I could see the road from my cell. Day after day I would gaze out, lost in thought about the horrors of yesterday and the hopeful tomorrows waiting for me on my release. I would watch the cars on that road and think of the people in them, trundling along in comfort, peace and freedom. One day, I thought, I’ll be on that road. One day, I’ll be free; free to prove to my captors, my prosecutors, my friends even, what a terrible wrong I had suffered in the name of justice. One day…
At Maidstone there is a reception area where inmates arrive and depart. One morning I had to go there for something connected with my job in the kitchen and I found myself staring at four cubicles, each with a prisoner’s name on the outside. I peeked into one of them: there was a long mirror, and a jacket and trousers hanging on a hook. There was also a clean white shirt, some socks and on the floor were some shoes. The cubicles were for inmates leaving for good or for a pre-release weekend. I looked at the clothes, then at the names on the doors. One day it will be my clothes hanging there, I thought. One day it would be my name on the door. One day…
Two or three months later, in July 1974, a prison officer told me to go to reception again. It had nothing to do with the kitchen, so I guessed it was about my pre-release weekend. A wave of excitement surged through me; I felt like a schoolboy being given an unexpected day’s holiday. Sorting out the clothes I needed for my weekend was a tingling experience: nylon socks, not coarse woollen ones, white cotton pants, not drab prison issue, a blue blazer, and neatly pressed light-brown trousers. I didn’t need to try them on, but I did, even the socks. Then I looked in the mirror at myself. It was an indescribable feeling, the first time in more than six years that I’d worn normal clothes.
They told me I was being released on Friday 23 August for three days and I went back to my cell, walking on air. Over the next few weeks I could think of nothing else but putting on those clothes and walking out of the door, breathing the sweet, fragrant scent of freedom. And then it was the Thursday before the Friday and I Was so excited that I felt I’d never drop off to sleep. But I did and slept wonderfully peacefully. I was woken twenty minutes before other prisoners so that I could get washed and shaved. I could not do it all quickly enough: I was quivering all over with excitement like a child on Christmas Day.
There are many people in prison who are not worth two bob, but there are others who are genuinely sincere and really care about people other than themselves. I’d struck up friendships with several people and later that morning as I sat around waiting to be called to reception they came over to me. ‘Have a lovely weekend, Charlie…Enjoy yourself, mate…Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, my old son…Don’t forget to come back, Charlie…’ They were all pleased for me and I didn’t hide my excitement, then someone was calling my name and I was on my way to reception, half-running to taste the freedom I’d dreamt about for over six years.
A prison officer told me there were some people waiting outside, reporters and photographers mainly, but I couldn’t care less. My day had come and I would talk to anybody about anything. Not for long, however, because Mum was meeting me to drive me to London and I was going to make the most of my three days, squeezing the maximum enjoyment and pleasure from my short-lived liberty.
The Press were great, as they always had been to me, then I was in the car and Mum, bless her, was putting fifty pounds in my hand and we were driving away from the grim establishment that had been my home for the last eighteen months.
I glanced back and caught a brief glimpse of my cell. Yes, I would be back there on Monday, I knew that. But for the next seventy-two hours I was going to push my hatred for that lonely cage out of my mind. My ‘one day’ had come and I was going to think of nothing but catching up with the world that had left me behind so cruelly on 8 May 1968.
That evening, Mum and the old man suggested going to the Blue Coat Boy pub in Bishopsgate; just a quiet drink, they said – there were a couple of old friends who were dying to see me again. We walked into the downstairs bar and chatted to a few people. I was a little baffled; I certainly knew the people there but only to say hello to – they were hardly old friends. But I was enjoying myself anyway, so I didn’t say anything.
Then Mum said casually that we ought to go upstairs where there was a bigger, more comfortable lounge.
And I nearly fell over.
There were not a few friends who wanted a quiet drink with me, there were over two hundred! Everyone I’d known down the years, it seemed, was standing there waiting for me, wanting to shake my hand and say how good it was to see me again. There was a beautiful buffet laid out, the drink was flowing, and ail the time I was being taken from one person to another, exchanging a piece of news here and enjoying a bit of nostalgia there. Suddenly, around closing time, I started feeling dizzy: I’d spent more than six years with just a handful of people –sometimes only one or two – and the hustle and bustle and heady party atmosphere was getting to me.
As if by magic, the chap who owned the pub came over and asked me to go downstairs with him; he had something important to tell me. The pub had now closed, and in the welcome tranquillity of the downstairs bar he sat me down and grinned. ‘I haven’t got anything specially important to tell you, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Your mum saw it was all getting a bit much for you so she asked me to get you away for a few minutes. She could see it was doing your brain in.’
I laughed. It was typical of Mum; she didn’t miss much.
After I’d got my breath back we rejoined the fray, and the drinking, eating, laughing and joking went on until 4 A.M. I was so high on excitement and joy I was neither tired nor drunk, and when some of us went back to Braithwaite House I happily sat there, drinking one gin after another, with no thought of going to bed. We talked about prison but it seemed a long way off. It was as if those six years had never happened.
I spent the whole weekend in the East End, strolling around to see how much of the old place was still standing, and chatting to other people I’d known before I went away. They were a highly charged, emotional few days for me and of course they couldn’t last. Before I knew it, it was Sunday night and I was making plans to return to the prison at 10 A.M. Mum wanted to come back with me, but I did not want her to have the upset of seeing me walk back through that door again. So, around 8 A.M. the next day, it was my old mate Tommy Cowley who drove me through South London and on to the A20 to Kent.
The Press were there in force, not so much to record my arrival, I think, but to be on the spot if I failed to turn up; that would have been a far better story. Tommy and I sat chatting until a couple of minutes to ten, then I walked to the gate and pressed the bell. The cameras clicked and I forced a smile I didn’t feel. ‘Fooled you, didn’t I?’ I cracked. ‘Bet you thought I wouldn’t be back.’
The newshounds liked that.
It was weird being back inside. It was as if I’d never been away and those three marvellous days as a free man had never happened. But they had, of course, and my friends wanted to know all the details – what I’d done, who I’d seen, whether things had changed, and whether I’d enjoyed myself. They would not taste that freedom for many years, so I drained my seventy-two hours of every little detail and they hung on every word. What I told them could have been put over in five minutes; I made it last a week.
Of course, one of the things they wanted to know was whether I’d slept with a woman. Like any normal man I’d missed sex desperately and had thought of going to bed with someone – probably a professional lady – on my first day out. But when it came to it, so much had been arranged for me, so many people were wanting to see me, that I simply did not have time. And anyway, deep down, the only person 1 wanted to go to bed with was Diana and I didn’t even know where she was.
My mates in prison thought it hilarious that I’d been too busy for sex.
Everything, they say, comes to those who wait. And the one thing I’d been waiting for – my full release – finally arrived on 8 January 1975. My name was on one of those reception cubicles again and I changed out of my prison gear for the last time. All the excitement I’d felt five months before was still there, but this time it had a hard edge to it, tinged with a fierce determination that once I was out of prison I would begin a campaign to prove I should never have been jailed in the first place.
Several days earlier I’d been told that, despite our divorce, Dolly had rung the prison governor asking for details of my release. No doubt she wanted to make a big show of meeting me to squeeze some more money out of a newspaper. Fortunately, the governor had told her she had no rights, and the only people who met me that nippy winter’s morning, apart from the Press, were Mum and two dear friends, George and Sue Dwyer. Driving down that road I looked back at the retreating prison wall, then up to where my cell was. For a few brief seconds memories of my prison existence swam around in my mind: the boredom and frustration, the anger and bitterness of maximum security, and the joy of coming off the A-List; the callous prison officers who loved making life difficult, and the sympathetic ones who bent the rules; the stupid inmates who drove me mad by talking rubbish and the mild-mannered ones who became my friends. These memories sped through my mind like a fast-forward video and then suddenly seemed to switch off. As on my pre-release weekend, it was as if those years, all that never-ending forever, had never happened.
As we left the town and headed towards the A20 and London, I sank back in my seat and closed my eyes, trying to take in that from that very moment I could do precisely what I wanted when I wanted with no questions asked, no permission to be sought. I was a free man, and it was a blissful, blissful feeling which sent a shiver of exquisite pleasure through me.
I cannot remember a more enjoyable hour’s drive.
One of the first things I did was persuade Mum to give up her office cleaning job. On my pre-release weekend I’d been shocked to learn that she was getting up at four in the morning for this, then waiting on tables at the Blue Coat Boy at lunchtimes. She said she needed the money to be able to afford to go on prison visits, but it made me ill to think about it. All the people who had had money from us over the years! You would have thought somebody would have helped her out with a few quid. I didn’t mind her doing the pub work, because she was an outgoing type who enjoyed company but I hated the idea of her getting up in the middle of the night to clean bloody offices. So when I was home for good I told her that that was the end of it. Mum, bless her heart, said she couldn’t give it up – the cleaning company boss was a lovely man and she did not want to let him down; but I persisted and eventually she rang him and said she was quitting. He was very understanding and thanked her for all she had done.
Mum had started with nothing, suddenly had everything, and now she was back to nothing again. Yet she never complained, never moaned. I was so pleased for her and the old man that they still had that flat in Bunhill Row. When we bought the house in Bildeston, people suggested we should sell the flat, but I said: supposing something happens and we’re not around, what would they do? Well, something did happen, and the house had to be sold. But Mum just went back to living in the flat and took on two jobs to make ends meet. Living the high life in the West End or on the breadline in the East End, she was still the same lady.
Money was a nightmare. I’d gone into prison with a lifetime’s experience of threepenny bits, tanners, half-crowns and ten-bob notes, and I came out to the complexities of decimalization. The old half-crown had bitten the dust and the much-loved half-a-quid note was now a fifty pence piece.
For a while it was like a foreign currency and, on my second night home, it hit me just how much I had to re-learn. I was staying with George and Sue at their home in Orpington and while I was in the local pub I decided to ring Gary. Without thinking too much about it I went to the phone, but I couldn’t work out how to use it. Coping with the new money was bad enough, but the phone system had changed too. I went back to George and Sue, feeling pathetic. ‘I can’t do it,’ I said, like a child. They fell about.
Once I had picked it up, I seemed to be on the phone all the time, trying to pick up the threads of my life as fast as I could. I was always flying about, always in a hurry. I couldn’t bear the thought of standing still; I’d idled away nearly seven years of my life, and I was determined to make up for lost time.
For two weeks I didn’t think of driving, even though my licence was up to date. But then, after a night at Mum’s, I asked George if I could drive us back to Orpington. Like swimming, or riding a bike, driving is something you never forget, and I drove the twenty miles as safely as if I had never been away from the wheel. After that, I was eager to drive everywhere. But I was still in a hurry: if I needed to stop for a paper or cigarettes, I’d see a shop then think, ‘I’ll wait for the next one.’ Then I’d do the same at the next shop. It was as if I felt I’d be missing something, losing my place in the queue of life, if I allowed myself to pause. The changes took a bit of getting used to: I lost count of the number of times I took a sharp turn into what I thought was a traffic-beating back-double, only to find myself facing a block of flats or a one-way street that had not been there before. Then when I did calm down and took Shanks’s pony I’d find the traffic had increased so much that crossing the road was a major, life-risking event.
There were people who were wary of me because of my name, but on the whole I found nearly everyone very friendly. I never took anything for granted, however, and was always on my guard. One night in the Chinbrook pub in Grove Park, South London, I was aware of a man at the next table staring. Then he said something to his wife, who looked over; it was obvious they were discussing me.
I felt a bit awkward – rather like an animal in a zoo – but ignored them and carried on chatting to George and Sue. The man continued to stare and I began to feel uneasy: the Kray trial had affected a lot of people and even though seven years had passed one couldn’t be sure of people’s reaction to meeting one of the convicted men.
Finally, George, Sue and I got up to leave. The man got up too, and walked towards me. He was about sixty, but huge – about six foot six. I tensed inwardly. This is it, I thought. He’s going to take a pop at me, or slag me off. He certainly didn’t look the type who wanted my autograph.
The gentleman looked me in the eye, but instead of giving me a load of abuse or even a right-hander he merely extended his hand and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how are you?’
I replied, ‘I’m very well, thank you.’
‘Oh, that’s good,’ he said. ‘I’m so pleased. I’d like to wish you all the very best for the future.’ And then he shook my hand warmly.
He was a middle-class, confident sort of man who, I believe, said what he meant and meant what he said. I left the pub with Sue and George, feeling buoyant. The encounter boosted my confidence no end.
I decided I had to talk to Dolly. Even though I knew Nancy was not my child I still wanted to see her; the upset of that last prison visit when Dolly had half-dragged her out still bothered me and I was missing her more than ever. I went to the flat in Poplar, which I had handed over to Dolly along with everything else, and discussed visiting arrangements. Dolly agreed it was best if I popped up whenever I liked and for the next few weeks I did that. For a while it was quite friendly; Dolly often cooked a meal and I looked forward to the visits, which I found rewarding and enjoyable.
Suddenly everything changed, however. For some reason Dolly decided she didn’t want me to see Nancy any more and I got a summons ordering me to go to court to fight over custody. I was shocked then angry, thinking this is all I need – court! I could not understand what it was all about. I didn’t want Nancy to leave her mother and live with me; I just wanted to see her once a week or so. Surely that could be arranged without the hassle and expense of going to court?
I started wondering what possible legal argument could be put forward to stop me seeing Nancy whenever I wanted. Surely Dolly wasn’t going to come clean and tell the truth about Ince? When Dolly’s solicitor eventually told me, I burst out laughing. ‘One of the points we shall be making,’ he said pompously, ‘is association.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘And what do you mean by that exactly?’
‘That it is not in the child’s interests to be associated with you, a convicted criminal.’
I laughed in the solicitor’s face. Well, what a joke! Dolly knew full well that I had served a sentence for something I didn’t do, and here she was, living with a man who had done time for something he admitted, yet it was me who was not a good influence on Nancy.
The court case went ahead. I won the right to see Nancy once a week and did so for a while. But it became clear that Nancy was not bothered about seeing me and gradually I stopped going round to the flat altogether.
Once I’d got back into the swing of normal life again, I turned my mind to tracking down Diana. The first weekend I could; I drove to Leicester. But seven years is a long time and I couldn’t find anyone I knew who could give me some leads to try to trace Diana. George, my old Maidstone mate, had discovered that she and her husband had once owned a pub, so we did the pub circuit again, but with no luck. Leicester is a fairly big city and Diana could have been anywhere. On the other hand, she may well have left the area entirely. I returned to London none the wiser.
George and I agreed to try again the following weekend, but during the week I got involved in some work that made it difficult for me to get away. George rang me and I explained that our private detective business would have to wait a week. An hour after I put the phone down, George rang back. ‘1 bet you’ll come up now,’ he laughed.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘I’ve found her,’ George said.
Suddenly I found myself short of breath.
George had discovered Diana’s pub was called The Carousel and had rung there. He had learned she was still married, and was ready to put the phone down if her husband answered, but luckily it was Diana who picked it up. When George told her he had a message from a ‘mutual friend’ Diana, who later said she knew that the ‘mutual friend’ was me, was pleased, but also wary; she had been questioned by the police after my arrest and didn’t know if what she’d read about the murders was true. Anyway, she told George, she didn’t like talking to strangers on the phone. George immediately went to the pub, discreetly introduced himself to Diana and told her that I’d been thinking about her for nearly seven years. Diana was not totally convinced but agreed to go to a Leicester hotel a couple of days later to meet me again. The agreed time was 8 P.M.
As a boxer, I never suffered from butterflies. I knew I was good arid could handle myself, and always walked from the dressing room to the ring with no tummy rumblings at all. But waiting for Diana in the hotel room that evening I went slowly but steadily to pieces. By 8 P.M. I was almost a nervous wreck. Seven years was a long time, I kept telling myself. Things change; people change. Before the arrest, I’d been a happy-go-lucky man about town – a wealthy businessman with a neat line in chat to match my expensive clothes, not bad-looking for my forty-four years, and supremely confident in myself because of my business success. In short, a winner. But I knew that prison had changed me. Seven years for something you did was hard enough to take; seven years for something you didn’t do was a knockout blow that was bound to take a heavier toll. I looked at myself yet again in the mirror. Yes, I had lost weight, and I was seven years older. But would Diana detect something lacking in me? Would she feel that the happy-go-lucky spirit that had attracted her all those years ago had died? That my eyes had lost their sparkle? That the effervescence and cavalier approach to life had been replaced by a quieter, almost inhibited, shyness? That seven years locked away from society had robbed me of my personality, leaving me a shadow of my former self? Would she see not the winner she had once admired, but a loser to be avoided?
In the end, I bottled it. After all the build-up, I couldn’t face the confrontation and the accompanying possibility of rejection. Not in the hotel foyer, anyway. If the reunion was not to be how I had imagined and dreamt throughout all those imprisoned years, I wanted it to take place in the privacy of the room, where we could at least be polite and brief and make small talk, then go our separate ways without too much hurt and certainly without any fuss.
So, at 8 P.M., I asked George to go down and bring Diana to the room. As I started on yet another packet of cigarettes new worries started banging away in my brain. What if she was scared to go to a hotel room with a man she had met just once? What if she wasn’t just scared, but mightily offended? What if she just walked out? What if…? I was piling one obstacle on top of the other when the door opened and there she was standing before me, blonde and beautiful, just as I remembered her. As we stood there looking at each other, smiling shyly, I knew it was going to be all right, and I walked over to her and gave her a kiss.
‘Well, I think I’ll be going,’ said George, bless him. And he went out, closing the door quietly behind him.
Diana and I talked and talked. She was eager to tell me how much she had wanted to get in touch; how many letters and cards she had written, only to tear them up because she didn’t want to cause me problems. In the end, she said, she reluctantly decided that she would leave it to me. She was so pleased that I’d tracked her down and had felt confident that I would do so. For my part, I was eager to tell her that I felt the same about her as I had done before I went away, but I stressed that if everything was all right in her life I didn’t want to spoil things and cause her problems. She immediately reassured me that I’d come back at the right time. She had left home once while I was away, but had returned; now she was so unhappy with her husband that she was on the point of leaving again. When she had read that I’d been out for a pre-release weekend she’d considered ringing, but had feared that I’d be too busy.
The talking went on and on, and then, quite naturally it seemed, we went to bed. I would like to be able to describe the sheer joy of holding, caressing and making love with a woman you adore after nearly seven years without any female contact whatsoever, but it is beyond me; I would think it is beyond most people.
There is only one word to describe my feelings that night – they were wondrous.
Life as a free man was wonderful. But there was always something nagging at me that would not allow me to enjoy it to the full. It was that unfinished business of injustice.
I started to pop up to Leicester regularly, and eventually Diana decided to leave home. It was a difficult decision for her because her daughter, Claudine, was only twelve, but she felt it was best for everyone involved, so she moved in with a girlfriend in Beulah Hill, at Crystal Palace in South London.
Diana was so good with people, particularly the elderly, that I couldn’t wait to introduce her to Mum and the old man. I felt sure they would adore her as much as I did, and I wasn’t disappointed. The old man did not make friends easily, but he took to her at once; Diana really cares about people and the old man quickly realized this. They got on really well. Mum thought she was great and said it was a pity I hadn’t met her years before. Mum never spoke badly of Dolly, but she went off her after the shabby way she behaved over the Ince affair. More than once Mum said my life could have been so much happier if I had met Diana first.
A friend of mine, Wilf Pine, former manager of the hugely successful rock band Black Sabbath, kindly loaned me a house, and Diana and I moved in together. Immediately after the breakup Claudine and her brother Ian stayed with their father in Leicester, but it wasn’t long before Diana and her husband agreed that it was best for the children if they moved to London. Some loyal pals made sure I had a few quid to help put me back on my feet and I was able to buy a flat in Worcester Park in Surrey. The kids came down and soon we were all living happily under one roof.
Sleeping had never been a problem for me. I’d always had the knack of being able to cut myself off from the hassles and aggravation of everyday living, and I managed this in prison, despite all the problems. But when I started living with Diana I would wake up in the middle of the night, shouting at the top of my voice. A dream would set me off and I’d wake up in a sweat but I could never remember what the dream was. It did happen once in prison – at Maidstone – and I woke myself up shouting. When it happened at home I would get up and have a coffee then go back to bed but then I’d have to get up again, and it would be backwards and forwards like that all night. Diana was worried, and a little frightened to begin with, but as soon as she senses the build-up now she shakes me and I slip back into a peaceful sleep.
I found I could go on television to talk about the past and my time inside, but in one-to-one situations – particularly with women –I’d find myself stumbling over my words with embarrassment. So you can imagine how awkward I felt when people actually wanted my autograph.
I’d got a job working on a big cutlery and silverware stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia and attracted a lot of publicity. Around 80,000 people passed through the Exhibition each day and after a while I started feeling as though many of them were looking at me and pointing me out to their friends. One day a couple of girls asked me for my autograph.
Not knowing what to do, I said, ‘You must have got me mixed up with someone else. I’m nobody famous.’
One of the girls laughed. ‘We’ve seen your picture. And read about you. You’re the Kray twins’ brother, aren’t you?’
Of course I signed my name for them, but I did feel funny doing it. And then it happened again, and again. A London Evening Standard reporter must have noticed, because he came up for a chat. He mentioned I was working, as though it must be a new experience for me. I told him I’d always worked, despite the notoriety.
‘But ten hours a day?’ He was shocked.
‘I like it,’ I said.
The next day I picked up a copy of the Standard. The reporter had written an article saying Charles Kray was working at Olympia and signing more autographs than he was selling cutlery. I thought it hilarious.
Communication with Dolly became cold and casual. We only spoke to each other about our son Gary but I knocked even that on the head when she did something I’ll never forgive her for. Dolly would be the first to admit that she is a hard, unemotional individual, but what she did to my family, particularly Gary, was quite spectacular in its selfishness and brutality.
When George Ince had been released from prison, Dolly had decided it was not convenient for Gary to live with her. She did not discuss it with him but waited until he went out one day, then packed all his belongings in a suitcase and left it on the doorstep for Gary to find when he came home that night. He went to live with Mum and the old man in Bunhill Row. But I always made sure he kept in touch with Dolly.
I had always got on well with Dolly’s mother and was very upset one day to hear she was ill. She was staying at the home of Dolly’s elder sister, so Gary and I went round there with some flowers. She was a lovely woman of about seventy and thought the world of her grandson. We had a nice chat and before we left she whispered, ‘Just because I’m getting old, they think I’m senile. But don’t worry, I know exactly what’s going on.’
I smiled and took her hand. ‘Well, you know what we think of you,’ I said. ‘I’ll be running around, but I’ll be back to see you in a couple of weeks.’
Early one morning, about ten days later, I was going on a visit to Parkhurst and left a note for Gary reminding him not to forget to ring his mother.
When I came back from Parkhurst around 7 P.M., an awful atmosphere hit me as soon as I walked in the door at Bunhill Row. Mum and the old man were in tears. I wondered what the hell had happened, then Mum said, Charlie, I’ve never said anything about Dolly, but I think this is terrible. After you left this morning, Gary phoned her.’
I nodded. ‘I told him to.’
‘He asked how she was, and said can I come and see you today? She didn’t want him to. Then…’ Mum was finding it hard to speak through her tears. I put my arm round her. ‘…then Gary asked how Nana was.’ Mum couldn’t speak for a few seconds, then she said, ‘Dolly just told him, “Dead and buried,” and put the phone down.’
I went numb. Then cold fury swept through me. How could Dolly not tell us her mum had died? How could she not give us the chance to pay our respects at the funeral? It was almost unbelievable.
‘That’s it,’ I snapped. ‘That’s the end.’
Seething, I got on the phone and rang one of Dolly’s brothers, Raymond. ‘Dolly’s taken a right liberty,’ I said, and told him what had happened.
‘Charlie,’ he said sympathetically. ‘We never thought our sister was that bad. We thought she’d let you know.’
‘Somebody should have rung, Ray,’ I told him.
‘We thought you were away.’
That didn’t cut any ice. ‘I respected your mum, Ray. If I’d been in China, I would have come home. It’s bad enough me not being there, but Gary…’ I was so angry I couldn’t speak, then finally I said, ‘Anyway, that’s the end for me. It’s the most terrible thing to do to anyone.’
After that I told Gary I didn’t want to have anything to do with the family.
Dolly felt guilty about Gary. For the next few months, she would ring him a couple of times a week, but it was purely because she felt she had to, not because she wanted to. She is incapable of feeling much for anyone other than herself. I would have expected Dolly to take Gary home to her flat, but she never did. I would have thought she could have taken him to see Nancy; after all they grew up as brother and sister. But she never did. Perhaps I should not have been too surprised. Dolly was jealous of Mum’s popularity and stopped Nancy from visiting because she knew the child loved her. Every one of Dolly’s relations said it was a bitchy, hurtful thing to do but Dolly didn’t care. She was the only person who didn’t like my mother. And the reason? She knew she couldn’t compare with her in any respect as long as she lived.
At one time both Gary and I missed Nancy terribly, so when a young bloke I knew said he often saw her, I asked him to set up a meeting with her for us. I told him to let us know if he wouldn’t be seeing her so we wouldn’t be waiting unnecessarily. Well, we waited. Nancy didn’t turn up, and neither did the bloke who was due to see her. That was the end for me and I decided not to bother any more. It was painful because I’d thought the world of her. Even though she was another man’s child.