So. That’s another reason I had to do it. Come out of retirement. That last big job, I mean. To get some money, some independence, to support Maria by myself, but more importantly, to escape from Tony. You don’t reject a man like that and expect it to end there.
If you want to know why women stay with a violent man, it’s simple. Because instinctively we’ve always known that he will become dangerous at the point at which we leave him. As long as you stay, you’re convinced you can manage him, appease him, control him, match him, keep him sweet in some way. Leave, or try to, and his threats become real. To kill you, kill the children, kill himself. He might well do it now, because he’s desperate; the full force of him is unleashed if you’re leaving him—he’s got nothing to lose.
The sadness returns, soon enough. New Year—1963—comes and goes, and with it Maria’s sixth birthday. I feel dimly that I’d rather Tony was angry than sad, because only when he’s angry can I feel certain I’m doing the right thing. I pack some stuff in two cases and leave Tony slumped over a coffee in the kitchen, Maria’s defeated birthday cake on the table, candles and icing all mashed up, wrinkled balloons bobbing round the floor, tired old faces. She runs to say goodbye to Daddy, no doubt thinking it’s a short-term thing, flinging her arms around him and then, when he clutches her, saying squeakily, “Daddy! You’re holding me too tight . . .”
We go to Annie and Dad’s in Lauriston. I tell them we’ve had a row, but nothing more. In any case, I know that Tony won’t be able to stay away. Four days later, he turns up, battering the door. Dad is out, Gracie, too, but Annie and Maria and I jump out of our skins, recognizing at once the quality of the knocking.
“Take Maria upstairs to the bedroom,” I tell Annie.
I open the door to Tony. He’s drunk, unshaven, black-eyed, and visibly shimmering with anger, like a lit firework on the doorstep. Sizzling.
“I want to see my daughter.” Everything about his face, his words, reveal the mood he’s in. As if he can’t actually see me, he’s so thick with malevolence.
“D’you think that’s a good idea? In the state you’re in?”
“I want to see my fucking daughter!” he roars.
I hear a couple of locks turning somewhere. A dog barking. A window opening. The mood is familiar enough. That day I was first caught hoisting, when Annie and Dad were fighting. Here, on this very doorstep.
“OK, I’ll get Maria. Stay outside. We can go to Vicky Park. But Tony—tuck your shirt in. Try and sort yourself out. She’ll be upset, seeing you like that.”
I’m determined to talk to him as if everything is normal. As if I’m not wondering about that Kropp razor that he sometimes taped open, and whether he has it in his pocket. As if I’m not thinking: I always knew you had it in you to be like this; I wondered when I would see it. As if my whole body isn’t braced, like a dog’s: to attack, or defend, or whatever is needed.
Tony allows me to close the door and go back inside. I stand in the hallway for a moment, rest my cheek against the raised shapes on Annie’s wallpaper. Annie’s worried face appears at the top of the stairs and then Maria darts out, a flickering black-and-white shape, running towards us. “Daddy! Is it Daddy?” She races towards the front door and without hesitating flings it open, throws herself into Tony’s arms.
And I’m thinking, again: can I really do this? Break them up? She loves him. She loves him more than she does me. What right have I to make this appalling decision, to deny her the only father she’ll ever have?
I watch them for a moment or two. He’s down on one knee, on the pathway, burying his face in Maria’s hair. He’s holding her very tight, and once again, she squeals: “Daddy, you’re squeezing me . . .”
Then he looks over her head at me, and I see it, but too late. There’s no love there for Maria. This is all about punishing me. In an instant he sweeps her up and he’s off and running. He strides away, down Lauriston Road, before I can follow. I dart out after him, not bothering to fetch my shoes, only dimly conscious of the iciness under my bare feet, screaming and shouting, and watching helplessly as I see him bundle her into a parked car, a car he’d parked out of sight, but screams off in a moment, as if he left the keys in, the engine running. Like a getaway. His talent, of course; how could I hope to follow him?
An old man comes over to me, to where I’ve sunk to the ground. I think I might be crying.
“Is that your husband?” the old fella asks.
When I say nothing he points to the call box near us with his walking stick.
“Shall I call the Old Bill for you?”
Call the police. Should I? That would be a first. Annie has come running out onto the street after me, and she’s brought my shoes. She puts an arm around me and nods to the old man, dismissing his help, and huddles me up onto my feet, ushers me back towards the house. I’m sobbing, but I’m also stunned; I can’t think straight. I can’t believe my own stupidity: that I would let Tony get this close to us and not realize he was going to do something. As if he would take a rejection lying down.
“When Gracie comes in, I’ll get her to fetch your dad,” Annie says. “He’ll know what to do. Your dad’s got friends, you know, someone who could sort Tony out . . .”
I can’t bring myself to answer her. To voice my worst fears. That it would be too late. That before anyone could get to him, Tony would do something to Maria. And that in any case, it wouldn’t be enough to sort Tony out once. He’d never stay away. I’m not numb anymore; my mind is racing. Am I really made of rubber? Perhaps it’s wood, like that wooden heart Tony once made me—“Treat me right, treat me good, for I’m not made of wood . . .”—and those things are not indestructible. Whatever I’m made of, I’m an idiot. Where has he gone? Should I phone the police and get them to chase him?
Then there’s suddenly a commotion at the door, and Annie leaps up, thinking no doubt that Dad’s returning. But someone is pounding, thumping with a fist on the front door. Annie opens it, and a tumbled Maria is heaped over the threshold, weeping hysterically, dumped on the welcome mat.
“You fucking bitch!” Tony roars. I slam the door in his face, rushing towards Maria, hugging her and holding her. What was that all about? Was it just meant to be a threat? Or did he regret it, think better of it? That explanation somehow rings true; Tony’s moods are unpredictable, and I know he despises his own temper, tries sometimes to get a hold of it.
Once again, I feel how terrified Maria is: her entire body trembling, her teeth chattering, her arms clamped around my neck.
“Save me, Mummy,” she keeps crying. Which makes no sense. She’s home now. But I understand what she means. I have to get us away. Somewhere Tony won’t find us. Not Gloria’s . . . that would be the first place he’d think of. Bobby’s in a place on Vallance Road; Tony knows that, too. Maybe I can go to Stella’s for a while; I don’t think Tony knows where her new flat is, the one belonging to the fat boyfriend, the huge fat one who likes the clinical sex, although it won’t take him long to find out. I need some money. Enough to move somewhere Tony can’t find us, somewhere he’ll never think of. Enough to start a new life, and save us both.
OK, enough excuses. Yes, it was a huge risk to take part in a robbery of this scale, just when I’d got my life on track, when I was out of prison, had got my daughter back, and was trying to go straight, to give Maria a different life than mine. Yes, yes, I’ve tried looking at my life, and how I got here, and I think I’ve covered quite a lot. Genetics, parents, family background, social environment, the wider society I found myself in, blah blah blah; peers, education, values of those around me—yes, yes, you must admit, I’ve covered all of that. What have I left out? What else makes you who you are? Have you ever asked yourself that? Do you believe in destiny, fate? God’s guiding hand? I don’t, I have to say. No, I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing.
I’m staying at Stella’s flat in Mayfair with Maria. It’s a squash, for three people, and it means Maria can’t go to school. Also, as we are all sleeping in the same bed, Maria and I have to make ourselves scarce for one hour every week when the huge fat man comes around. At least Tony hasn’t yet figured out where we are and we’ve been here six months, scrounging off Stella and using up the last few quid of my saved money.
To my horror, I miss Tony sometimes. I feel sickened by the way that a song, a particular song, like that Roy Orbison one, “Falling,” can catch me off guard. I feel quick to bruise, like a peach. Just a snatch on the radio, that aching plea to be forgiven. Tony had a good line in aching to be forgiven. Stella jumps up whenever she hears it. Switches it off.
So we edge along to the summer of 1963. The summer of the Profumo Scandal. Everywhere you go you hear Randy Mice-Davies jokes and record shops are selling a daft album full of silly songs about the case; there are Profumo cartoons in all the newspapers. Stella is particularly obsessed with following it all, because she met both Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler a couple of times; both of them worked at Murray’s as dancers, or showgirls on and off, like Stella. Stella remembers Christine as being striking. She had haunting eyes, like an Egyptian goddess, Stella says, an extraordinary face. What surprises Stella is how the girls are always presented like best friends in the newspapers. Stella remembers them fighting. She remembers a time when Mandy chucked a whole load of Leichner theatrical powder over Christine in the dressing room. Well, threw it into the air and it whirled around in the fan and landed on Christine’s hair as she was sitting there in her Red Indian costume, doing her makeup, ready to go on. And another funny thing: Stella remembers Christine as a blonde, and Mandy as having dark hair, almost black, with a fringe and kiss curls on each cheek. In the papers it’s always the other way around: Christine with her snaky black hair and her mate Mandy a daft blonde in a petal-strewn hat, swaggering out of court.
Anyhow, we follow all this gleefully, poring over the photographs, heartily approving of the fact that Christine and Mandy are, according to the press, still going to Vidal Sassoon in Bond Street throughout the trial to have their hair done; or that Mandy comes out of the Old Bailey in that lovely wrap dress, giving everyone a whirl.
Stella remembers suddenly, reading about the trial, that the name Stephen Ward means something to her. Wasn’t Stephen Ward a name in the little black book of Ruth Ellis, all those years ago, when we went to visit her at the Little Club? What a strange coincidence, but Stella’s sure she’s remembered right. That Ward knew Ruth’s friend Vickie, who was killed in a car accident in 1956. And there’s another name from the Profumo Scandal that prompts a memory in Stella. The landlord Peter Rachman, ripping off all those colored tenants. One-time lover of both Christine and Mandy. But she can’t remember why or how she came across his name before. I remember immediately: he was in Ruth’s book, too. Small world, Stella says.
Just about to get smaller. Because the robbery was introduced to me through two separate routes. What a criminologist would no doubt call my “social milieu.” The main players were all people Bobby knew. That’s Bruce Reynolds, Charlie Wilson, Buster Edwards, and Roy James. Three of them were boys he knew from borstal; another was a racing-car driver he’d known from his kennel-boy days at Hackney Wick. One of them had been in primary school with us; another in primary school with Stella. They’re all about our age (thirty-ish). Too old to be the Beatles but still wanting their five minutes of fame. Not that I remembered meeting any of them before, but they were deeply familiar, just the same.
Only one of them, as far as I knew, had links to either of the gangs that might mean Tony would know the plan—the Krays or the Richardson gang—and that was a bloke called Tommy Wisbey. It soon became reassuringly clear that Tony wasn’t invited. His current heavy drinking and wildness would have been known of and ruled him out. Also, surprisingly for the time, the Krays weren’t behind this plan. The money was being put up by someone else, though no one ever seemed to know who.
The second connection was through Stella. Her fat man bought his properties with the help of a solicitor, John Wheater. She mentioned him casually to me; she was thinking of trying to buy a flat of her own, and had been talking to this John Wheater about it. He had an Irish friend, handsome, who was always with him; this fella had a couple of rich girlfriends who intimidated Stella. She was always trying to get the two men alone. She did finally, plying them with whiskey when her boyfriend was away visiting one of his other mistresses. These two men started talking to Stella—indiscreetly—about a robbery on a fantastic scale that they’re involved in. She had no doubt, years later, that the Irish man was the one referred to by the robbers as the mysterious “Ulsterman” who tipped them off about the train leaving Glasgow. The train they were about to rob. The solicitor John Wheater was later arrested and sentenced to three years in connection with that same robbery. I’m sure you know which one.
It’s Bobby who suggests it first. Says he needs my help, and there’s a really good whack in it for me if I do. We’re round at this terrible place he’s now living in, on Vallance Road, a real slum; yours must be the only remaining one, I tease him, I thought they were all demolished? I have Maria with me, and I’m nervous. It can only be a short visit: Tony might find us here.
Bobby’s in some sort of trouble. He’s left the firm, or his boyfriend—he doesn’t say which and I don’t ask—and he owes someone a lot of money. An enormous sum, something like twenty-five thousand pounds, and there’s no way on earth to get that kind of money without a really huge job. Why does he owe it? Because he was gambling with it, and it wasn’t his to flush away, but he believed his luck was in (he always believes his luck is in), and he kept piling more and more bets on, that seam of optimism in him, like a strip of mercury, poisoning everything.
He can never hang on to money. I’ve wondered about that, before now. How money that’s “won,” that lands in your lap or is stolen, perhaps never feels quite real or solid. If he tries to translate it into real things, bricks and mortar, it just puffs away.
He’s making us a cup of soapy-looking tea in the kitchenette attached to his living room, and pacing around, talking about this fella Bruce, the leader, and how I’d better say yes quickly, because it’s all set for about a fortnight’s time. Every so often he pauses, clutches at his ribs, winces.
I noticed a toffee-apple seller on Vallance Road on the way up here. I send Maria outside with sixpence to get one, so I can look at Bobby’s ribs.
Under his jacket, his lovely Prince of Wales checked suit jacket—that I know is his pride and joy—under his pale blue shirt, I find sodden bandages. He lets me discover them, but pulls away from me when I put my hand out to touch.
“Leave off. I’m fine.”
I take my tea and go sit on the sofa, hearing Maria’s returning footsteps on the steps outside his front door. He’ll never tell me. I know that, but all the same, the words leak out: “Who was it?”
He’s trembling, I notice. His skin is a watery grey color and his eyes bloodshot. He gives an almost imperceptible shake of the head, meaning: that’s as much as I’m going to say.
“Have you got a television set?” I ask Bobby, opening the front door to Maria’s light knock. He says no. I turn back to him then, aghast at the thought that just occurred. “It wasn’t Tony? It wasn’t because you wouldn’t tell him where we are?” A cold slick of sweat forms on my back as I wait for his answer. Slowly I become aware of a little dark form in front of me, and the sound of splintering toffee. Maria.
“Maria—here, sugar, go into Uncle Bobby’s bedroom and put the radio on. See if you can find that song you like about the devil in disguise.” Maria eyes me suspiciously over the top of her toffee apple, but does as she’s told. I close the bedroom door behind her.
Bobby sits down heavily on the sofa, and makes it clear that the subject of how he got his ribs broken is closed.
“Right. Give me a cigarette and tell me about this job then,” I say.
Bobby opens his packet of Player’s and offers me one.
“Not any old job. It’s only the biggest job you ever heard of.”
So, Bobby explains.
The biggest train robbery in history. A Glasgow-to-London postal train. A traveling post office, in effect. A train due to arrive in Euston at 4:00 a.m. on Thursday 8th August, but with a dash of luck and quite a bit of planning, most of it now in place, will never get there with its £2.6 million in mail sacks, all neatly in marked packages, very helpfully marked with the amount of cash contained within. Bobby will be one of those on the track, hauling the mail sacks. His whack with mine combined is likely to sort us both out. We’ll split it. He can get the man he owes money to off his back—that’s all he’s prepared to say about it—and bugger off to Spain, where he’s happy to live for the rest of his life. I can leave London, live anywhere I like. Anywhere that Tony can’t find me. Give Maria the life she deserves.
“Give me the life I deserve,” I say. I’m not going to make my daughter the scapegoat. I’m not going to be one of those mothers moaning: after everything I’ve done for you . . .
I’m thinking of that day with Stella, after the jewelry robbery. Those bank notes: prancing in our high heels like show ponies, tossing our hair. Two and a half million pounds. What does two and a half million pounds look like?
“We need you to stock the hideaway, kit out the place,” Bobby says. “We’ll do the main bit. You won’t be on the track, but we need a bird for the shopping, for stocking this farmhouse we’re going to hole up in afterwards, because . . . well, blokes look suspicious, don’t they. Blokes don’t buy food.”
You have to laugh.
He tells me a bit more what the setup is. As much as he thinks I need to know. His job is to find the ringer—the cars with plates—but also to be on the track. They’ll be using Land Rovers and an ex-army lorry. Everyone will be in army uniforms and balaclavas. There’s a meeting in South London, and he wants me to go.
“Bruce says girls are unlucky. Crime’s a man’s business.”
“Who is this Bruce?”
“I need him to meet you, see that you’re as good as any bloke . . .”
“Better.”
He grins at me.
“So you’re in, are you, Queenie?”
As if one of us signaled the discussion over, we both suddenly stand up. Comical, somehow; formal. We stand smiling at each other, trying to pretend just for a while longer that there’s a possibility I might say no. Finally, Bobby laughs, and then winces, and I go to hug him, then remember.
“That day at Hackney Wick,” Bobby says, as I go towards his bedroom to fetch Maria. “The dogs . . .”
No need for me to ask him which day, or why he’s bringing that up again, after nearly twenty years. I pause, my hand on the door handle; nod, say, “I know. You made a decision. Not necessarily the wrong one. You were more scared of Dad than the thought of going to borstal . . .”
“So, are you more scared of Tony? You should be.”
“Bobby. How much will my whack be? That’s all I need to know.”
I open the door to the bedroom and an unusually docile Maria gazes up at me. She’s engrossed in her toffee apple, sitting on the bed, gnawing at it, her face red and sticky, much of the bedspread smeared with it. Bobby won’t like that. On the radio it’s not Elvis but Tony Bennett crooning away. I stand and listen for a moment, and for the first time in months and months, I’m not scared; my heart is rising and rising, like a balloon.
“Oh the good life . . . to be free and explore the unknown . . .”
Even all these years later there is so much that’s written about it, about them, that’s absolute rubbish. The line that always makes me laugh is the one about the “criminal mastermind” behind it all. It’s like no one could actually imagine a bunch of working-class criminals, most of them knowing each other from poor bits of London or their time inside, actually planning it together, carrying off something that cheeky, “the crime of the century” they called it, without a posh bloke to boss them around.
I remember the Sunday Telegraph going on about this shadowy evil genius, a miser living alone in one room in Brighton. An “uncrowned intellectual king of the underworld.” One thing they did get right in my view is that, yes, most big crimes have connections to each other, most cons come from the same families, going back a few years, and we know each other. We meet in school. We go to the same pubs. We go out together, get married, have kids together. You’ve seen that.
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.
He sits on the toilet seat, the equipment—stockings, balaclava, army fatigues—across his knee. “Put them on for me. Cover your face, an all. No one will know. If you keep your mouth shut . . . I don’t know, can’t you strap your tits down?”
And then he’s sobbing, truly sobbing, like I haven’t seen him do since he was a little boy, since long before those borstal years, when he was small and lost, when no coin had yet been flipped, when it was still in his hand, shiny and new, ready to toss towards the future. Now he’s clutching at his ribs and I’m terrified that they’ll rupture, spill him out, that it will all of it have been for nothing. He needs that whack, he sobs.
And more than that. “Look at that,” he says, and he’s practically screaming. “They only went and painted the inside of the lorry!” A shiver runs up and down my back, his voice sounds so frightened. I follow his eyes. A tin of paint, that’s all. A squashed tin of yellow paint. Please, Queenie.
And so. That train, lighting up the night sky as it arrives. A sound rushing in my ears, of blood, of money, of something else. I remember. That’s all I’m saying. Whether I was there or not, believe what you like, all the men say I wasn’t, could never have been. They’ll concede that Bruce stayed with his pal Mary near the Thames, after the job. They’ll admit that one of them had a German wife who picked him up in the morning; that Footpad used a girl he picked up as an attempt at an alibi, to say he was in Ireland at the time. But a bird on the track, or down on the embankment, lifting mailbags? No bleeding way. Even Bobby would tell you that I was never there. Jack knew. I’m somehow sure that Jack could tell it was me. Maybe I’m wrong, because it was dark, and no one was looking at each other. We were simply working, efficiently, quickly, putting our talents to use.
That clanking sound as the train is uncoupled. The tang of hot grass, metal, and cat piss. The taste of nylon stocking in my mouth, the feeling of my eyelashes being stuck. I can’t even blink. And someone or something, like a lover, you know—that long-delayed, always expected something we live for, who never quite arrives—calling to me through the night air.
What I remember now is a fox, streaking across the grass. I don’t know if anyone else saw it, saw her. A vixen, cubs in front. I was on the track, and she was whisking along the embankment—grey, ghostly in the moonlight, her low tail stroking the ground, ears back, nosing the cubs in front of her. She disappeared and appeared again as I glanced up, like a scarf weaving through a magician’s fingers. I blinked, tried to concentrate. The mailbags were heavy. There were 120 of them. My task was to stand there, say nothing, and heave the bag passed to me along to the man standing at my right, who would heave it to the waiting lorry. Give nothing away about how heavy I found them, not make any kind of feminine grunt or sound.
The vixen had been keeping her body low, swift but unhurried. Pretending to be casual instead of what she really was: intent. Every inch of her twitching with it, and in that strange indistinct light she seemed ablaze. I can’t now remember the drive back to the farm, or how I lifted and threw those heavy bags, stood my ground. I just remember that vixen, the only thing glowing in that soft grey night. She was beautiful, I remember thinking.
For most of us, myself included, the habit goes as deep as Brighton in a stick of rock of boasting. Exaggerating. Lying, if you like. Or best of all saying nothing at all. Perhaps I’m making it up, you know, putting myself at the center, everywhere that mattered? That’s me. Right at the heart of the criminal world since landing there in 1933.
The papers said at first that a million was stolen. When I read that a shoot of anger went through me because it was such a lie. They knew it was more than that. They were playing with us. Just like that day years ago in Bethnal Green when I lost Nan. The bastards think they know what it’s good for the British public to hear. Two and a half million was worth a hell of a lot back then.
Three days later me and Bobby are back in London. We’ve missed one of our drops—a bag in a telephone box near the farm that got abruptly left because Old Bill is now crawling all over Leatherslade. But the whack is so good that we’re not complaining. We follow it all on the radio and on the television all through the night until the early hours, when we get back to Stella’s, hugging ourselves, drinking hot sweet tea, keeping the curtains drawn at her flat and trying hard not to whoop and holler too much, in case the neighbors hear. Sweating, flushing—hot, cold—whenever we hear things. The police believe the robbers are holed up within a thirty-mile radius of Sears Crossing.
The train driver, Jack Mills, is still in hospital. He suffered lacerated injuries to the back of his skull . . .
Bobby’s suitcase is here at Stella’s; he’s already packed. He’s not the fit man he used to be, and winces as he leans over. I gently take the suitcase from him and lift it myself. Maria and I go with him in the taxi to Heathrow to wave him off; our own plan is to leave later today. Stella is going to drive Maria and me to the Fens, later tonight, to the same village I was evacuated to as a child, where I’ve already found a place to rent. “Maybe someone will recognize you?” Stella says. What, that little East End slum girl? I don’t think so. In any case, there’s nothing at all to link me to the robbery.
My plan is to rent the cottage—in a village outside of Ely—at first, get Maria into a nice quiet country school, lay low for, say, two years, and then when I’m settled, buy a house in the city of Ely, a cottage at the bottom of Fore Hill, maybe the cottage by the river I saw that day when Bobby and I first arrived, as children, and had the strange feeling about. I remember the sense that there was someone inside it, someone I knew. Funny that.
“Come visit, won’t you?” Bobby says.
“Look after yourself,” I tell him. This handful of words will have to do. We hug silently, hoping our bodies can say our goodbyes. We break away. “Stay out of trouble,” he replies. We can’t say more in front of the taxi driver. We still don’t know if we’ve got away with it.
Paying the driver when I return from the airport is the first time I use the money. They’re all used notes, hard to trace, mostly in the form of one- and ten-pound notes, brown and green with the lovely severe face of our Queen on them. I hand the notes over, waiting while he gives me my change. My hand is sweating—the notes shimmer in front of me, threatening to dissolve. Then I recover, give the cabbie a big grin. Lean in at the window with some of my old brass neck, waving another pound note at him. Keep the change.
A week later, a postcard arrives at Stella’s. San Pedro, Costa del Sol. Whitewashed houses bristling with red geraniums and a wide strip of blue sea, like a runway. She drives to Ely to bring it to me. We wander round the marketplace, and then down by the river, arm in arm, and she slips the postcard into my pocket. No message, sensibly, but I recognize Bobby’s handwriting on the address—big, capitals, curly loops. I smile, and when I get home—get to my slightly wonky, sloping ivy-covered cottage in a village nearby—I prop it up near the fridge.
A month after that he sends Stella a photograph. She brings that the following Sunday. I stare at it for a long time, committing it to memory, before tearing it up. It’s Bobby lying by a swimming pool, wearing sunglasses. Bobby who always hated water, flattening himself out alongside the blue square, dipping one hand in. A big fat cigar poking out of his mouth. The pool is surrounded by shrubs, and orange trees.
A memory floats back then. Something about Bobby as a child on the Salmons’ farm, when he came back on his own here without me. How he loved the horse, the outdoors, the good dirt, as he always called it, and how it was before Bobby’s superstitions—his insistence on lining up coasters and mats and towels—kicked in. I remember that Christmas, too, when he first saw an orange and didn’t know what to do with it, threw it down the stairs in frustration to try and open it. Now he’s lying beside his pool surrounded by orange trees, more oranges than anyone could eat in one lifetime.
By 1964, most of the train robbers had been brought in. I followed the stories, reading the paper, watching the television, always waiting, expecting. But I knew I needn’t be worried. No one was looking for a woman. And because Bobby had sat out the whole thing, hiding in another of the outbuildings, his prints weren’t on the mailbags or any part of the train, and no one was looking for him, either. Stupid Roger Cordey was the first to be arrested, by answering an ad for a garage to rent that had been placed by a policeman’s widow. When he paid up, three months cash in advance, from a thick wad, she raised the alarm. Leatherslade had quickly been identified as the hideout. Fingerprints were found on the ketchup and the Monopoly box and on a drum of Saxa salt. (I remember seeing Buster shaking it everywhere like he couldn’t get any out, even when it was pouring.) Ronnie Bigg’s dabs on the Monopoly cards. The public loved that. “Can you believe that, they played Monopoly, with real money?” I heard this woman say, in the butcher’s on Market Street in Ely. I longed to tap her on the shoulder, say casually, “It was Ronnie Bigg’s birthday. They didn’t just play with it, they rolled it up and smoked it, like cigars.”
Jack Mills, the train driver, gave his testimony in court, and was described in the papers as “nerve-shattered” and “a broken man.” I don’t know how the others felt about this—I can never ask them—but I always had a horrible dive in my stomach whenever his name came up. Bobby’s argument was that it wasn’t just the bastards who hit him but the British Railway Board who shafted him, since he was off sick for a long time afterwards, and stopped work for good only later, and never got any kind of compensation from his bosses. The Railway Board defended themselves, saying that the driver’s sick leave in the year following the attack wasn’t as a result of the train robbery, but because he had leukemia. They claimed one of his medical boards had proved this, but the doctors had chosen not to tell the driver, and they didn’t want to be the ones to break the bad news. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that.
Jack, my Jack, was one of those never brought in. No one grassed any of us up, and most of the money was never recovered. We didn’t see each other again after that night, though. I knew we wouldn’t. Jack was proof—to myself—that I could get over Tony, and a distraction, but he was never going to be a contender. There were dramas and escapes—Biggs of course, most famously, and Charlie, too, later. There were newspaper deals and books and films and eventually firsthand accounts by people like Bruce, claiming to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but . . .
Stella and I put our heads together and laughed every time another story came along. There’s so much that’s disputed that it’s barely worth trying to get a version together. Some claim it was Charlie who gently wiped the driver’s face with a blood-soaked rag. Neither Bruce nor Buster will tell who it was who helped the driver, sat with him, held his hand, offered him a cigarette, while they waited for the train to be shunted forward to Bridego Bridge. Who exactly was there and who did what is never agreed. “What happened to the huge stash of money? And maybe there were others on the track that fateful night . . .”
There was one detail that interested us. Poor Footpad. He was caught by some traces of paint on his suede shoes, the same paint found in the cabin of the lorry, and matched to the paint in the outhouse at Leatherslade Farm. Yellow paint. So maybe Bobby was right to be frightened of yellow, after all.
Luck again. Can I believe my luck? I don’t know. Isn’t even luck something you make yourself? Stella doesn’t agree, and later, I mean, the following week, the next time she visits us, we argue about it. “Even in the most hopeless situations, there’s usually something you can do yourself,” I say. “You can make things better or worse.”
So Stella says, “Well, all right, what, say, what if you was drowning? No lifeguard around, no rope to hold onto . . . nothing. And the current’s dead strong and you ain’t got no strength left and can’t fight it? That’s just plain unlucky . . .”
“Unlucky might be how you got there, OK, how you start out. But once you’re in the water, you can still do things. Thrash around. Carry on struggling. Or close your eyes, give up. Or . . . think about it; use words, try and make sense of it, even while it’s happening; tell yourself a story about it . . .”
“A story,” she says. “Trust you to come up with that!”
She snorts then, lights another cigarette, crosses her long legs, and leans back against a postbox on Lisle Lane. She’s seen a bloke she recognizes, her visits here being so regular, and is giving him a hard, appraising smile. A country postie in his shorts, on a bicycle. He pauses, adjusts the satchel over his shoulder, before smiling back.
I do miss Tony sometimes. It happens most often when I go to pick up Maria from her school—in a thatched pink building, can you believe!—and she skips to the car in her gingham skirt and red cardigan, and I think of all the things Tony’ll never see: Maria in the nativity play as a sheep with woolly ears tied on her head; Maria winning at hockey with a ferociously determined center forward position; Maria standing proudly in front of the whole school to receive her badge as house captain. This morning on waking she says to me, “Mum, did you know that there’s a kind of squid with 256,000 teeth?” I didn’t even know a squid had teeth. She’s clever, so clever that sometimes I catch myself having that exact same thought that Nan voiced about me: “Where did you come from?” Or maybe: how did I ever deserve such a lovely bright spark as you?
But then I discover that whatever decision I took, however guilty I feel about leaving him, Tony wouldn’t be seeing any of these things anyway. Tears are wasted on him. Stella told me recently that he’s inside, Durham again, doing a good long stretch. Armed robbery, and this time his trigger finger found its target, as I knew someday it would. Maria is growing up in the cookies-and-milk kind of life I can provide her with, and I’ll leave it up to her whether she wants to see him, when she’s older. She knows where to find him.
I miss Nan, too, sometimes, remembering all she gave me, what a loving person she was. She deserved a gentler death. I think of all those people who died that night in Bethnal Green and I wonder—not for the first time—why I didn’t. Why somebody, or something, saved me. Was that luck then? Or something else? Somebody helped me, the woman who pulled me by my hair, but more than that, I remember the strong feeling of a person sitting beside me in those worst moments, feeling for my hand. Maybe Nan, maybe someone else. Wasn’t there a little girl wearing a beret with a sparkly rabbit clip?
Am I ashamed of how I got here, that it wasn’t honest, that it wasn’t legal or what—regular, or orthodox, conventional, is that the word? I told you at the start I wasn’t and you won’t catch me repenting. People love to believe they’re so much better than they are. People who have never been tested, they’re so quick to judge. What do they really know about themselves? All I’m saying is this: unless you’ve been there, found yourself with nothing, nothing but your own talent, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t do it the same way, too.
One day, driving Maria to school, in a mad rush as usual, turning right on the Stuntney Road, I glance up and see Ely Cathedral on the horizon, sitting there as always, above everything else, dominating. The Ship of the Fens. And I remember Nan and the tea-leaf sludge she moved around with her finger in the empty cup, not so much reading the future as indulging a family trait she passed down to me: relentless hopefulness. Optimism. I see her soft skin, her blue eyes, the same blue eyes Dad has, and now Maria. I see a ship, Nan would say. One day your ship will come in.