Then the men would come out of the pub, all pissed, and throw handfuls of coppers in the air. The more pissed they were, the better it was for us, because they would throw even more money in the air.
The drunk men went home to their houses and slept in the afternoon. They would get up at teatime for their dinners. We always had a lovely spread, with fresh vegetables, shrimps, mussels, cockles and all that.
Everyone lived well on Sunday because it was the big day for us. We wore our Sunday best and went into each other’s houses. All the adults had even more drinks, and everyone listened to music. We had a lot of music in our house because we had a big piano. There used to be an old rag-and-bone man, Bo, who played the piano and we used to have sing-songs.
If you took Bo old clothes and all that, he would give you a goldfish in a plastic bag. One day he had a huge goldfish and I wanted it. I took my dad’s best coat out, gave it to Bo and came home with the massive goldfish.
A few nights later, my dad asked where his coat was because he was due to go on a night out with the boys.
My mum said: ‘Robert, where’s his nanny goat? You’d better bring that coat back now, or you know what’s coming.’
I sniggered when I heard that cockney name for a coat, admitted what I had done, and accepted my telling off. Dad had to go round to Bo’s house and hand over two shillings to get the coat back.
My family were pure-bred Cockneys, going back several generations around Islington and Kentish Town. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a charlady for a well-to-do family. Her husband, my grandfather of course, was in the Royal Navy during the First World War.
My father’s dad joined the army aged only fourteen and won lots of medals during the Boer War in South Africa. My dad’s mother was a Romany Gypsy. Her hair was jet black and the men of the time loved her. I heard she was a bit hot and wayward when he went off to war.
With all of that military background we all learned to cook, iron and everything. It was always my job to clean everyone’s shoes. I had to clean the soles as well, so that they were completely spotless.
Dad was fascinated by animals and birds. Our terraced house had a big garden and he let a billy-goat run wild in there. The goat wasn’t there to provide milk or anything; Dad just bought it for a reason known only to himself. It gave us lots of hassle, chasing everyone all over the place.
We had an outside loo, which meant running the gauntlet with the goat. One day, as I approached the toilet, it charged, and I had to hit it on the head with a shovel. After I’d done my business the goat charged again, and I had to use the shovel on the fucking thing again.
Dad even bought a monkey from a pet shop. It was a destructive thing and it caused havoc in the house. Dad gave the monkey away to a scrap dealer called Corky, who was upset when the bloody thing started biting people.
Dad even had a mynah bird in the house and taught it to talk. We taught it to swear, and it gave everyone dog’s abuse. We taught the thing to wolf-whistle and it used to target women in the street on our command.
My family were always fanatical royalists. In our house, the Queen was like the mother of the nation. There was always a photo of her on the wall and we celebrated her birthday. When the Queen came to power not long after I was born, we were taken down to Buckingham Palace to pay our respects and wish her well.
My dad defended the Queen to the hilt and he even had a couple of punch-ups in defence of royalty. I remember when someone insulted the Queen, he attacked them. It wasn’t just a slap on the face; he would give you a proper punch on the chin. That was how much the Queen meant to him.
Another huge influence in my family was the Queen Mother. My mum would see how she dressed and, if we were going to a do, my dad would go out and buy a similar outfit – well, the best he could afford. In our family, the Queen Mum had the same respect as the Virgin Mary, she was that important.
The way they saw it was this: some politicians were corrupt, councillors could be dodgy, but the Queen was perfect. She was non-corruptible. You had to look at her as an example and that was how you had to behave.
At Christmas, everything in our house came to a standstill for the Queen’s Christmas message. Three o’clock on Christmas Day was the highlight of the year.
There was bomb debris everywhere, even in the 1950s and early 1960s. There were new builds going on all over the place. Everybody needed somewhere to live and so they were building prefabs – you know, those types of cheap, easy-to-build houses.
North London looked like a patchwork quilt. You would have a nice house next to a building being demolished. Those bombed houses were a haven for us kids. We used them as camps, and brought all sorts of stuff into them, using the cart. We turned a tea chest upside down to use as our table and sat on fruit boxes. We collected anything that we found around and about, including bullets and bayonets; everything had a value.
We nicked stuff from cars as well. We had a builder’s tool called a centre punch, as it marked out holes for drilling in metal. Well, with that force, we employed it successfully against the rear windows of cars. People weren’t so careful in those days, and it was easy to nick things. Once the window was out we could take briefcases, umbrellas or whatever was in there.
It was a battle for survival, with an assortment of scams to provide money for the pictures on Saturday mornings. We used to throw mud at people’s windows and then offer to clean them. We even devised a scheme to steal tomatoes and apples from Mrs Rose’s back garden.
We had a fishing net, consisting of a cheap cane with a net on the end. We netted what we could, then took the lot to school and sold everything. Mrs Rose was a lovely old woman, but she was never going to eat the hundreds of tomatoes and apples in her garden.
None of the kids in our streets had any money at all, so people like Mrs Rose kept everyone going. Breadwinners who were lucky enough to have jobs received peanuts for their labours; millions of people lived in slums; and I was penniless as well, with Dad having to support eight kids. You have to remember that the famous London Docks were in decline, with other, better-placed British ports taking work away. From the 1960s onwards, 150,000 jobs were lost in the docks and related industries, so child poverty was commonplace.
There were so many characters around. An old woman called Beetroot Annie used to boil up beetroot in a big bathtub. Her hands were always bright red, and you could buy beetroot from her and take it away wrapped in newspaper. Another old lady called Annie with pure white hair did large amounts of washing, including sheets and all that, in a huge tank in her shed. That was their way of making a few bob during those hard times.
We used to collect beer bottles and take them to the local pub to get three pence in old money – a thrupenny bit – for every bottle. The landlord put them out in his back yard, so Maltese Tony would climb over the wall, nick them back and we’d cart them off to the next pub to get another three pence a bottle – for the same bottles.
Some Greek people lived near to us. We used to paint the windows in their houses with black tar. They thought it was still night time and they’d get up late for work. We were paid two bob – and that was a lot in those days – for each window we cleaned off. And it was us who’d painted the windows black in the first place.
We had loads of little rackets going on as kids. It was because we had nothing, and we had to think of ways of earning money. Look at that Apprentice programme with Alan Sugar. We would have been well ahead of those people! If he’d given them a hundred quid and gave us a hundred quid, we would have gone out, earned more, and took the hundred quid from all of them!
A family moved in, and they were called the Cherries – their name came from us. They were Italian or Portuguese or something like that, and owned the baker’s shop. They used to make Bakewell tarts with little cherries on the top. Their son was always called Cherry. The family were all very religious people, going to church on Sundays. His mum wanted the son to fit in with the street gang to protect him. He wa
s an innocent-looking, vulnerable kid.
‘Those kids are naughty, but they’re not horrible,’ I heard Mrs Cherry tell her old man. ‘I think they’ll protect him.’
She was right, really. I mean, kids were being bullied at school, but we protected our own as if they were family, although we were just eight or nine years old. If you didn’t fit in with the street gang, nobody played with you and you became ostracised; it was as if you were a leper.
A couple of simple souls ran around with us and she saw that they were given complete protection, even in primary school. We didn’t discriminate: we went around with a fifteen-year-old girl who wasn’t too smart; the older men were trying to get inside her knickers – they took her into the loo in the pub and showed her their willies and tried to get her to do stuff. We told the men to fuck off or we would report them. So they did scarper. The Cherry family saw what we did, and they were happy for their son to join us. We were all ragamuffin kids at the time, and Cherry was as proud as punch to have new pals.
Cherry’s mum sent him out with cakes from the shop. My favourite cake was a cream slice, so she used to bring that out to me because I was running the gang. I became the head of the gang because everyone looked to me for ideas and inspiration. I used my organisational skills at an early age. Put me in a group of people and they revolve around me. I was never afraid of anything or anyone, and those qualities always ensured that I was the leader.
One day Cherry met up with me and Maltese Tony. Tony said to me that if we could get hold of lead we would make loads of money. I agreed to take the stuff to Bo, the rag-and-bone man. He was part of the family, really, and always paid a fair price for our odds and ends.
Down at King’s Cross station they had an old Victorian overflow system in the public toilets with lead piping coming down to the bowl below. Maltese Tony went into the toilet with a hacksaw and sawed the lead piping off. He sawed about half a dozen of them in the cubicles and put them in our cart.
‘Should we be doing this?’ Silly Billy asked, clutching his golliwog as if his life depended on it. ‘What if someone comes in to use the toilets?’
Silly Billy was one of the simple souls who followed us around. Nowadays he would be identified as having learning difficulties and qualify for some sort of help. In those days we just thought he was a bit on the slow side. He was three or four years older than us, and I remember he went to a special school.
In the 1960s there were no medical terms to describe conditions like his. Today we have Asperger’s, autism, dyspraxia and the like. We thought he was retarded in some way, but didn’t take the mickey or anything like that. That’s where loyalty comes in, from early street gangs through to heavy firms, as you’ll find out later.
We just accepted that Silly Billy went around with his golliwog. It was a sort of comfort to him as we went about our daily business. And we never thought it had anything to do with racism or anything like that. There was none of the ‘PC’ stuff then; if I wanted to buy a tub of jam with a golliwog on it, I bought it, and if Silly Billy wanted to carry his golly around, then he carried it around.
I remember the Robertsons jam with the mascot on – nobody thought anything of it. It was a smiling face and I can’t ever remember anyone complaining about it. People used to collect golliwog toys, watches and things like that. The jam company sent out 20 million Golly badges; Silly Billy probably had a large percentage of those, and so did his pals. They were collecting toys, or dolls with smiling, happy faces. To me, what’s the difference between golliwogs, Cabbage Patch dolls and Barbie dolls? Load of bollocks, if you ask me.
In our street we had people with all sorts of backgrounds and it meant nothing to us. One of the black kids was nicknamed Sambo. Even his old man called him Sambo. The one thing we had in common was that we were all skint. Someone’s colour or religion meant zero to us in the early 1960s. Why does it all go so wrong nowadays?
Anyway, with Silly Billy, his golliwog and the gang lurking round the toilets, this guy walked in to use one of the cubicles. He flushed the chain and, instead of coming down into the pan, the water came out like a fucking shower. He was soaked right through and started shouting.
One of our boys jammed a stick in the door so that the guy couldn’t get out of the toilet. He was banging on the door, screaming and shouting.
Cherry, who came from that really decent family, was an honest, caring kid and he pulled the stick out of the door.
The guy came out of there like a wild banshee and punched Cherry right in the eye because he thought he was the culprit. The railway police at King’s Cross came and saw Cherry with his big black eye – you can imagine the damage, because a grown man had hit him.
Maltese Tony told the police that the guy had been showing his willy to everyone. So they took him away and prosecuted him for assaulting a child and indecent exposure. An innocent guy, going to work, had been showered in his suit and everything – we flogged the lead for £6 and he was carted off by the Old Bill. Cherry’s mum gave us all cream cakes for helping her son and telling the police everything.
After that, though, the Cherries had a change of mind. They realised that we were a bit too naughty to hang about with and they moved away from the area.
We grew up around violence and it was no big thing. I remember sitting out on our front doorstep and my mum brought me in because it was late at night. I lay in my bedroom, hearing screaming and all that. It would either be a pimp bashing up a prostitute or gang fights in the street, where they were hitting each other over the heads with broken bottles.
Naughty boys all went around with each other, and that would be the start of proper firms. We went to the same school, had little street gangs and grew up together. Those early gangs and later firms never had any names, really, as we had no intention of giving the police any clues about our illegal operations.
Some kids did thieving, some took up boxing, and it was a tight-knit little lot. Everything developed naturally. Who could handle himself in a fight? Who was the natural leader? Loyalty was built up in school and it became a real bond. There was no way you would grass on anyone or anything like that.
Gang culture was quite an acceptable thing; violence was acceptable. You learned the laws of the jungle when you were a small kid. I trained the young ones, showing them how to steal things from the backs of lorries, and they soon learned all the tricks of the trade. Maybe I had some sort of charisma, which meant that those young ones watched what I was doing and did the same. That leadership quality stood out, and the kids always turned to me for help and support.
We were all there for each other, and we would never let each other down. It was about bonding while we were growing up. Bonding is a very powerful thing. There is a sense of belonging and a feeling of higher self-esteem.
You were somebody in that gang. You had an identity in that gang. You also had an identity in the manor – the area where you lived. I was ‘to the manor born’, if you like. All of these early experiences groomed me for life in the cut-throat world of crime, firms, businessmen and gangsters.
There was always a bit of gang warfare to claim some territory. You expanded your territory to operate your rackets. I’m talking about ages as young as ten. When I hear nowadays about ten year olds doing it, I’m not really shocked, because we were doing it then, too, at that age.
As time went on, more and more people came to challenge us. They came at us with sticks and iron bars. So we had to carry better weapons, and we would tool up with weapons like bayonets. Then the other gangs knew we carried bayonets, so they would come looking for us with an axe – then we went after them with an axe.
Members of a childhood gang were totally loyal to one another. Even the weakest link had security wrapped around him. You became a person of importance in your own community, even at such a young age.
That King’s Cross area was rife with prostitution, violence and drug dealing. Crime was all around us, and it was natural to become involved in some way
.
I went to Grafton Primary School in Holloway, and my secondary school was Holloway School in Camden.
I first became involved in violence at secondary school. On your first day, because you were the new kids, the second year lot ganged up. They used to have pennies in their hankies and cosh you over the head because they thought that was funny. I wasn’t having any of it. I waited for my chance and targeted my attackers, one by one. I worked my way through the list and really let them have it.
Jimmy was the school bully. He was the same age as me, about eleven, but he looked like a kid of about thirteen. He was big built like his old man, and had a messy mop of thick, ginger hair. It was quite a spectacular barnet for a young guy. If he saw kids playing, he would take their marbles and grab money off them. He would stick their heads down the toilet, and he weed on the ones he really didn’t like.
Jimmy used to meet the girls from the school up the road. He gave them packets of sweets and they let him put his hands down their knickers and all that. And he always smelt of wee. He was a big kid from Connemara in Ireland. I thought that if he ever tried it on with me, I wasn’t going to stand for it. Well, we had a fight and I got bashed up really badly.
I went home and my dad said it didn’t look like I’d come out on top. Dad had a fearsome reputation as a fighter and I could tell he expected me to follow in his tradition. An image of Jimmy flashed through my mind, and I thought, ‘I’m going to get you!’
I told my sister’s boyfriend, who said I should get myself a stick and hit him right across the shins with it. He said, ‘With a kid like that, you didn’t want to mess about.’ He told me that once I had hurt him he wouldn’t want to fight me ever again.
I went into my sister’s bedroom, because she had a rounders bat. It was like a miniature baseball bat. I put it in my school duffel bag and got up really early in the morning. I felt really good because I knew what I was going to do to him.
I hid at the back of a bike shed that was behind a block of flats on the way to school, as I knew Jimmy was going to be there to meet some girls. I hit him right across the legs with the bat and then I started beating him. I can remember the fear on his face. He was screaming.
I Am Not A Gangster Page 2
