King's Cross Kid

by Victor Gregg

  When the mother turned up at the school to collect her offspring, and she saw little Johnny with a bruised face and perhaps a torn jacket, she’d cuff him smartly round the ears, saying, ‘If I catch you fighting again, I’ll tell your dad.’ The dad’s attitude was usually, ‘If you’re going to fight, hit ’em ’ard and don’t come crying to me.’ Boys were raised to look after themselves.

  It was the same outside school. The boys had their own corner of the street, to which they returned after they’d been roving about engaged in some mischief or trespassing on a weaker gang’s domain. The girls likewise commandeered a section of the street where they could play out their fantasies, such as pretending to be film stars or maybe a princess looking for a handsome prince. The ‘handsome prince’ was usually one of the boys in the street’s gang. The girls all knew who fancied who, but the boys on the other hand looked upon the girls as an oddity that had to be tolerated. Even so the boys always regarded the girls as their property and any attempt by boys of another street to interfere with or annoy what they called ‘their girls’ always resulted in a bout of serious fighting. Kids from the same street regarded each other as brothers and sisters, all part of a family. Streets were sacrosanct to the people who lived in them. Three or more boys entering a strange street immediately became subjects of suspicion and more often than not they were challenged.

  I remember a typical event in the King’s Cross area in the early 1930s. A bunch of six or seven of the young boys in the Harrison Street gang, aged anything between eight and eleven, had got bored with kicking their rag ball up and down the road and somebody suggested that it might be a good thing to go and annoy the Wakefield Street gang, just around the corner,

  ‘Let’s go and bash ’em up.’ With no further ado off they set, singing and shouting, dragging sticks against the railings, letting everybody know that the Harrison Street gang were on the march.

  The boys of the Wakefield Street gang were engrossed in a game of cricket, with a piece of wood shaped like a cricket bat and a hard rubber ball. A few minutes earlier the ball had smashed through one of the upstairs windows of a nearby building. The players were debating whether to scarper or to dare to ask for their ball back.

  The boys from Harrison Street arrived and one of them pushed his way into the bunch, addressing one of the smaller members of the Wakefield Street lot: ‘Oi, four-eyes, gis that bat.’ The boy in question, the owner of the spectacles, replied by lifting the bat and swiping the intruder around the head, drawing blood. This was a sudden and unexpected defence of property and the lad who had demanded the bat was now howling his head off, blood streaming from his mouth as a result of the teeth that had been smashed by the blow.

  The leader of the Harrison Street gang now made his presence felt. He approached the eldest and biggest of the Wakefield lot: ‘Oo you looking at then, tosher?’ – this was the normal form of address that signified that a bundle was in the offing – ‘I fink I’m looking at a load of turd.’ This question and answer session would go on until one of the boys struck the first blow, which meant the start of an all-out fight between the two opposing forces. But the leader of the Harrison Street gang broke the unwritten code of the streets: never make remarks about someone’s mother. ‘You ain’t got a farver, ’ave yer?’ ‘What’s it to you?’ ‘You’re a barsterd, ain’t yer?’ ‘What yer mean by that?’ ‘Your mum’s had a barsterd!!!’ Without further ado the boy without a father hurled himself at his adversary, giving no quarter, tearing the other boy’s face to ribbons. The brawl came to a sudden halt when one of the boys shouted: ‘Look out, the rozzers are here.’ Quick as lightning, the street cleared of the boys of both sides, all except the one who had dished out the last lot of damage.

  The burly policeman, who was nicknamed ‘the Bear’ because of his massive girth, called the boy over, and when he came close bent down, the better to bring himself to the boy’s size. ‘He ain’t gonna talk like that about your mum again, is he?’ The Bear was reckoned by one and all as someone not to mess with. ‘You gonna take me round the cop shop then?’ said the boy, probably thinking that to show some form of defiance might be to his good. ‘Not this time, sonny boy, I saw what happened, but a warning in your little ear, don’t get cheeky with me, and always show respect for the law. Now shove off and behave yourself.’

  Later that evening, the plates had been cleared away and little Emmy was asleep in her rough cot, while Mother was stitching some work she had brought home in order to earn a bit extra. Suddenly I said, ‘Mum, is Farver ever going to come home?’ Mum looked at me, ‘Why do you ask that, Victor?’ ‘No reason, Mum, I was just finking.’ Mother put down her work and without warning tears started rolling down her face. I felt guilty that I had made her cry. I put my arms round her and said: ‘Don’t cry, Mum, I didn’t mean to make you cry, we will always look after you when we grow up.’ Mum wiped her eyes and stood up: ‘Come on, Victor, off to bed with you. And, by the way, Mrs Brown next door told me about the happenings of today. Fighting is never a good way to settle an argument.’ This from a woman who had lost two of her brothers in the senseless slaughter of the Great War.

  9

  Harsh Lessons

  Life in the junior boys’ school was harsh, and the slightest deviation from the straight and narrow was severely punished. And in some ways it had to be. Any sign of weakness or hesitation on the part of the teacher would be picked up by the quick-witted assortment of young scruffs sitting in front of him. Our teachers were always men. Discipline was enforced by a swipe with the cane which all teachers carried, and a boy could be caned severely for the slightest misdemeanour. Neither the boys nor their parents thought it necessary to challenge the authority of the school; it was accepted that if the boy had done wrong he had to take his medicine. Yelling while the cane or strap was doing its worst was allowed, crying wasn’t, and if you were silly enough to complain to your father, or in my case my mother, you got another whack for good measure.

  One of the boys in our class was a real basher; his mum and dad were reckoned to be people who started a fight if they could find no better way of amusing themselves. On one occasion the boy shouted at his teacher and told him he didn’t give a f–– about ‘’im and ’is cane’, whereupon the said teacher lost his cool and laid into the kid. The boy retreated under the weight of blows and ran out of the class heading for the safety of his mum’s arms.

  We all knew what was going to happen to the teacher once the mum found out. Sure enough, late in the afternoon the whole school heard the sound of the boy’s mother screaming her head off, pulling her son by the collar of his shirt into the classroom. She pointed her finger at the teacher, shouting, ‘Is that the barsterd?’ The boy nodded, and without a second thought the woman reached inside the big shawl that hung around her massive shoulders and pulled out a heavy length of wood, setting about the luckless man with some vigour, encouraged by the shouts and cheers from the boys in the class. It’s quite possible that real harm could have been done if the head teacher and a couple of the other masters hadn’t appeared in time to pull the woman away. The mother was escorted off the premises, and that was the end of the matter. The school kept quiet, the teacher learnt his lesson, the boy’s status in the class was raised and the mother added another victory to her list of battles against authority. All’s well that ends well.

  10

  Bit of a Lark

  During the day there weren’t many cases of real violence in the streets. At night it was a different matter: as a gang you didn’t venture into the streets of another gang unless you were looking for trouble. Singly or in pairs was quite safe, you were no threat. Mob-handed meant only one thing, and then out came any weapon that might be to hand. Later, as we turned into young men, knuckle-dusters and coshes all became part of our armoury.

  During the summer months, when the evenings were long and drawn out, the temptation to liven things up a bit was always present. We had been banned from the playing fields at the Foundl
ing Hospital in Bloomsbury (now called Coram’s Fields) because of our ‘unruly behaviour’ and we wondered where else to go. ‘Let’s take a stroll down to the Cross.’ The trouble with that innocent suggestion was that, to get to the Cross, you had to go over Sidmouth Street, not a good idea if you wanted a peaceful evening. The Sidmouth Street gang would see to that. But it wasn’t something that us boys lost any sleep over, to us it was the natural way of life. So long as our boisterous behaviour didn’t cause problems with the law, the grown-ups seldom bothered their heads over a few bloodied noses. ‘Serve yer right, shouldn’t have got in the way of ’is fist’ was the typical retort of a father to a son coming home with a damaged conk.

  On a Saturday afternoon a trip down to Somers Town or the market in Chapel Street could yield some fruit. None of us had any cash and to get a handful of apples or oranges we had to nick what we wanted while the stallholder had his attention diverted. This was a risky business as stallholders were known to have eyes up their backsides, in the form of the younger men and boys of the family. Nevertheless, undeterred and full of the spirit of adventure, off we went to the market.

  Not one of us gave a thought to the idea that we were stealing other people’s property. No: to our young minds it was a lark. But in the eyes of the law, property was sacred and the local magistrates had a nasty habit of sending young men of my tender years to ‘homes of correction’, not a nice experience. There was one lad in our street who had done two years in one of these places. His name was Charlie Stokes and he was older than me, being in the senior boys when I was in the junior. Everyone knew about Charlie and his mum and dad. Charlie had a brother, Freddy, about eight years older, who earned his living as a professional boxer; he was reckoned to be quite handy with his dukes. But Freddy wanted a lifestyle way beyond what he got for bashing other young men around and so spent half his life doing time for breaking and entering. Young Charlie, quite naturally, worshipped his big brother and did his best to follow in Freddy’s footsteps. Unfortunately for him his lack of ability in the art of fisticuffs left him with but one other recourse – he started mixing with a gang of lads from Collier Street, which was just off the Pentonville Road, and Charlie ended up before the beak in the court in King’s Cross Road. The first time he went down for six months, and the second time saw him put away for eighteen months. In our eyes Charlie was an old lag. Anyway, Charlie came out of the second stretch a completely different person: anything that signalled danger he shied away from; he had been utterly subdued. The cowed way in which Charlie Stokes mooched around was a constant reminder of what lay in store for us if we transgressed.

  My brother John and I made regular Saturday morning trips to any one of the giant produce markets of central London. We started these foraging trips when I was seven and John was just into his sixth year. After John went to live with our gran he used to come round to Compton Street on a Saturday morning and Mum could be relied on to put some rashers of streaky bacon in the frying pan, cut up four huge doorsteps of bread and with all that food stuffed down our gullets we sallied forth to the challenge of the market.

  We knew that a sack of potatoes and greens could easily be collected off the pavements at the Garden. At Smithfield meat market, what the traders didn’t sell by ten in the morning was generally reckoned to be a throwaway job, and it was our intention that any throwing away should be done in our direction: once we even picked up a whole leg of lamb.

  There were two drawbacks to a Smithfield trip, the first being that everything collected had to be eaten that day as it went off by the next. The second was the amount of opposition. The youth of the East End gathered en masse at Smithfield on a Saturday morning where there were always fights over possession. No: far better and simpler to be satisfied with the easy pickings at Covent Garden.

  The wages that our mum received for her weekly work were too meagre to feed us throughout the week, which meant that without our Saturday supplement the four of us would be down to turnip stew and whatever bits of scrag end meat Mum was able to scrounge from the local butcher who, luckily for us, was a leading member of the local Baptist church of which mother was also a member.

  Come Saturday morning, bright and early, having gulped down the bacon sarnies, we were out of the house with our mum shouting her instructions down the stairs: ‘Behave yerselves and don’t get run over crossing Kingsway and bring back some firewood and pot ’erbs.’ By the time the instructions concerning the ‘pot ’erbs’ reached us we were well on the way to Russell Square.

  The rest of the route took us by way of Museum Street, Drury Lane, Long Acre and finally into the mountains of debris that marked the site of the biggest fruit and veg market in the country. All around there were piles of damaged fruit and all manner of different vegetables waiting to be collected up and stashed into the largest wooden box we could find. In less than half an hour we could fill the box to the brim. But our enthusiasm for quantity could prove to be too much. The overflowing box became too heavy to pull along without breaking the string. So there we would be, two scruffy kids, sitting in the gutter trying to decide what to dump and what we could drag home. At least there was no shortage of string.

  And so homewards, back out of Long Acre, through Great Queen Street and along to Southampton Row where stood one of our favourite stopovers: the Holborn Cake and Biscuit Shop. If the cake shop was empty we could have a go at getting some stale cakes for free. We played on our scruffy appearance, dirty and dishevelled, our socks around our ankles, grubby arms outstretched: ‘Got any stale cakes, missus?’ The lady who ran it was desperate to keep up appearances and could hardly be blamed for wanting to see the back of this pair of street Arabs as quickly as possible. In no time at all a bag of old cakes and biscuits changed hands and we were on our way, scoffing down stale and broken examples of the pastry cook’s art that our mum could never afford to buy.

  Eventually, we’d get our loot back to our waiting mum who, after evaluating the spoils, began sorting out the little extras she always gave to the old lady who lived in the rooms below us. That night it was off to bed with a good vegetable stew in our bellies.

  Whether it was the Garden, Smithfield or Billingsgate, the routine hardly ever varied except, of course, that only Covent Garden supplied the route through Cream Cake Land.

  11

  The Bear

  It was on the streets that we found our amusement and the variety was endless. Nearby we had the three main line railway stations: King’s Cross, the home of the London and North Eastern Railway Company, Euston Station, in Euston Road, and the far better St Pancras, which together housed the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. Those three stations acted like a magnet to us boys.

  First there were the steam engines themselves: huge monsters belching smoke and steam as they pulled into the station, along with the clanging of metal and the shouts of the porters, the whole station pulsating with the hustle and bustle.

  Quite often, when we were at a loss for something to do, one of the boys might suggest a trip down the station, St Pancras being the favourite since it was the easiest station to bunk out of if we got chased by the guards. There, if we were lucky, we would get to carry a passenger’s luggage to the nearest hotel. This didn’t happen often as any attempt to do the station porters out of earning a bob or two would get us a cuff round the ear. And then there were the railway police who would lose no opportunity to chase us out of the station.

  Behind both St Pancras and King’s Cross was ‘the coal base’, the area where mountains of coal were stacked to supply the insatiable hunger of the steam engines. The coal that the steam engines used was not the usual small nuggets that the coalman brought around in his hundredweight sacks. The stuff in the coal base came in super-large lumps, so big that it was only possible to get four into a sack. This was our main source of free fuel.

  A raid down the coal base had to be planned. A couple of boys were sent ahead to determine the strength of the railway police. Then, as soon as nig
ht fell, and having sussed out the opposition, we would bunk over the wall and throw huge lumps of coal over to our waiting mates. The drawback was that, if you were caught, it meant an appearance in the local police court charged with theft, and this spelled real trouble as it meant that our parents had to pay up. So the winter had to be really cold for us to raid the coal base.

  Further behind the stations were the stables. This was another place to earn a little cash. ‘Clean yer ’orse darn, mister?’ Sometimes we really struck lucky and were offered as much as sixpence to perform this task which meant not only washing and brushing down the horse, or horses, but also cleaning out the stables.

  These horses were enormous beasts, and to satisfy their thirst there were horse troughs situated along the main thoroughfares. The horses pulled in to drink and at the same time got rid of the water they had drunk at the last stop. The gallons of urine cascading along the kerbside on its way to the nearest drain hole didn’t seem to bother anyone.

  Once, on one of our forays to the coal base in which our whole gang was involved, we accidently alerted the railway police and got chased out. One of the boys dropped his school cap, which unfortunately had his name inside. None of us gave this any thought. We had got away, and once back in our street we shared out the spoils, one huge lump each.

  A couple of days go by and I’m indoors for a change helping my mum with her housework. The bell clangs away and the next thing we see is the Bear standing outside on the landing. In that confined space he really looked like a bear, he was enormous.

  We all knew his name and my mum greeted him: ‘Hello, Mr Thomas, what brings you here?’ ‘Good evening, Mrs Gregg, I’d like a word with young Victor, if you don’t mind.’ Mum gave me a look. ‘Now what games ’ave you bin up to, Victor?’ The Bear quickly put my mum at ease. ‘Nothing to worry about, missus.’ And then he pulled up our one remaining chair and looked me in the eye. ‘Now, young man, tell me when you was last round the coal base.’ By this time my mum was getting a bit hot and bothered. ‘Now, Victor, you tell Mr Thomas the truth.’ I could almost feel my mother beginning to cry. The Bear must have sensed this, too. ‘Now, now, Emily don’t you fret, I’m not here to nick ’im, just give him a friendly warning.’ The Bear carried on: ‘When I came up the stairs the first thing I set me eyes on is them big lumps of coal that you didn’t break up after you and your mates pinched them from the base a couple of nights ago. Why did you pinch them? You know that thieving can get you and that lot you hang around with into real trouble?’ ‘I wanted to keep my mum warm, she ain’t got the money to keep buying coal.’ Silence for a few seconds. ‘What about a nice cup of tea, Emily?’ said the Bear, but Mum was still calling him Mr Thomas. My mum made the tea while the Bear gave me a lecture on how ’ard it was for my mum bringing up her children all on her own without a man to help. There was nothing untoward about the use of mother’s Christian name, since everybody knew that the Bear knew everyone’s business and nobody expected him to worry about formalities. All the same, I sensed that he was more than a little interested in my mum who, despite the toil and stress, was still a very attractive woman, especially to a man who had lost his wife less than six years before.