Bringing Down the Krays (2 page)

Dad met Mum when she was young, about sixteen. Dad was twenty years older. He saw Mum the first time when she was riding on a London tram and hanging on to the handrail as it clattered along. She must have been very pretty. He was driving a flashy convertible, and followed the tram and waited for her to get off. That as far as I know was the first time they met. I always liked that story too.

Dad had always been a natural showman. Just before the war they’d lived in a big, mock-Tudor house in Chingford. He’d built a greyhound-racing track in Edmonton, promoted all-in wrestling. He’d made a fortune. Dad told me that for years he’d had a chauffeur to drive him round. But by the time I was born it was all gone.

Mum lost her first child, a girl, named little Nell. Eileen, Alfie, me and David came along soon afterwards. A few years later they also had George, Paul and Jane. So there were seven of us kids – although it was us three boys in the middle who made up the gang. We hung out together all the time.

Dad seemed to favour me a little more than the others; at least that’s how it felt to me. I would sometimes get a beating
from him with a cane. Even so I would think he still loved me. Dad would say, ‘I’ve got to do this because my dad beat me in the same way.’

I wanted to show Dad I was brave; so one day when I was about eight years old I found a dead rat and I picked it up. I hid it behind my back and said, ‘I’m brave, you know.’ Dad looked at me curiously and said, ‘I know you are, Bobby.’ Then I showed him the dead rat I had in my hand. I was fully expecting to get praise for being so courageous. Instead I got a beating.

I was always trying to make my dad love me even more. I always thought I wasn’t good enough to be worthy of his favour. I was going to spend a long while trying to make him proud of me. In the end it didn’t matter too much. We had it tough but not as hard as some. The tougher things got, the more solidarity there was between me and my brothers. That was the comfort. That’s what made the big separation, when it came later, so hard to bear.

The three of us – Alfie, David and I – were always very close. As children we would sleep in the same bed almost every night. Alfie would say, ‘Witches’ trick,’ and we would all have to turn over simultaneously, our legs fitting together like a jigsaw because there was so little room in the bed. Before we went to sleep Alfie would remind us to say our prayers. This carried on right up to our early teens. When it was cold we would fill glass Tizer bottles with hot water to warm our beds.

By now we were living in the middle of London, in Lamb’s Conduit Street, Holborn. The West End wasn’t too far away. I was learning how to survive on the streets, how to earn money –
even if I got it wrong sometimes. One night I went to Russell Square tube station on Guy Fawkes Night to get a penny for the guy. It was very cold so Mum said I could put on her old fur coat. I wasn’t getting much and I was just about to go home when this American soldier came along. He said he wouldn’t give me anything for the guy but he would give me five shillings for the coat. It seemed like a good deal to me so I sold it, and ran home to give Mum the money. Well, she was not exactly pleased. She went out looking for the American but never did find him or the coat. It must have been worth a lot more than what I got for it. Mum never did tell Dad. I would have got a good beating if he had found out.

St Joseph’s Roman Catholic was the first school I went to. It was on Macklin Street next to Covent Garden Market, and it was run by nuns. The nuns would give my brothers and me the cane when we were late, but I soon worked out a strategy to avoid this. I would pick up some flowers out of the market dust-bins that still had some life in them and take them to the nuns to get their blessing. ‘My child, how kind and thoughtful of you,’ Sister Camilla or Sister Dominique would say to me, instead of punishing me for being late. But this kind of trick only got me so far. I never shone at school – I was always put at the back of the classroom so I was out of the way, especially when dignitaries came in to observe us. The clever girls were put up front. I hated the place. I didn’t really learn to read, write, spell or even speak properly while I was there.

Then one day we discovered that Dad had another family living in Westcliff-on-Sea near Southend. He couldn’t keep it
hidden. We just heard Mum shouting: ‘Go on then, you’re always going off to see
her
.’ It was the cause of a lot of argument between Mum and Dad. No surprise there. His other wife’s name was Alice. He had other children although I still don’t know how many. For some reason, I don’t remember this bothering me too much. As long as he loved Mum and us best, and I believed he did, I didn’t care.

Dad had lost everything after the war so he would duck and dive to get by. He was always into diamonds in a small way, but no one really knew what he was up to, not even us. Because Dad’s attentions were divided and we always needed money, Mum would take in costume jewellery and we would glue cheap glass ‘diamonds’ on pieces to sell. We would all help out any way we could. In the summer we would go hop-picking in Kent. Six weeks working the hop fields and sleeping in wooden sheds.

As I grew up I continued to come up with new ways to help the family finances – as long as it didn’t involve too much hard work. Alfie and David would do the same. There was a sense of ‘all for one and one for all’ in our little gang. We’d look out for each other whatever happened. I used to think I’d never keep a secret from my brothers. They’d know anyway, instinctively, I believed. Though of course one day that would all change.

But as kids, my brothers and I were all in it together. We would get rags, paper and cardboard and sell them to a man who would give us cash to help the family out. Sometimes we used the money to fund our escapades. More as an adventure than protest, we ran away from home when I was about twelve
and got as far as Southend. We loved the Kursaal fairground, the sea and especially the big rock-candy sweets. Another time it was Epping Forest, always a big draw; climbing trees, getting lost… We would catch the Number 38 bus that took you right into the countryside and then all the way back to Holborn. That little jaunt got us a good beating off Dad.

By now I’d got a taste for wheeling and dealing and was getting much better at it. The street markets of the East End were the big draw. I would go down Petticoat Lane and Club Row with all the pets, pulling a pram-wheeled homemade cart loaded with junk – old clocks and gramophones and the like. I was about eleven years old at the time. The family tried to stop me because I would leave at five on a Sunday morning, rain or shine. The streets would be empty but I needed to get a good pitch and I knew that Mum needed the money.

Meanwhile I had started at Sir William Collins secondary modern school in Somers Town. I didn’t last long. I couldn’t stand it, and would just play truant. Alfie, David and I spent a lot of time playing in the bombed-out ruins when we should have been in class. The middle of London was still a big bomb-site. Everything was grey and brown and colourless and there was still rationing, although people were so poor it didn’t make any difference. When I was eleven there was big street party for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Some people even watched it on the television, a novelty in those days.

You could tell better times were coming. But I could not wait that long. Street trading did not bring in enough for me, so eventually I started shoplifting and stealing bikes. I was a
right villain, or thought I was. In fact there were lots of kids just like me.

Of course I got nicked. The case was heard at Chelsea Juvenile Court and I got sent to an approved school called Banstead Hall for nine months. It was horrible.

I went down with the mumps and Mum came to see me. She wore Yardley’s pillar-box-red lipstick, a knitted jumper of the same colour and a flowery skirt. She was as immaculate as always, but I could see that the skirt had been mended several times over. She’d once worn furs and diamonds when Dad was rich but now she didn’t have two pennies to rub together.

I was in bed in a hospital wing at the school. I had a fluorescent rosary in a little box on cotton wool and hidden underneath the cotton wool I had a half-crown coin. I gave it to her.

‘I don’t need it, Mum.’ I told her. ‘If I get found with it I’ll be in trouble.’

Only then would she take it from me.

After six months I went on the run from Banstead Hall. After a few weeks of generally larking around, I needed money. This time I got a proper job – at Bentley’s Oyster Bar on Swallow Street in Piccadilly. I was going to be a West End delivery boy. My bicycle had a big metal basket on the front.

One day a Rolls-Royce stopped in the middle of the road and the driver opened his door suddenly as I was coming up behind on my bike. Everything went flying, including me. The driver wanted to take me to the hospital. I was in terrible pain but I knew I couldn’t go. After all, I was a fugitive from justice, a big-time criminal. The hospital casualty department would be
full of policemen all waiting for me. In my head it was playing out like a gangster movie. Actually I was a petty bike-thief and a spectacularly unsuccessful oyster delivery boy.

In any case, my freedom turned out to be short-lived. I was staying at my aunt Mary’s, my mother’s younger sister. She lived opposite Great Ormond Street Hospital, round the corner from our old house. Not much of a hiding place. At the time Mum was living at Leigh-On–Sea, on the way to Southend. My aunt got news that she was ill, so off I went to see her. Good old Mum was in bed and not looking well. I stayed to help out as best I could. There was a lot of lace-curtain rustling in the houses nearby and I think some nosy neighbour must have noticed I was there. Two days later the police came knocking.

This time I was put into a real prison cell back in London – in Wormwood Scrubs – even though I was only fifteen years old and looked no more than twelve. It was terrifying. I couldn’t stop crying. All the other cons would look through the peephole in the door of the cell to check out the crying kid.

Then I was taken to a detention centre, where I would await the juvenile court. The approved school had been so bad that I’d had to run away. This was much, much worse. I went through hell with regular beatings by a real sadist – the sort who got that kind of job just so he could take his sexual kinks out on young boys. I hated it, loathed it. I could understand that what I’d done was going to get me punished – but not like this.

My older brother Alfie came to see me. I told him what this man was doing to me and he was furious. I grabbed Alfie and said, ‘Please don’t do anything! When you leave he will beat the
shit out of me.’ Alfie understood and managed to hold his temper. I didn’t get a kicking that time.

Eventually, two men arrived one morning to take me to court for the hearing. I was charged with stealing property worth forty quid. It seemed a long drive. I was handcuffed, sitting in the back of the car. One of them asked me: ‘Why are you holding your stomach?’

‘I’m in pain,’ I replied.

‘Did you see the doctor?’ he asked. I shook my head.

He looked at me closely. ‘How long have you had this pain?’

‘A few days, after every beating.’

There was a folder on the front seat and the driver told the other man to take a look at it. He opened it immediately and read my notes. After a time the man reading the folder turned to me and said: ‘They are going to stick you away in the worst place anyone could be put. I wish we could help. Sorry.’ He was sympathetic but there was nothing he could do.

When I got to the court, in Dorking, Mum was there and when I saw her I just started to cry. I couldn’t stop sobbing – so much that I had to be taken out. On the panel of the court there were two women and two men. I was sat outside the door while they were deliberating and I could hear the two women arguing with the men and saying they were not going to agree with their decision.

I know those two ladies saved my life. Instead of the ‘worst place’ possible I was sent to an approved school called Glamorgan Farm School, at Neath in Wales. It was the furthest I had ever been from home, but from that point on the beatings
stopped – or at least they were not on as regular a basis as they had been at the detention centre.

Glamorgan Farm was on top of a hill. As soon as I got there one of the staff made it clear he fancied me and would follow me all over the place. If I were taking a shower and another guard was on the door, this man would come to the door and start talking to him, while openly staring at me. It was obvious what he was doing. I felt furious and desperately humiliated, but there was nothing I could do. He was a plump, short man called Mr Williams, and I hated him.

Boys at this school would sometimes get a chance to actually go off and live on a local farm and be paid for their labour. I volunteered and I must say I enjoyed it, especially the sense of freedom I experienced while driving a tractor up and down the Welsh hills. I was a hard worker and the farmer would let me and another boy have time out to go into the village to buy sweets and look in the shops. Then I was accused of stealing a watch – which I certainly had not. The watch later turned up. The farmer and his family said sorry and wanted me back – but on my side the trust had gone.

I was hurt and sad because I had hoped that this time I had found a job that I could be good at, but it was not meant to be. At this time of my young life, so much of it recently spent in various forms of detention, I desperately wanted control of my own destiny. I wanted to be free. But there was no more running away, even if I could. They’d caught me before and they would surely catch me again.

And so I finished my time in approved schools and was released. It was 1959. I was seventeen years old, with what might seem the experience of someone twice that age. I had been routinely beaten, abused and sexually preyed upon. Meanwhile I had learned how to stand up for myself. I thought I was tough. I thought I knew it all. In fact I was pathetically naïve. I still had so much to learn about the realities of the world.