The North of England Home Service (17 page)

The West End was still shadowy at nights; still ‘dark’ as the theatre people said. The law allowing the famous rippling signs to be switched back on and neon lights spelling out names in a perpendicular way wouldn’t come in for nearly another year yet. From the landing window at the gym Jackie had watched the nests of individual bulbs that filled each big hollow letter of the word making ‘
WINDMILL
’ grow dusty and black and for this reason had imagined the shows going on inside the theatre being similarly low voltage and dimmed.

That this was not the case he discovered as soon as he and Jimmy tiptoed in and took their seats behind the jimmers. The band, for a start, was loud and brassy, and the spectacle of light and colour it was accompanying, featuring high-kicking
showgirls
and bare-chested dancing boys, seemed too much to be
contained
on the small stage. As they settled down, each with his copy of the Windmill programme which, with its pictures of near-naked girls, was the closest you could get to a dirty
magazine
in those days, the big production number was brought to a conclusion and they believed they might be going to see
something
then. Instead two men came out in front of the curtain, one of them pushing a piano. ‘Hello, music-lovers‚’ the piano-less comedian said, and Jimmy and Jackie both thought this was very funny, but nobody else laughed. The audience seemed to have heard the jokes before and dozed or rattled the pages of their newspapers pointedly while the double act was on. As they came to the end of their five or six minutes, though, the newspapers were put away and the men in the stalls sat up in their seats as the curtains drew back to reveal a ‘Grecian Frieze’ of three models posing like statues on ivy-covered plinths towards the rear of the stage, while a song-and-dance item went on in the subdued ‘artistic’ ultra-violet haze that drifted around in the foreground. The Olympic Games were due to open in London in a few weeks, and Jackie supposed that this was meant to be some sort of
topical
tribute to the Olympic ideal: one of the nudes posed with a discus, another with a spear, while the third, who had noticeably the largest breasts, held a plaster torch which began to sway slightly after a while. The dancers wore approximate net-gauze swimsuits and gymnast leotards which, in accordance with the strict rules laid down by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, teasingly outlined the figure but never glaringly showed details of the human form.

The effect was oddly erotic and, although they didn’t join the
move stagewards, Jackie and Jimmy found themselves sitting on until the next tableau, and then the next one, came around in the anticipation that something more explicit might be shown. The truth was that Jimmy Li had never seen a white woman unclothed. A man a few seats along in the row in front watched furtively through a pair of heavy black binoculars whose warm Bakelite casing Jimmy could smell.

They left when the lights came up on the old sheepish pervs and the pattern of black chewing-gum pressed into the carpet of the centre aisle.

Kid Lewis had palmed a big wadded white five-pound note to Jackie when they had parted company with him outside the theatre. And Jackie had kept dipping into his pants pocket and satisfying himself of the note’s increasingly soggy presence throughout the performance. Five pounds could be made to go quite far in the summer of 1948, and as they emerged on to the darkened streets that promised much but that didn’t easily give their secrets up to strangers, it pleased him to be able to lead Jimmy Li away from the clueless milling crowd of rubes and out-of-towners to the places that only somebody like himself with the inside dope would know.

In the space of not quite two years he had become a
well-known
figure, and Jackie nodded his ‘good nights’ and ‘be goods’ to a number of dubious characters as he guided Jimmy through a network of echoing courts and alleys to their first pit-stop of the after-hours and quietly revelled in what this said about his change of station.

They were still in June, only a week or so past the longest day. And it was one of those sunlit nights that Jimmy had spoken of earlier, with the sky still blue and the newspaper-sellers and flower stalls still open for business all along Coventry Street between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. The Potomac and the Princes were two clubs situated back to back between
Jermyn Street and Piccadilly. One was run by a Belgian trumpeter called Johnny Claes, the other by a glamorous local heart-throb tenorist, Reggie Dare. They blew twenty-five shillings in the Potomac listening to Claes’s Claepigeons playing a kind of
boop-de-boop
jazz music that wasn’t strictly to either of their tastes, and then slipped through a service door at the end of a passage by the kitchens into Dare’s place, where the boss stood them their first round. (Not very many years later, when Jackie went to visit Booba, who was dying in Homerton Hospital, the gatekeeper there was Reggie Dare.)

The place all the faces went in those days was the Modernairre, owned by the big gangster Billy Hill’s sister, Aggie, in Greek Court. So they made their way round there and had one, and had another two for the road somewhere else, then went into Lyons Corner House where Greta made out she didn’t know Jackie and the upshot was that at the end of it Jackie and Jimmy,
acquaintances
of a little over fifteen hours, were dead friends.

Jimmy Li was robbed of the first fights he had in London because of his ‘paint job’. The nearest Labour Exchange to Clapham Deep Shelter was in Coldharbour Lane in Brixton. Most of the people Jimmy had come over on the boat with had gone to live there and Jimmy had joined them in Brixton because it became the place where in a city of called-out monkey noises and constant unaggravated violence he could feel comfortable and most himself.

He rented a bed in a house with a dozen other fellows from home, and on many nights they would gather together to drink the cheap ginger beer and whisky-based punch they called ‘lunatic juice’ and listen nostalgically to recordings of the Senior Inventor, the Caresser, Lord Beginner and other favourite
calypsonians
, and relive memories of the street marching, the costume floats and steel-pan music that dominated Trinidad Carnival in the four-day ‘mas’ leading up to the beginning of Lent. Mr
Solomons’ acquaintance Lord Kitchener started to play regularly in the saloon bar of a local Brixton pub, singing the new calypsos he had composed in Britain, about Britain, and then at the dance clubs, cellar bars and semi-legal bottle parties that Jackie started to go to sometimes with Jimmy.

These, Jimmy assured him, were the nearest proximity you could get in London to the gaiety and happiness back home. ‘Is weed, man‚’ Jimmy said to explain the uninhibitedness of the party-makers who had dipped into the little brown-paper packets that Jackie had seen surreptitiously changing hands. ‘Rockin’ high with charge.’ And Jackie became aware of feeling an aloneness again in the midst of people with manners – ways of saying and doing things; music they liked and clothes they wore – that he didn’t and could
probably
never hope to comprehend. To the best of Jackie’s knowledge – but what did he know – when he was with him Jimmy stayed clean.

Black vs. White, as Mr Solomons had seen coming, became a major draw. And because he was needy for the money and there was little he could do about it, Jimmy Li was one of the ‘bodies’ put in against white boxers who were sometimes a stone or twenty pounds heavier than him. Occasionally when he was
overmatched
Jimmy upset the betting and won. But even in winning one of these uneven contests he could sustain a severe amount of punishment. ‘The only good fighter is a hungry one‚’ Mr Solomons, who had much fatter fish to fry, would tell him on those occasions when Jimmy tried to raise a protest.

Jackie and Jimmy often ran together and sparred and trained together at Windmill Street under the eye of Nat Sellers. There wasn’t much weight difference between them but they were different physical types. Jimmy was like a perfect take-apart teaching hospital model, lithe with long, elegantly defined muscles attached to a fine powerful frame. Jackie was squatter, more clenched, with the milky, transparent, sun-starved English skin that takes a cold blue undercolour from the skeins of surface
veins. In training, and during fights, a hot red flush came up under the blue in a way he had been told many women liked. Jimmy’s supple brown skin was perpetually slicked with sweat. Jackie hardly seemed to sweat and sometimes actually seemed to emit a ghostly glow in the gloom of the cracked dark leather and the dark wood of the gym. Jimmy liked to jab and dance; he punched above his weight and his fighting philosophy had always been a simple one: ‘When you see an opening, just put your fist through it.’ He had a snapping right and tended to fight every fight to the same pattern: to punch, keep punching, and punch some more. Jackie was an in-fighter, kidney-punching and pummelling and preferring to fight skin to skin. He liked to keep coming and wear opponents down; his style was to stay close and be all over them like a rash. Jimmy was a bleeder; he cut all the time. Jackie by contrast hardly bled at all. His fists were calloused but his face was barely marked.

They had never been matched against each other until Mr Solomons was drawing up the ‘underneath’ for the big
showpiece
set-to of 1950 between Bruce Woodcock, the reigning British heavyweight champion, and the American, Lee Savold, with Savold’s world heavyweight title on the line. The glamour fights always drew a celebrity crowd to training sessions at the gym consisting of champions and former champions and
show-business
stars such as Danny Kaye, who was enjoying his
tri-umphant
season at the Palladium at that time, and Sophie Tucker, who was at the London Casino, and lesser stars of the calibre of Robertson Hare and Ann Shelton and Nova Pilbeam and
members
of the Crazy Gang, plus a couple of the racier High Court judges mixing and mingling with some of the top coppers from West End Central and the government hangman Albert
Pierre-point
, who was also a boxing referee and came accompanied by a very powerful deathly aura which was heightened by his stark terror of a camera and the way he refused ever to speak for
publication. ‘Miss Tucker, let me introduce you to His Majesty’s hangman, Mr Pierrepoint, who gave that wicked Ellcot boy the drop last week.’ Jolly Jack loved all this celebrity
booshwah
of course and looked forward to big fight nights for the opportunity for blowing smoke up celebrity
tushes
as much as for anything that took place in the ring.

Jackie and Jimmy, who were both used to the small halls, were excited by the big occasion, although very few others at White City on the night appeared to be. When they went on many of the cheaper tiered seats on the far side of the greyhound track were occupied, but they made their entrance through row upon empty row of the dented metal folding chairs in the field that they
themselves
had helped to put out. Woodcock, the Doncaster
piston-fitter
, they knew was booked into the Strand Palace Hotel. The American champion Savold and his manager were staying at the Imperial, Russell Square, which had a Turkish bath in the
basement
. Jimmy was still sharing a room (and sometimes a bed; with a railway cleaner who worked nights) in Brixton; Jackie was still lodged at the Buildings in Whitechapel, and they had both made their separate ways to White City on the underground. In Jackie’s satin dressing-gown pocket was the small leather box containing the set of
tefillin,
the sacred texts, with which Booba had solemnly presented him. Only a handful of the pencillers for the papers had bothered to claim their seats for this nine-stone battle of the minnows when the bell went for the start of the first round.

To his own amazement, and then with a slight sense of
concern
, Jackie won at a clip – ‘without bedewing his brow with a single pearl of perspiration’, as one of the scribes present would later write. Jimmy, at twenty-seven to Jackie’s twenty, was giving away seven years. But he was more experienced, stronger and usually much faster on his feet. If the mood was on him he could win a fight by feinting and dancing and not letting his opponent come near. That night though Jimmy never seemed to get going.
Now and then he would buzz his way in to close quarters, land a flurry of punches and flicker off out of distance. But all in all he seemed preoccupied and sluggish and wasn’t moving with any of his usual fluency and zip.

In the first round Jackie was able to score heavily to the body, and he caught Jimmy with a solid left hook about a minute into round two. Jimmy wasn’t seriously hurt, but he was knocked off balance and slipped. He left himself wide open, hauling himself awkwardly off the canvas with the help of the top rope, and Jackie should have moved in then for the kill. When he didn’t – he stood back and waited until Jimmy was ready and then sportingly extended his gloves – he noticed some of the old-timers and Mr Solomons, who had materialized at the ringside in his
midnight-blue
dinner-jacket, disgustedly shaking their heads.

The third round was about even. By the fourth, Jimmy’s right eye was bleeding. He kept clinching, and his blood was on Jackie’s head and chest. When they broke and Jimmy turned his head to listen to the referee, Jackie didn’t hesitate. He heard the voice of Kid Lewis in his head:
Be
ruthless.
Never
hesitate
when
you
see
your
opponent
is
staggering
but
throw
everything
into
the
blow
that
will
end
the
contest.
When
your
opponent
is
cut
never
back
off
but
deliver
your
hardest
punches
to
the
wounded
area.
The
objective
is
to
incapacitate
your
man.
It
is
the
boxer’s
job
on
any
and
every
occasion
to
protect
himself.
His right whipped out,
connecting
with Jimmy’s temple, and Jackie’s good friend Jimmy sank in a heap.