by Dawson, Jill
Funnily enough Ronnie Biggs, the one who ended up being the most famous of all, was really just a bit player. A petty thief, part-time handyman friend of Bruce’s who’d spent more time in prison than out of it. He started off in 1946, nicking pencils.
One thing that’s agreed in all accounts of the robbery was that there were people who were involved who were never named, or caught. One book by this Piers Paul Read called one of them Bill Jennings. I don’t remember any Bill Jennings. Bruce, in his own highly colorful account, called one of them Frank Monroe. I don’t remember any Frank Monroe. There was a retired train driver giving specialized advice whose name changed every five minutes: was it Stan, was it Peter, or Frank?
The other thing that’s agreed is that only about a seventh of the original £2.6 million haul was ever recovered. One writer on the robbery, the best in my view, wrote, with obvious frustration: “Where the rest went only the surviving robbers know. And as usual, those who are still alive are not saying.”
I see him once that summer. Tony. I’m on the bus with Maria; he’s in the street. He looks . . . handsome. He runs a hand through his hair, and I see a flash of his wrist under the cuff of his shirt. Even now, it’s possible to see that wrist like a signal, like a flag raising, a message. See how you still love me, doll. He’s walking fast though, along Bethnal Green Road, with his usual deliberation. He walks as though he’s chasing something.
“Look, there’s Daddy!” Maria squeals, and lifts her hand in a wave. I grab her hand.
Am I wrong—I wonder—am I wrong to be afraid of him, to keep his daughter from him? How will I ever know? All I know is that I don’t want to be one of those women you read about. The ones discovering their husband jumped from a balcony, or gassed himself in a car, and took the kids with him. The wives who say, yes, he threatened it, but I could never imagine he would really do it, do such a thing to his own child . . .
I’ve seen that gun, the Luger. I never believed he chucked it, not really. And when Dad told me about that girl, that girlfriend before me that Tony hospitalized, was I surprised, really? My problem is, just as it’s always been: I have a good imagination. I can imagine it.
The meeting then. Bobby is silent all the way there. Just as we get out of the car, he puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes it. Then he steps up to the door, knocks sharply. A bloke who must be Bruce opens it. There’s a woman hovering in the background as we step in. She moves upstairs without a word, a whiff of baking powder and disapproval as she bangs a bedroom door on the landing above, where she’s obviously been told to make herself scarce. A child’s voice from somewhere calls to her. I think about Bruce’s comment that crime is a man’s business, suppressing a smile. Oh, yes. We’re just the wives and girlfriends: mopping up.
Bruce takes us into the front room, where the television screen has been covered by a white sheet pegged to the curtains. He’s sort of brainy looking, dark hair starting to recede, soft moustache, beginning of a double chin, black-framed glasses. What I notice straightaway is his posture: poker-straight, army bearing. Or like a teacher, somehow. The glasses perhaps.
There’s a couple of bottles of scotch on the coffee table and two ashtrays already full of fag-ends. About seven men sitting around. Introductions done quickly—Bobby’s sister, I think you know her? That kind of thing. They’re so close to the Big Day; the tension smolders in the smoky room like a heat haze.
I find myself wondering if one of them is a new boyfriend of Bobby’s. Which one would it be—the tall one with close-together blue eyes is handsome, but there’s no sign that any of them is a queer. I decide I must be wrong and not about that for Bobby; it really must be about escaping, and the money.
There’s one introduced as Jack and he’s really swanking in a mohair suit that looks hand-tailored. I notice a pricey looking watch on one wrist but he’s not flash—no other jewelry. He’s the only one not smoking. He also has manners. He stands up when we’re introduced, nods, smiles, runs a hand through his blond hair, sits down again, carefully tugging his trousers so as not to spoil the creases with his knees. I suddenly feel a tremor of excitement that I’ve barely yet allowed myself. Perhaps this job might have the odd little bonus for me in it, beyond the money.
This is just last-minute stuff. The Up Special has been thoroughly checked out. The HVP coach is the one they want (High Value Package). This is the core group, but there are others, about the same number again, and the railway worker, needed to beat the railway signaling system and teach the others how to uncouple the carriages. This is trickier than you might think, it seems, if you don’t know what you’re doing.
“Draw the curtains, Frenchie,” Bruce suddenly says, and a slim man jumps up and the room is hastily darkened, while Frenchie fiddles with a film projector. The one Bobby called Footpad helps himself to a slug of scotch, topping up his glass without offering it to anyone else. I sit down next to Jack, as close as I dare to those long folded legs. He budges up a little for me. I’m conscious that I can feel his thigh against mine, and I try to move away but there’s no room on the squashed sofa. His thigh muscle radiates heat towards mine through the fabric.
We’re shown a brief wobbly film of the train, then this place called Sears Crossing, all projected onto the sheet pegged to the curtains. At one point the woman from upstairs bursts in with a tray of tea and the light makes us all blink, and her husband—I think this must be Charlie’s house—says to her by way of explanation, “It’s Frenchie’s . . . war stories . . . love, just leave that on the table, ta, we’ll put the milk in.”
She glares at me. A bunch of men watching Frenchie’s war films? In that case, what’s she doing there? As the door closes, leaving only a frame of light, Jack places his hand on my knee. No one else sees it. The room is dark. I stay absolutely still, but I don’t shake it off. His hand rests there, unmoving, like a leaf that just fell innocently from a tree. We both stare straight ahead, at the screen.
I gather that the train has been studied over and over and these seven men are familiar enough with that side of the operation. They just like going over it. The way they all looked up so shiftily when Charlie’s wife came in with the tea was so like naughty boys caught in school that I wanted to laugh. Now we’re sitting in a dark pit with dust motes dancing in the strip of light from the projector between us, and it’s like being bats in a cave. The room has that feeling: the high whine of something that passes back and forth between us, over and above what is being said. I’ve missed you.
A bit more discussion and a few grumblings about having me on the team. Just like Bobby said, they wonder if it’s unlucky, having a bird onboard; it’s like having a girl on a ship.
“I love being called a girl,” I say. I’m thirty years old.
Bobby begins sticking up for me. The lights come back on. Jack’s hand has miraculously disappeared from my knee. Bruce, silent throughout this discussion, grins, pushing his glasses up his nose and telling everyone to shut up. It’s going to be all right. He’s the boss. Class dismissed.
We’ll reassemble down at Leatherslade Farm. Bobby will drive me. My job is partly to stock the farm; Bobby’s to fake the number plates and provide (nick) the remaining necessary equipment: the army uniforms. There’s an army base nearby, Bobby says, so it will look more natural to have an army convoy. How else would you explain that number of men near Bridego Bridge?
We say brief goodbyes and Charlie’s wife hovers again in the background as we leave. Jack taps his forehead at me in mock salute. He beams me a mischievous smile, too, over the head of the smaller bloke, Frenchie, and adds an appreciative glance at my cleavage for good measure. The tension in that cave of a front room I’ve just spent four hours in is almost too much for a body to bear. I’m taut as a guitar string.
These are the things I buy to stock Leatherslade Farm: Eighteen tins of luncheon meat. Nine tins of corned beef. Forty tins of baked beans. Eighteen pounds of
butter. Twenty tins of peas. Thirty-eight tins of soup. Fifteen tins of condensed milk. Thirty-four tins of fruit salad. Thirty-two pounds of sugar. Seven loaves. Nineteen cans of Pipkin beer.
I do it over three days in early August. Bobby helps me, posing as my husband. We go to different grocers so as not to arouse suspicion, Maria dancing around the boxes as I lift them into the car, looking like the perfect little family, away on a holiday. “We’re all going on a summer holiday . . .” we sing. I have to do all the hefting. Bobby is fit enough to drive, but his ribs are tender and they need to knit together, so I won’t let him stretch or bend too much.
Jack sends a big sack of potatoes, a barrel of apples, via Bobby. Seems he has a fruit stall, a legit one. He adds a note. “Tell your sister there’s plenty more where that came from,” he says. “And I notice you don’t get many of those to the pound, if you don’t mind me saying.” I remember him clocking my cleavage earlier. Cheeky sod. Shouldn’t make me laugh, but it does.
Then we go to a different grocer on the Chatsworth Road for the cheese, the Bovril, the Saxa salt, the biscuits. Next we get coffee and tea and jammie dodgers and ketchup. I add Brillo pads and rubber gloves. There’ll be plenty of cleaning to do.
Seventeen rolls of toilet paper. Eleven inflatable rubber mattresses. Pillows. Sleeping bags. Blankets. A dozen Pyrex plates. We fill three carloads and take three separate trips to Leatherslade Farm. Journeys full of the smell of orange peel and Bobby’s walnut dashboard. The village of Brill suddenly appearing at the top of a hill, the picture-postcard windmill, and those vast, swanking views of Oxfordshire. We laugh about everything. A house called “Commoners” and a sign for “Boarstall,” which sounds alarmingly close to a place we all know well. Even, bumbing along the caterpillar of a road, a sign for HM Prison Bullingdon makes us laugh, rather than shudder, and we wave madly, in case any of our mates are inside.
Leatherslade Farm takes a bit of finding the first time, and we can hardly ask a local. We’ve been told by Bruce it’s up a longish track set back from the road, in the Oxfordshire countryside, between the villages of Brill and Oakley.
It takes us two attempts to find the track, it’s so well hidden. There’s a milking unit next to it, and the sound of a cow clanking against something metal makes us jump as we sit in the car for a moment, windows down, smoking, uncertain if this is really the place. To our left it’s all tangled brambles and early blackberries, red and hard, but I need to relieve myself, so I squat down beside the car on the damp grass. Then Maria wants to go, too, so I help her with her knickers and hold her skirt up for her, laughing when the sheep in the field beside us, who have been watching us anxiously with their ears sticking out, suddenly bolt in alarm. A huge buzzard is circling overhead; the track leads upwards to the farm, well hidden by a low wall covered in ivy. Bobby waits impatiently.
Maria’s never seen me this excited. I catch her staring at me, staring and staring, and flashing me one of her lovely dark smiles. I’m in my element.
The “Farm” is actually a farmhouse cottage and a load of outbuildings on about five acres of land, on a little rise, almost directly below Brill. Surrounded by garages, outhouses, sheds; big enough to hide a five-ton lorry and a Land Rover. Ivy, a dense hedge, and loads of thick green mean that you can’t see it from the track below. But from the house, from the top rooms, with binoculars, you can get a view of the Thames Road below. A big pile of tires, machinery scrambled with green growth . . . it’s clear no one’s used the place much in a while.
I’m there already the night before it kicks off. Bobby has left, one last trip back to London with Maria, driving with her sleeping in the back, to drop her off at Stella’s and then return to Leatherslade Farm. (We’ve both agreed Stella a part of the whack, for her part in hiding me these last seven or eight months.) Bobby’s then planning to come back again by midnight. We all have walkie-talkies and radios in case they don’t work, so we can contact one another. Phone lines are going to be cut, so the walkie-talkies are essential. I’m left behind, making up the beds and unloading provisions into the larder, and smoking with the men who are already here. There’s a basement, with a trap door, perfect for storage. I leave some candles and matches at the top of the step in case the torches fail, and close it again.
Jack strides into the kitchen.
The curtains are pulled down everywhere, even over the door. The place is ablaze with yellow-and-orange flower patterns, and it’s a warm August evening, but someone has already lit a couple of gas lamps and put some cocoa on the camping stove, which is taking a long time to boil because the flame is so low. They obviously got fed up and left. It’s like being inside an Easter egg.
“We could hole up here for a fucking month,” Jack says, opening the larder door and grinning. He helps himself to a glass of ale from the Pipkin can he finds there.
“Gloves,” I remind him. He isn’t wearing his. I wipe the place where he handled the larder door for him; I’m wearing pink rubber gloves.
He turns me round and kisses me. He pushes my head back against the closed larder door. He runs his hands all over me, murmuring into my neck. I peel off the gloves and the smell of rubber wafts up to me. When men pawed me like this in the past I always hated it; I’m surprised to find how differently I feel now. Perhaps I’ve been waiting for this. Jack’s the only man I know who doesn’t smoke and he smells fresh, like a new shirt from a packet. It’s hot in the kitchen. My eyes are closed. I’m thinking if I do this then it will seal things; it will be over with Tony and me. And I’m surprised, still, at the little stab that this thought gives me, even now . . .
Jack takes hold of my hand and I glance down at his fingers. He has a small scar across one of his knuckles. He nods towards the nearest bedroom, where I’ve recently made up the bed—mattress, pillow, sleeping bag. But as I turn I see a hair—one of mine, bleached blond—attached to the handle of the larder door. I pick it up.
The radio on the kitchen table rumbles into life just then; a car rolls up, too, and I hear someone arriving at the front door, just as Jack is laying me down on the opened sleeping bag and rolling down my tights. “The Ulsterman!” someone shouts—bloody hell—the job has been postponed for twenty-four hours. I gather it must be the arrival of Footpad, from the voices and the sounds of ice and whiskey being poured in the kitchen. Someone moans loudly, achingly, and there’s the sound of chairs being scraped back. One topples over and another voice says, “Shit! The cocoa!” as the smell of burning chocolate curls into our bedroom.
Jack pushes the bedroom door closed with his foot. I stifle a giggle at the sight of him, blond hair all over the place, trousers all propped up at the front. He slicks down his hair with both hands for a second, kneeling over me. He’s vain but that’s all right with me. So am I. Slowly, teasingly, he starts unbuckling his belt.
Look, I know it wasn’t all larks. They didn’t plan on hitting the driver, but the bloke they’d brought with them couldn’t drive the train from Sears Crossing to Bridego Bridge, and something had to be done to persuade the driver to move it that last twelve hundred yards to where the rest of us were waiting. It wasn’t like any of them had guns; you have to give them that, just a couple of coshes. In court one of the rail workers said he heard a shout: “Get the guns!” But Bruce remembers it differently. Get the cunts—that’s what was said.
If you ask me, the problem boiled down to one person and that person has never to this day been named, nor caught. Not Buster Edwards. Buster said he hit the driver, but there are a lot of different stories and there was a book deal in the offing and they wouldn’t have got it if someone hadn’t owned up so Buster did. Oh, yes, I know he’s the one you love the most, the cheeky chappie, the diamond geezer. You’ve got your version of him. That’s not how I remember him. He was a boxer—Bobby knew him from Repton Boys club. He was part of the firm run by Freddie Foreman, and Buster’s favorite weapon was, according to Bobby, an iron bar.
Even so, there’s so much dispute over who hit the train driver. I’m not sure even those of us who were there know, unless we were at that end of the train. Unless we were really there.
On that and other things: can you really believe what a bunch of crooks tell you? Especially when they keep contradicting themselves. Were there fourteen or fifteen men involved? Or eighteen? Have you ever wondered: who are the ones the convicted keep mentioning, who were never brought to trial? Who was that small figure, pocket-sized, like a jockey; army fatigues; dark in a balaclava, stocking mask squishing the face; slender enough to trot along the moonlit track, misty in a sudden burst of steam from the steampipe; under that hunter’s moon, swift and low, virtually invisible? Who was it that covered the green signal with a glove to stop the train, while the two others took care of the driver and his mate?
We’re nervous, at Leatherslade Farm, waiting for that message. Buster chasing chips pink with ketchup round his plate with a fork, the others playing Monopoly, rattling the dice and buying up hotels. Jack is dressed, now, the memory of him tight in my belly, already in his army uniform, staring down at his cup of tea.
“Christ, we look like Popski’s Private Army!” Bruce says, but no one answers. Walkie-talkies crackle into life, and, when they do, a surge runs through us like we’re all wired together. Check. Check. Check. People standing up, pulling on their balaclavas.
It’s in the lavatory—the outhouse—that Bobby catches hold of me. Hustles himself in there with me. Locks the door and I stand against it, staring at him in shock. He’s crying; he’s shaking. I’ve never seen him like this. He can’t do it, he says. His ribs. He can’t lift mailbags. Sweat is pouring from his face, mixing with the tears and a suffocating feeling in this tiny room with us, already reeking of nervous male piss.
