King's Cross Kid
Page 18
I decided that I had to say goodbye to the lads who had been my mates for the last few years. I went round to Frankie’s café where I was ribbed right, left and centre. We drank coffee and nattered away, just as we had always done, then I stood up and shook everybody’s hands. On the way home I met Peg. I was walking back to Kenton Street through Cromer Street and there she was, standing talking with some of her friends, gently rocking a pram, like a real experienced mum. I stopped and our eyes met and the world around me went silent. I’m certain that Peg was going through the same emotions as I was. Then, in the same instant, the spell ended and in the politest possible way we said our hellos. ‘You do look nice in your uniform, Vic.’ ‘You look top of the world yourself, Peg.’ We both felt uncomfortable. I wanted more than anything to touch her hand, like in the old days. For the first time in my life I felt real guilt and I knew that I had lost something very precious. Whether she felt the same I shall never know. But we both knew the rules; you don’t mess with someone else’s girl, and anyway Peg was now married with a baby, so that was that. We had crossed a bridge and there was no going back. I was hurt but had no means of showing it. Next I went around to the restaurant in Percy Street and had a free meal with Ron and his mum and dad. They all showed genuine interest in my new career and asked me if I thought there was going to be a war. I had to admit I didn’t have a clue. ‘Your fiddle and music are still up in my room,’ said Ron. I replied, ‘You never know, Ron, you might break yours, so now you’ve got a spare.’ That was the last I saw of Ron. It was a sad goodbye to the Stéphane Grappelli duets we used to play together.
On my last night I went for a walk with Grandfather to his club in Marylebone Lane. He took me into a pub and offered me a pint, but I only had a half. I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself.
As we were supping up, my grandfather said, ‘You wouldn’t know this, Victor, but I was at Ladysmith when the Green Jackets were there. I suppose that your mob are still called Green Jackets? Take a tip from one who knows: the chief thing you need to learn now is survival. You’ve got yourself mixed up with a real death or glory lot, so watch yourself. If the Germans don’t throw this Hitler out on his ear the bloody square heads will trample over Europe same as they did last time. I don’t think you’re going to have it very easy. So mark my words, watch yourself, remember that, and go with our blessing.’
My grandfather’s words went in one ear and out of the other, but they all turned out to be true.
Next day I made my way back to my new life. I wasn’t sad any more. I was a soldier boy now and there was nothing left for me in the streets that I had once called home. I walked away from King’s Cross heading for Waterloo and the train back to the depot. My head was full of memories but I knew that my growing up was all done, all finished.
My apprenticeship was over.
Plate Section
My grandparents who took us in when Father left.
Uncles and aunts on the Hamblin side of the family. My mother is far left and my grandmother far right.
When I was six I was taken into care by the Salvation Army and placed in the Shaftesbury Home for Boys. We were fed, clothed and exercised.
Our local policeman looked just like this. Nicknamed ‘the Bear’, he kept a fatherly eye on all us kids.
The home was run along military lines. I think the idea was to prepare us for the Royal Navy.
Like the boys in this picture, we had an enlightened headmaster at Cromer Street School, Mr Thornton, who made sure that we learned more than the Three ‘R’s.
A lot of lads saw boxing as a way out of poverty.
This is where I knocked a lad out defending my sister’s honour. The flats were once a slum, but the kids I met there recently live in a different world to the one I grew up in.
King’s Cross Station, where we used to steal coal and get chased off by the police.
Covent Garden Market, where as kids we scrounged veg, and where later I worked and did a lot of growing up.
Within two years of this picture, John Cobb, driver of this car, the mighty Naipier Railton, would be in the RAF fighting the Luftewaffe. When I was fifteen I used to get taken round the track in it, squeezed into the cockpit.
The very same car, with its twenty four litre engine, is still going strong today.
Charles Laughton, the famous actor, used to hire me to wash up at his parties.
Musicians looking for work gather in Archer Street. When I was a teenager it was part of my Soho stomping ground.
The two guitarists in the centre are Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt, my musical heroes.
Then, as now, Soho was known for ladies of the night. Their pimps hired us to watch out for the law.
We hung around and drank beer in places like this, unaware that before long our world was about to change for ever.
Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts tried to stir up hatred against our Jewish neighbours. When I was seventeen we fought him and his mob in the Battle of Sidmouth Street. He didn’t come back.
Me, a newly enlisted Rifleman, ready to take on the world. My apprenticeship in King’s Cross is over. I am off to learn a new skill – the art of war.
Acknowledgements
Encouragement comes from all points of the compass and in all manner of forms, but reality, in the form of the number of words a publisher might accept, means that only the surface can be skimmed. Right at the top of the pile have to be my editor, Rick Stroud, and his lovely wife, Alexandra, and next to them the young men and women at Bloomsbury, headed by Bill Swainson. There is no doubt in my mind that it has been the persistent encouragement of this small circle that has driven me on. Thanks to them especially, and to Simon Fenwick, archivist to the Shaftesbury Young People Organisation.
A Note on the Authors
VICTOR GREGG was born in London in 1919 and joined the army in 1937, serving first in the Rifle Brigade in Palestine and North Africa, notably at the Battle of Alamein, and then with the Parachute Regiment, at the Battle of Arnhem. As a prisoner of war he survived the bombing of Dresden to be repatriated in 1946, and now lives in Winchester. The story of his adult years, Rifleman: A Front-line Life from Alamein and Dresden to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, also co-written with Rick Stroud, was published by Bloomsbury in 2011. An eBook single of his POW experiences, Dresden: A Survivor’s Story, was published in February 2013.
RICK STROUD is a writer and film director. As well as working with Vic Gregg on Rifleman he is the author of The Book of the Moon and The Phantom Army of Alamein: The Men Who Hoodwinked Rommel. He lives in London.
By the Same Authors
Rifleman
Also Available by Victor Gregg with Rick Stroud
RIFLEMAN: A FRONT-LINE LIFE FROM ALAMEIN AND DRESDEN TO THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL
‘One of the last voices of a vital generation . . . gripping reading’
CONN IGGULDEN
On his eighteenth birthday in 1937, Victor Gregg enlisted in the Rifle Brigade and began a life of adventure. A soldier throughout the Second World War, he saw action across North Africa, was a driver for the Long Range Desert Group and fought at the Battle of Alamein. Taken into captivity at the Battle of Arnhem in 1944, he was sentenced to death for sabotaging a Dresden factory; he escaped only when the Allies’ infamous air raid blew apart his prison and soon encountered the advancing Red Army. Gregg’s fascinating tale does not end with the war – he also recounts his later adventures behind the Iron Curtain, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage. Rifleman is the extraordinary story of an independent-minded and quick-witted survivor.
‘A gripping life-story: an incident-packed account of heartache, violence and cunning by a man whose will to survive and unbreakable optimism are a true inspiration’
INDEPENDENT
First published in Great Britain 2013
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Victor Gregg 2
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Preface copyright © Rick Stroud 2013
The right of Victor Gregg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
Photographs reproduced in this book are from the authors’ own collections except where credited otherwise Maps by ML Design
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