2

A good many people down our end of Ladbroke Grove came from one-parent families. Sometimes I think, looking back on it, I came from a no-parent family.

After all these years I’m still not too sure who my dad is, and certainly Mum never told me. I always went by her name, which was Keegan, and it was only her family I ever met, so I reckon my dad was no more than a passing moment in her life.

What I remember most about Mum was when I was first at school - down in among the infants I was at the time - she would come and fetch me with this music stuck in her ears. You couldn’t hold much of a conversation at home either because she liked her music loud. When I remember talking to Mum, it was all shouting over Duran Duran, at full volume.

I remember the kitchen where we lived on the estate, with plates stacked up by the sink sticking together, and I can remember wondering why there was so much washing-up because we weren’t a big family. No dad, no brothers and sisters - just me. I suppose more got eaten because Mum often had guys she called my uncles around. Most of the time, of course, these uncles weren’t uncles at all and then Mum would hustle me off to bed extra early and I’d lie awake listening to her Music for Romantic Evenings tapes played extra loud until they moved to the bedroom and I could get a bit of sleep. Anyway, I stayed with my mum and I put up with Duran Duran and her Romantic Evenings until one of the uncles turned out to be someone called Jack Levenhall, who gave it out that he owned a kebab place on Harrow Road. Much later, it turned out not only that he didn’t own it, but that he’d been thrown out of it because of his habits. This Uncle Jack made it horribly plain that he fancied me more than he fancied my mum, so I moved out as quick as I could, and I never lived at her place after that.

Well, my mum knew where I was if she wanted to come after me, which she didn’t. First I went to my gran’s place in the Bethnal Green area, but she was always on about the big heavy villains she had known in her younger years, people like the Krays and the Richardsons and just how they could draw, with their razors, a perfect semicircle on the faces of those who disagreed with them. Gran seemed to admire this about the heavy men of her younger years, but hearing about it pissed me off, quite honestly, which is why I moved again and went to live with Aunt Dot in the buildings up near Kensal Rise cemetery.

Aunt Dot was the best. She was Mum’s aunt, but a lot younger than Gran. She’d always talk to me without the incidental music, and it seemed like she always took an interest in me, and when I got into trouble and had to go away, Aunt Dot always seemed pleased enough to see me back. She had some of my mum’s good looks, but in her they seemed softer and more appealing, that’s what I thought at least.

Of course, my Aunt Dot was used to people going away for a while seeing as she was married to my Uncle Arthur. He was good to me also. He was in a business way, out of anything I’ve ever attempted, robbing banks and building societies, threatening cashiers and customers with a shooter which he kept carefully cleaned and never even let me hold.

As you can imagine, this paid Uncle Arthur very well when he was working, and we used to go out to posh restaurants and even holidays in Spain. The trouble was he went away for a long time when things started going wrong, so we stayed on in the building in the Kensal Rise area, where the rent was reasonable, and Aunt Dot went off to the West End to do bits of cleaning, and that was when I was at school and Uncle Arthur was away from home.

It all started when I was about twelve. Something like that. This may surprise you, but I was quite a bright boy at school. For one thing I got the hang of the isosceles triangle long before anyone in the class understood it. It was at school I met Tiny McGrath. He wasn’t called Tiny because he was especially small but to distinguish him from his very much older stepbrother, known as Chippy, not because he was a sort of carpenter but because of his huge appetite, at that time, for chips. He and Tiny had the same father but different mothers.

Chippy was always tall and in spite of what he ate he was quite skinny. He had a strange smile. I mean he only smiled with one side of his mouth. One side went up quite cheerfully while the other side stayed down as though it couldn’t see the joke.

What I suppose he was was a natural leader; he had the gift of getting other people to work for him. He used to ask Tiny and me and some of our friends round to his place in Formosa Street and give us sweets or cigarettes, or a bit of money, to do little jobs for him. Such jobs, to be honest, usually consisted of stealing things, like pinching bottles of whisky and that from the off-licence while he kept the woman in charge amused with requests for crisps and sweets and other things she wasn’t meant to sell, and she was busy explaining that we weren’t entitled to be there anyway. All this led to us, but not Chippy, having to appear before the desk sergeant at the Paddington nick, where he told us that a life of crime would lead to misery and unhappiness. Looking back on it now, I’m still not sure that he was telling us the truth.

We graduated from there to car radios and the opening of car doors with a wire coat hanger. It was when I got caught at this that the friendly warnings stopped and I got seriously beaten up by members of the Metropolitan Police with time on their hands. After that I went inside for the first time as a Youth Offender.

It was after I left the Youth Offenders that Chippy and I got together seriously. We took to watching the smart houses in the Holland Park area, and noting when the milk and the papers were stopped because of the owners being away on holiday. We got skilled in the way of breaking and entering, and Chippy’s cousin Ozzy Desmond had made a study of disconnecting burglar alarms. As I say, we did well enough, and I was about to give my Aunt Dot some of life’s little luxuries when I got caught. I got four years from a judge who’d decided from the word go that I was a menace to society. Chippy, by the way, was in the getaway car near the house we got caught in, and he just drove off and left us to face the consequences.

So, it was then, when I was in real prison, that I decided I wouldn’t get into no more trouble at all, and wouldn’t get into fights. I kept myself to myself all those years. I’d get my meals and take them back to the cell and eat them on the table, which was, let’s face it, the lid of the toilet. There was a lot of violence about at that time, from the London heavies, who the screws were afraid of. I saw one punch a screw in the chest during association, and the screw pretended not to notice it. He pretended it hadn’t happened at all, he was just too frightened to make a point of it.

Well, you could quite often get into a fight in association, so I kept out of it. I stayed in my cell about twenty-three hours a day and I got used to it. I got so I didn’t really want to be with other people. The time near the end of my sentence, when I was allowed days out with close relatives, I went out with my Aunt Dot, who told me Uncle Arthur had gone away again for ten years. She was always nice to me, my Aunt Dot, but I couldn’t wait to get away from her. I wasn’t listening to her hardly at all. All I could think of was how nice it would be to get to my cell for a bit of peace and quiet. So I asked her to take me back to prison early.

Of course, being alone so much, keeping out of everyone’s way, I had time to read a lot of books. Most of them were a load of rubbish, crime stories, so called, by people who didn’t know the first thing about crime.

Then I got a prison visitor called Simon who gave me a crime book by some Russian who suffered with epileptic fits. It was about murder and, of course, I never did a murder. In fact, there’s no violence in my record whatsoever. But I got stuck into this book and I found it interesting. Then I kept on getting called away for education classes, which taught me that three and three make six, a fact I already knew, and I lost the thread of the Russian book from time to time. But I persisted with the book whenever I could get away from education or watching further rubbish on TV during those dangerous moments of association. Simon got arrested for downloading pornographic material or some such affair, so for all I know he’s somewhere inside the prison system, and I never saw him again.

I was all right reading in my cell. I mean, I was quite all right but I wouldn’t have minded getting back into the fresh air, and by then I was able to work the system. We had ETS classes, which stood for Enhanced Thinking Studies. They asked you at the start what you were thinking and you had to say, ‘I was thinking how great it’d be to go out on Saturday night and get pissed and hit someone’s head with a hammer.’

If you said something like that, you started from a low point and your thinking could only improve you. So the ETS person gave you a good report, which helped towards parole.

Then I began to get visits from a woman who asked me to call her Gwenny and said she was from an outfit called SCRAP. One time she came, she told me the whole prison system was rotten and all prisons needed blowing up. This worried me and I began to wonder if this SCRAP was some sort of terrorist organization. But then she asked if I’d like SCRAP to fix up for some sort of person to look after me when I got out and help me to lead an honest life. Then I realized that SCRAP was another of those things, like ETS. It was better to go along with it if you wanted to leave the Scrubs as quick as possible.

This got a bit delayed, however, by my probation officer, Mr Markby, who gave me an interview when the question of parole came up. He said that I was extremely intelligent (ha ha) and that I knew exactly the right answers to give (which I did) but that I didn’t seriously mean them (which perhaps I didn’t) so I should stay inside because I couldn’t be trusted. Which was why I didn’t get parole. It just shows that I wasn’t as good at working the system as I thought I was.

Anyway, this incident made me very suspicious of probation officers and all suchlike who say they’re only trying to help you and support you, when what they’re really after is to keep you inside for quite a bit longer. All the same I felt relieved, because, quite honestly, I wasn’t ready to face the outside at that particular moment in time and I had to finish the Russian book, which I was able to do before my eventual release.

One week before I got out, I got a visit from the chaplain, who said that SCRAP had found a praeceptor, whatever that might mean, Lucinda Purefoy. She was an excellent choice seeing that her father was a well-known bishop. I smiled at him, of course, and seemed to agree but I’d already decided, once I got out, not to have much more to do with probation officers and SCRAP women who could no doubt turn the way Mr Markby did. Being out of prison means that you’re free, doesn’t it? At least that’s the way I looked at it at the time.

 

They were a bit slow at the office that morning. They gave me the clothes back I was wearing when I got arrested. The sweater I had was all moth-eaten but they said they could do nothing about it. I got £46.75 and a travel warrant and then they opened the gate and I was out in the rain.

I hadn’t taken more than a couple of gulps of fresh air when this girl came towards me, all smiling. She was wearing black trousers, a long overcoat and a white shirt. It looked as if she’d dressed up for the occasion. Now I’m not sure why that annoyed me so much.

Which is where this story begins.