attacked Doug. By the time Sue Spargo waded into the fray, it had spilled down the stairs. When it appeared that she, too, was going to come under attack from Richard and Pete, twelve-year-old David sought to protect her with a butcher knife from the kitchen, where he'd gone allegedly to make his breakfast.
It was at this point that the neighbours became involved, roused by the noise, which they could hear through the badly insulated walls of the adjoining houses. Unfortunately, the neighbours - three in all - came to the Spargo residence armed with a cricket bat, a tyre iron, and a hammer, and according to Richard Spargo's account, it was the sight of these that enflamed him. "Going after the family, they were," was his direct statement, the words of a boy who saw himself as the man of the house whose duty it was to protect his mother and siblings.
Into this developing imbroglio, Michael Spargo awakened. "Richard and Pete was going at it with Mum," his statement recounts. "We could hear them, me and the little ones, but we didn't want nothing to do with it." He indicates that he wasn't frightened, but when probed for more information it's clear that Michael did his best to give his older brothers a wide berth so as to avoid "a thumping if I looked at them crosswise." That he wasn't always able to avoid the thumping is a fact attested to by his teachers, three of whom reported to social workers bruises, scratches, burns, and at least one black eye seen on Michael's body. Other than a single visit to the home, however, nothing more came of these reports. The system, it seems, was overburdened.
There is some suggestion that Michael passed on this abuse to his younger brothers.
Indeed, from accounts gathered once four of the children went into care, it seems that Michael was given the responsibility of seeing to it that his sibling Stevie did not "wee the sheets."
Without resources as to how this was supposed to be accomplished, he apparently administered regular thrashings to the seven-year-old, who in turn took out his own rage on the other boys further down the line.
Whether Michael abused any of the littler boys that morning is not known. He reports only that once the police arrived, he got out of bed, dressed in his school uniform, and went down to the kitchen with the intention of having his breakfast. He knew it was his birthday, but he had no expectation of the day being acknowledged. "Didn't care, did I?" was how he later put it to the police.
Breakfast consisted of frosted flakes and jam rolls. There was no milk for the cereal - Michael brings up this point twice in his earliest interviews - so Michael ate the frosted flakes dry, leaving most of the jam rolls for his younger brothers. He put one of these into the pocket of his mustard-coloured anorak (both the jam roll and the anorak becoming crucial details as things developed) and he left the house through the back garden.
He said his intention was to go directly to school, and in his first interview with the police he claims he did go there. This was a story he did not change until he was read the statement made by his teacher attesting to his truancy that day, at which point he changed his story to confess that he went into the allotments, which were a feature of the Buchanan Estate and which were positioned behind the terrace where the Spargos lived. There, he "might've give a bit of aggro to an old bugger working in a patch of veg" and he "might've bashed in some shed door or something" where he "could've nicked some secateurs maybe only I didn't keep them, I never kept them." The "old bugger" in question does verify Michael's presence in the allotment at eight in the morning, although it's doubtful that the small enclosures of raised beds held much attraction for the boy, who seems to have spent some fifteen minutes "tramping them about" according to the pensioner, until "I gave him a right proper talking to. He swore like a little thug and scarpered."
It seems at this point that Michael headed in the general direction of his school, some half mile from the Buchanan Estate. It was somewhere on this route, however, that he encountered Reggie Arnold.
Reggie Arnold was quite a contrast to Michael Spargo. Where Michael was tall for