I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau
My paternal grandfather, Walter, wounded out of Flanders, had become disabled from his work at a veneering factory after a swinging tree trunk delivered itself into his shrapnel-softened leg. Jobless and desperate, he and Eliza created and ran a business from the kitchen of the rooms they rented above a mews garage in Islington. There, the two boys, Frank and Percy, along with Eliza’s father, Granddad Crisp—a hansom cab driver and a man whose photos prove that braces always need a belt for extra security—would bag up nuts and sweets and help Eliza make toffee apples to sell to the queues outside the nearby Collins’ Music Hall. It kept the Kemps fed and housed, but unfortunately, when the SecondWorldWar came, Eliza’s little helpers were soon considered to be in danger from the new threat of German bombing raids. Equipped with gas masks, the two boys made their way through crowds of weeping mothers to Highbury and Islington station and a two-year stay away from home.
One evening, during the London Blitz, a Luftwaffe pilot caught in ‘ack-ack’ fire evacuated his payload of bombs. Below him was Walter, tall and lean, quickly making his way home through the empty streets, the sky above alight with tracer. Within seconds the eight bombs had landed around him, sucking him into the huge hole they’d created in the road. Luckily the bombs didn’t detonate and, dazed, he crawled out and back to Eliza. But Walter’s nerves were forever blown apart. Afterwards, he became wrecked and sleepless, and my father would often see the red glow of his cigarette as he lay smoking in bed through many a long night.
Unfortunately my father and mother were experiencing another hell. Both tell similar evacuation stories of beatings, accusations of stealing, and destroyed or censored letters home. Sadly for my mother it would end at the age of nine, in a breakdown of bed-wetting, fear of noise and inconsolable night-crying. While they were both away, two bombs fell silently through the London night sky and destroyed each of their family homes and any evidence of their younger lives.
Walter and Eliza were temporarily relocated to the relatively peaceful suburb of Finchley, and Frank was granted his wish to return from rural exile to his family. His war was not over, though, and as a Boy Scout he was drafted into the role of stretcher-bearer at Finchley Memorial Hospital. On 6 June 1944, D-Day, a heavy raid delivered itself in retaliation upon the city. Frank carried eight dead bodies, young and old, into the morgue that evening, at one point having to shuffle them around to fit them all in. Later that night he lay sleepless in his bed, listening to Allied planes making their way to France and the final act of the war.
With the war over, the Kemp family returned to Islington and new rooms in Rotherfield Street, rented from a local landlord. But the brothers would still have to replace the walls and ceilings themselves, as a doodlebug had dropped in the street and partially destroyed them. They took the top floor, their parents’ brass bed set up in the living room creating a centrepiece reminiscent of Roald Dahl, but in reality it was nothing but cramped and stifling. On the floor below, even more Dahl-esque, lived two ‘filthy old boys’, as my father called them.
Sadly, the family didn’t have the means to indulge Frank’s aspirations or potential, and his desires to stay on at school beyond fourteen and become a journalist were impossible even to contemplate. So Frank was sent to work as a printer—ironically, printing ruled lines onto paper for others to write on. In 1952, after his two years in National Service, he returned to the print and a blind date with a shy, Irish-faced girl from the New North Road called Eileen Green. Their first evening together ended with what must have been a memorable visit to the London Palladium to see Little Richard perform. A few dates later and they were helping to shake its Grand Circle up and down while watching Bill Haley and the Comets. Somewhere between the rock and roll they fell in love.
On Eileen’s first visit to her new boyfriend’s house she was welcomed at the front door by one of the resident ‘old boys’. Wrapped against the cold in ancient grey clothes and carrying an oil lamp in his greasy fingers, he beckoned her in, slowly guided her up the narrow stairs, and pointed her on past their own stinking rooms towards the top floor and the waiting Frank. The fragile Eileen swore she would never come again to this decrepit place, but eventually married Frank, and, as a proud virgin in white, moved into the house on their wedding night. Awkwardly undressing for bed, she broke the gas mantle, casting them both, gratefully, I’m sure, into darkness.
Eventually, they rented two rooms on the floor below and uncomfortably shared the kitchen with the elderly gents, now in their nineties, who infuriated Frank with their habit of keeping coal piled in a corner of the landing outside their door. Thankfully, the two nonagenarians soon shuffled off their shabby mortal coils, and with my arrival my father took over their space and turned it into a bedroom for me, giving his new family the whole floor.
Almost two years later my brother was born in my parents’ bedroom. My father looked after me, banned, like all men of his time, from the proceedings, while two midwives and a doctor saw Martin into the world.My mother had chosen to haveMartin at home, not for any holistic purpose or lack of NHS service, but because she couldn’t leave me, as my father was unable to take time off work. Unfortunately, Martin was thought to be a ‘blue’ baby—meaning he might have a potentially fatal blood condition—and was immediately rushed to hospital. When cleared, he would return home to two murder attempts from his brother.
The first was more of an experiment. He was asleep in his cot and my fury at his satisfied, gurgling presence was unbounded. I must have realised his breathing was essential to life because first I poured the remains of a pot of Lyle’s Golden Syrup on to his face, and then, pleased with my initial syrupy delivery, followed it with a bowl of sugar—a fine recipe for suffocation, I thought. He would at least enjoy it while it lasted. I watched little sweet bubbles form and pop around his mouth and nostrils and then suddenly there was a room full of screams, a crying baby, and a punished, whimpering child. I’d failed. This time.
A few weeks later I took my chance again. A sunny day meant a stroll to the New River Walk, a faux little brook that was actually designed to bring in fresh drinking water to thirsty Londoners but was now a favourite haunt of new mothers. Outside our house my old perambulator proudly stood with its new incumbent tucked tightly inside. My mother went back to shut the door and I took my chance. I grabbed the handlebar and shoved the huge beast of a pram into the road. A woman passing by screamed as it flew from the kerb, tipped backwards onto its canopied end and, wheels spinning helplessly in midair, came to a stop. But so swaddled was Martin that he never moved from the security of the covers, his head safely cushioned by the pillow, and within seconds my mother had him and the pram back on the pavement. With a stinging arse I saw that he was blessed, and probably worth keeping.
Below us, on the ground floor, the landlord had his rental office, and one day a week a line of people would snake through our ‘passage’ to pay their rent through a hole in the wall, a public encroachment which never seemed to bother us, although my mother would struggle to push her pram past the grumbling tenants. On a wet day they’d all cram into the narrow hall for protection, filling the house with the smell of damp clothes and the murmuring of local rumour. Under all of this, in the basement, lived an elderly woman, who eventually filled the house with a fetid stench of her own, alerting us to her lonely death.
The house contained no bathrooms, and the only toilet was outside in a small walled yard where my father had once kept chickens that he horrifically ‘burst’ by swelling their stomachs with an inappropriate diet of barley. On one side stood a brick air-raid shelter full of paint pots, rusting bicycles and hidden creatures. On the wall hung a tin bath that I never remember coming into the house—a ‘good wash’ was always had in the kitchen sink. I only remember this being once a week, unless my father took me to the local baths, where I’d lie tense and repulsed in one of their large cubicled tubs, with its flaking enamel and worryingly brown rust spots, timidly calling, ‘More hot water, please’ to the old geezer patrolling the corridor outside. Our outside toilet was a reeking, damp home for insects, and although torches were required in the evenings, it was beyond the call of nature to visit it at night. I also feared the empty basement that you had to pass to get to it, especially in the knowledge that the old woman had recently rotted there, not to mention our cat Ginger, who’d spent his last hours of life spewing on the dusty floorboards. To make things worse, in winter the pipes would freeze and the cistern would stop working altogether. Night-time relief was had in a bucket, and it was common in the morning to see Uncle Percy or Aunt Jean carrying theirs down to the loo. A stroke had taken Eliza before I was born andWalter just after, so my uncle, now married, lived upstairs with his wife and two children. We were joined in the house by my older cousin, her Turkish-Cypriot husband and their son, who all moved into the old ground-floor rent office when the council took over the property and turned the room into a dwelling.
It was now a house full of relatives (and, oddly, a monkey—my cousin’s husband having bought one in Club Row market as a pet); and although the three families kept themselves separate, sequestered on their different floors, the children claimed the doorstep, the yard and the damp basement space for their adventures in imagination.
CHAPTER TWO HOME-MADE
Rotherfield Primary stood at the end of the street; a typical redbrick Victorian state school, infused with the smell of sour milk and hot plimsolls. The rule for boys was to wear shorts until they were eleven, which gave the local long-trousered schools great ammunition to abuse us with. In June, shorts made sense, but in winter we were a swarm of goosebumps. Towards the end of my time there my mother thought it too extravagant to buy me a new pair, even though I’d reached a size where my hulking thighs were bursting out of my shorts like escaping sausage meat, and when I sat down they’d ride up and resemble a pair of worsted underpants.
My parents were constantly pushed to the limit of their purse just buying what was necessary, and so to give love and save cash my mother knitted jumpers for us. I particularly remember a rusty brown one that I wore proudly for school the day it was finished, although I was a little unsure about the jagged blue ‘G’ she’d sewn on its breast. Martin, of course, had a perfectly straight ‘M’.
I was spotted—for rust can be a little lurid—as soon as I entered the school gates. I’d forgotten about the ‘G’.
‘That stands for Germ!’ A playground nasty confronted me; even at eight, he already had the worn face of a man. ‘Look! G for Germ!’ He was now pointing out his witty discovery to his host of sycophants. The phrase became a ringing tune repeated endlessly for my benefit by more and more of his cronies. I never wore the jumper again without tears.
Even visiting barbershops seemed frivolous when my dad could easily do it himself. It was the era of the as-seen-on-TV gadget, and the kings of these domestic necessities were K-Tel. They’d sell you things that you never knew you needed, with chirpy, urgent voiceovers and slick demonstrations. Vegetable choppers, knitting machines, even hair trimmers arrived at our house. This last device was designed to trim the hair by just combing it through. In actual fact, it tore the hair in random places as it ripped its way down; a medieval torture instrument by any other name. My father would force us on to a chair and then begin his Sweeney Todd-like operation. You’d sit and pray for no pain, but then it would catch on a knot or a curl and successfully remove your hair whole from its follicle. It felt as if it had been yanked from the back of your eye and you jumped like a galvanised frog. To make things worse, the more haircuts my dad administered the blunter the ‘trimmer’ became. When it was over I’d sit in the chair, shoulders covered in broken pieces of hair, and wipe away tears. I’m not sure if these homemade haircuts were actually to save money or simply to satisfy my father’s love for DIY.
He was creative with his hands, and apart from the usual shelves and decorating, if there was a fancy dress competition or an Easter hat parade then Martin and I would invariably be wearing something grand, often mechanical, and always of a winning formula. I felt his love for us through the time and effort he put in, and the Kemp boys stood out at school because of it; though not always in the way we would have chosen.
My brother had a fully working windmill bonnet made for him once, and I remember awkwardly walking to school dressed as a knave-of-hearts playing card—a large painted box hung on me from braces, while a hat and straw wig finished off my nursery-rhyme look. Embarrassingly, I won. As usual.
On one awful occasion, though, my mother cried over what I had to wear. I was crossing the street and must have been struggling to walk as my shoes were too tight. My poor mother was mortified—they had no money at the time to buy me a new pair. I didn’t think we were any different—everyone we knew owned very little; houses were rented, and everything we sat on, slept on, drove in and watched was on HP. Constant saving through ‘Christmas Boxes’, coupons or Green Shield Stamps would pay for holidays, and bottles were always returned promptly for their thruppence deposit.
My parents needed to work hard for money, and at times our front room resembled a factory. My father not only worked Saturday mornings but also brought home work for some extra cash, and for a while we had a small printing press squeezed into a corner. The smell of ink soon became a familiar, homely one. My mother also worked from home as a machinist, stitching up ‘golliwogs’ among other things, and the rattle of the Singer sewing machine andMum’s frantically pedalling foot became our constant soundtrack.
To a child, things reveal themselves in symbols. Once, for a curious, forgotten reason, but probably to find money for sweets, I reached into my mother’s coat pocket as it hung over a chair. Not only was I surprised to find the pockets empty, but also both of them had holes, and my hand reached down into the dusty lining. It shocked me and I snatched my hand away. It felt as though I’d discovered something hidden about my mother. And, possibly, about us.
Like Dad,Mum was the youngest of a family of five children. She knew very little about her father, Thomas Green, as he’d died from gangrene before she was born, and so hated was he that he was never mentioned thereafter. A drinker and a bully, this road-worker of Irish descent, proudly born on St Patrick’s Day, would terrorise the home—when he chose to be there, as he often vanished for long periods of time. His background is unknown, his Catholic family having ostracised him when he married Elizabeth Bristow of Shoreditch, an Anglican with no previous pious convictions. ‘Liz’—ten years his junior—worked in the local bathhouse and blamed her later debilitating rheumatoid arthritis on the dampness of her workplace. A woman in constant pain when I knew her, she rarely spoke to me, and because of her ‘bad legs’ played little with her grandchildren.
I picture her, grey hair, grey face, puffing billows of grey smoke around the room, as if her body were making grey at such a rate it needed to expel the surplus. Sitting toothless and pinnied in her twelfth floor flat, bloated legs on a leatherette pouffe, mechanical ashtray perched on a metal stalk by her side, she would talk to my mother while Martin and I sat motionless on the sofa, letting her clouds slowly embrace us. When Nan’s constant smoking had filled her faithful ashtray, I was allowed the privilege of operating it, and with a press of a button would watch its little trapdoors open and the dirty butts vanish into its ashy bowels.
My parents would often take my grandmother out in our black Ford Popular on summer day trips. Southend-on-Sea was a favourite, and Martin and I would sit trapped in the back of the car, windows closed, while Nan puffed solemnly away for four or so hours on her Player’s Weights. These were pre-service-station days, and Nan’s bladder had to be emptied in numerous lay-by bushes along the route, making it a journey of immense proportions, but at least allowing us some respite from the fug. We’d finally arrive, set her down on a deckchair, put a plate of whelks in her hand, and play in the mud for a few hours before the return journey home and another gassing.
I could leave her there, in the back of the Popular, heading home towards Shoreditch, or maybe jump-cut to 1978 and the last time I saw her, waving me goodbye from her hospital bed, ancient against the smooth, fresh pillowcase; either way I would be doing this woman a disservice, the woman I never knew, the one that existed before the broken version that I met. So I want to wave goodbye to you again Nan, and try to see the young, cockney girl who once fell excitedly in love; the woman sadly resigned to the constant disaffection of her husband; the mother who was forced to say goodbye to her babies at a wartime railway station; the fighter who worked all the hours she could to feed her five children; and the brave widow, who once crawled from a shelter to see her home and all her lovely things crushed by a German bomb.
The Duke of Clarence was a busy Victorian pub, full of etched glass and polished wood, with a well-worn upright piano pushed against a nicotined wall. Part of the terrace, it adjoined our house and was the venue for my parents’ wedding celebrations. Of a winter’s evening, returning from shopping or a family visit with my mother, I would hear the liquored ribaldry coming from the smoky warmth inside, and through the swinging door witness flashes and hints of this secret, prohibited place of adults, brilliantly lit in all its bottly glitter. My parents weren’t drinkers—I don’t think they’d been inside a pub since the night of the broken gas mantle—and so the people within held some kind of illicit attraction for me. My father would occasionally have a bottle of brown ale on a Saturday night—his glass perched on the mantelpiece as a symbol of the weekend—and manage to make it last the entire evening, whereas it would take at least a wedding for my mother to drink. My bed was next to the pub’s adjoining wall, and at night I would lie and listen to the muted devilish sounds of the piano accompanying hearty, raucous singing. Those old, boozy music-hall songs that swam through the wall—still part of the prevailing culture in the mid-sixties, albeit waning—became my lullaby, and to this day I’m home when I hear them.
Once a month, local mods would converge on the pub and I’d stare out of my bedroom window, thrilled by the scooters gliding down the street, a dream in white sparkle and mirrors, reflecting the sharp, neat lines of their riders. This was certified mod country—a greased rocker wouldn’t dare walk the Essex Road. Young men here took a feminine level of time in their grooming, and my cousins’ boyfriends would be all slim suits, burned-in partings and geezer sovereigns.* The mods would reincarnate themselves here one day as soul boys and I would join them, but that’s for the future. Right now, my Aunt Dolly is drinking inside, blonde and beehived, her voice warm with rum and black.
Dolly lived two doors away from us with her mother and her brother, David, and she’d occasionally pop in on her way to the pub. I’d never smelt perfume before, and she was all sweets and smoke on our sofa, with a great big laugh that denied the cancer swelling within her. When she died, David’s ‘mum’ revealed to him that she was really his grandmother, and that Dolly was not his sister at all, but in fact his real mother. I was beginning to realise that it was what people thought you were that was important, even if it wasn’t the truth.
In front of me is a grainy black-and-white photograph of my family, taken in the Clarence’s upstairs function room during the wedding reception for my pretty cousin Janice. It’s about 1967, and she has just married one of the Nashes, an appropriate moniker for the family who ferociously dominated the Islington underworld. Here’s Ted, my great-uncle who fought in the First World War, standing proud in a three-piece suit, face as white as his hair, homburg settled on a cabinet behind him. Here’s Aunt Flo, looking mischievous and twinkley in winged spectacles, and here’s my cousin’s husband, wearing a pin stabbed through his collar and, like the other men in the picture, hair trimmed neatly and Brylcreemed. The men wear dark suits, white shirts and sombre ties with small, hard knots pushed up to strangling point. The younger women have their hair high in beehives, while the seated, older ones look comfortably ample and matronly as they contribute to the ashtrays that spill over on the table. My parents are both sporting tans, telling me that we must have just returned from our annual summer visit to my Uncle Tom and Aunt Joyce’s family home in Swansea, and that there had been good weather that year on the Mumbles. I’m stood behind my brother, but you can only make out the top of my head, hair newly trimmed—probably by Dad’s do-it-yourself shearing tool.
Staring at the photograph now, I’m reminded that I may have been a little tipsy here. The reception had deteriorated into post-speech raggedness, the children starting to be ignored in favour of flowing booze and knees-up music. Women were kicking off shoes and dancing in stockinged feet on the now sticky carpet that had, over the years, cushioned many a cockney do. Lured by fascination with what my parents had claimed was a reception full of bookmakers and villains from the Angel, an area of Islington where Essex Road met Upper Street, I wandered around the edge of the room. I was attracted to a mucky, lipstick-stained glass of thick, yellowy fluid, and, lifting it from the deserted table, drank its sweet contents. The elixir was—magically, I thought—called a Snowball; is it any wonder that I wanted to drink one of those? Head curiously light, I loitered around the male conversations at the bar, now heavy with cigar smoke and braggadocio. It was here, in hushed tones, that I overheard a cousin mention the Krays to another man. Was it a gang? A new musical group even? There was such reverence and awe in his voice that it struck me, even at that age, that whoever or whatever they were, they were to be feared and, disturbingly, this wedding was somehow bringing them closer to my door.
And then the bragging men were rushing past me. A fight, outside somewhere, between some of the wedding party and a gang of interloping rivals. The excitement that suddenly swept through a number of the male guests as they ran into the street was palpable. Someone told me to stay where I was but I was thrilled by these heavy, bristling blokes, hot in their brinylon shirts, as they strode back into the hall, pumped with adrenalin and beer, cigars still smoking in hands, breathlessly recounting what had either just or, more realistically, almost occurred. Many years later, these would be the kind of men that I would draw on when asked to play one half of that feared East End fraternity.
With friends from show business and politics, and pictures of them by Bailey and other society photographers, the Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, were supreme rulers of London’s underworld, and their name had fast become a byword for proletarian power. They dressed in the stark, dark uniform of the working-class male, which owed more to the sartorial sobriety of the forties and fifties than anything that could be considered ‘swinging’ in this new age. The Krays put the Nashes in the shade.
We poured out of the Clarence and into the warm night air. It felt grown-up to be part of the noise in the street, the noise that usually woke me, and I was thrilled by our loud, carefree voices echoing off the redbrick housing estate opposite. Bentham Court had been built in the hole that the doodlebug had made and it would be there, within the next year or so, that I would meet a dynamic young Irish woman who’d set my life on a course that would one day take me to Broadmoor prison, and a meeting with Mr Ronnie Kray himself.