EIGHT
It was close to nine thirty in the evening when the Banana Boys arrived in Portsmouth on a bleak and dark winter’s night, the timing of which, though not planned, as they had expected to arrive mid-afternoon, suited their clandestine mission. Well, it suited their furtiveness, but the wintry conditions hampered them very much in their frozen proverbial clandestines. They did have clothing for winter weather, their mums insisting they wear vests, and had fleeces with hard-nut intimidating hoods, thick coats, woolly hats with eye-holes that you can see out of if you pull them over your face, and of course clandestine gloves. They had the attire, but had left it all at home, considering it more important to look like hard-nuts; ironically, those nuts were now hard, shrunken to the size
