My Criminal Childhood with Cousins

My cousins and I were experts at fiddling the machines at the amusement arcade.  In Ireland we have cousins the way other countries have mosquitoes.  I remember being shocked by a visiting English child who confessed to having just one cousin; I had figured cousins always came in batches of dozens, like eggs.  Aged between 8-13 our gang knew the ropes like old convicts.  Mind you, we’d learned the hard way.  These blasted machines had eaten our sparse holiday money for years, so we’d grown hardy and wily. 

My cousin Bill was the best.  Only trouble was, he was so good he got barred very quickly from all the establishments.  He was also rather ruthless in his methods.  His favourite trick was to smash the glass window of the first cylinder of a one armed bandit.  Then he’d put coins in and pull the arm while carefully moving the cherry round to win two pennies each time.  It took patience but gradually, in a day, he could empty a machine.  The trick, he said, was breaking the glass cleanly so that no tell tale cracks could be seen.  One of the older cousins, Tom, felt Alan’s technique was not moral and spoke at length about how illegal it was.  The rest of us were conflicted about this issue and would hold long debates about the ethics of it all.  Tom was righteous and managed to save some of his holiday money each year putting it aside in a responsible manner.  As one of the debaters admitted, it was tricky, on the one hand there was no one more righteous than Tom but Alan was by far the most generous of all of us, so which virtue was more important.  The general consensus was that generosity trumped righteousness.  We would not use Alan’s technique, as the majority felt it lacked finesse but we would not condemn him either that would be altogether far too righteous.  Our acceptable methods were subtler.   

People often forgot to press the refund button on machines, so we’d feed off their carelessness once they’d gone.  The joy of those large round illicit pennies warm in your palm!  Old money felt much more substantial and indeed one penny could in those days buy you a paper bag full of sweets.  Or, we’d find coins lying under the bottom rim of a machine kicked out of sight.  There was a favourite change machine in one arcade that was meant to change half crowns into pennies but was the very dickens to use.  It took the half crowns easy enough but then sullenly refused to spit out pennies in return.  The poor punter would press every button available to no avail and then go to the booth at the middle of the arcade to complain.  In a flash, we were on the machine and would give the side panel high on the right a swift blow.  Like a choked person the reluctant machine would cough up first two pennies in rapid succession before vomiting the rest into your waiting hand.  You couldn’t let it hit the bottom for fear of announcing your success to the world.    Ethically, we felt secure.  Sure, didn’t people who dropped money need to learn to be more careful? We were practically providing an educational service! When using the change machine play, we always insured that one of us would be left with the machine so that when the technician came with the punter to investigate they would confirm he had indeed put a half crown in and proclaimed loudly that the machine often didn’t pay out as it should.  This meant the punter got his change and also meant we were up front about the machine’s weaknesses.  We felt no guilt whatsoever, after three hours of wandering desolately around the amusement arcade penniless, we felt we were due some reward.  We learned gambling was addictive. 

One summer our youngest cousin, Sarah , stood transfixed at the penny drop, pumping not just ten but every single one of her valuable pennies into a money clogged waterfall that despite a sliding log refused to fall.  She tearfully begged money from her Mum on the beach, while I minded her machine from the ‘jumper inners’ waiting to take advantage of all her priming of the pump.  All to no avail, even a half crown later not one penny fell.  She dropped to the ground sobbing in anguish and despair.  Bloody machines, we all stood appalled by her pain.  The hero of the hour was cousin Henry, built like a brick house, he tried to pull her to her feet and in doing so leant his considerable weight against the glass fronted machine.  That was all that was needed and there was an ecstatic machine gun of pennies firing out into the tray, the logjam freed.  I still remember her shocked face as pennies rained down over her head and shoulders.  It wasn’t every day you witnessed a miracle. 

However, all these tricks were as nothing compared to our biggest triumph.  There was a machine at the back of an arcade that consisted of black and white stripes moving over rollers.  You slide your penny down a chute and it rolled on its side until it fell over on the black and white stripes.  If it landed on the white stripes not touching the black, you won.  We discovered that if you took the chute and wagged it from side to side like a demented table tennis player, the coin would come out in a perfect straight line each time and flop on the white middle line like a beauty.  We were delighted with this discovery and made a real killing.  Imagine our outrage when the arcade closed this machine, taping an ‘out of order’ sign across it.  It took us a while to discover another in the back of a smoky arcade across town.  More success followed and we were exultant.  After years of the amusement arcades taking our pocket money we felt we were on a righteous roll.  Gradually, they disappeared these black and white beauties to our deep disappointment.  Decades later, I discovered one in an amusement arcade in Brighton.  I cannot begin to describe my ecstasy on spotting the familiar friend behind a pinball machine.  Within seconds, I was whipping the chute to and fro like a pro and winning coins hand over fist.  My three sons looked on in awe as we left, all our pockets bulging with coins.  There are always moral issues to tackle in life but just occasionally success is down to sheer skill and you can only celebrate that.