The Profession of Violence (3 page)

Some of the old East Enders like Charles Kray lived on their wits. Others, like Violet's father, old John Lee ‘the Southpaw Cannonball', lived by sheer force of personality. Boxer, juggler, street performer, impromptu poet, market man, he was a famous local character. His mother's family was Irish and his father's Jewish. His father had been a butcher.

‘He weren't a bad man, except that he took to alcohol, and it ruined him as it's ruined many a good man. It made him epileptic. I can remember as a boy him having five and six attacks a day. And all the time he'd still be drinking.

‘ “Helen,” he'd shout to my mother, soon as he was over an attack, “bring me my rum and coffee.”

‘There was one night when he come over all peculiar and tried to kill us in our beds. Mother called the police and he was taken to the epileptics' colony at Epsom. He was there seventeen years. I saw him twice myself. He died there.'

John Lee became a passionate teetotaller; he was also a great fighter in his time. ‘I had a good left hand. That's how I got the name, “the Southpaw Cannonball”. I was just nine stone, so I fought as featherweight, but when I
boxed professional, I'd take on any weight at five pounds a fight.'

He saved his money, started a haulage business and ran twenty-two horses before going bankrupt. Then he became a showman, working the streets of the East End.

‘First thing, I made a bit of money from was licking the white-hot poker. I'd seen a big black fellow doing it before a crowd on Mile End Waste, so I took a chance with it myself. You're safe enough, long as you see the poker's white-hot. If it's just red you lose your tongue.'

Another turn that earned him money was walking the streets with his young son on a five-gallon bottle balanced on his head; but it was his barrel trick that brought Cannonball real fame. It took him four years to perfect. He used to walk down a line of twenty-four lemonade bottles which were balanced nose down on the floor. Then he would climb a pair of steps with a bottle on each rung. From the top of the steps he would jump into the mouth of a barrel, all this without upsetting a single bottle. He toured the music-halls offering fifty pounds to anyone who could do the same and never had to pay. His last appearance on the stage was at the Portsmouth Empire, when he was nearly fifty; afterwards he worked as a market porter. But however eccentric Cannonball's working life appeared, life in the home was always strict; he ruled his family with Victorian severity.

‘True, we lived hard, but I could always find a bit of greengrocery from the market. Kippers was two a penny in them days, pennyworth of faggots, ha'porth of pease pudden. All things that put the vitamins inside you and help you to uphold yourself.'

He had a famous temper in the home, and his daughters went in fear of him. At table none would eat until he finished carving. No one contradicted him, and not a drop of liquor was allowed inside the house. By the time Violet had made her peace with him, Cannonball had mellowed, but he still lived within the old-style world of Bethnal
Green with all its rectitude, self-reliance and loyalties. This was the family to which Violet brought the twins. It soon became their real home. Their father was invariably away and Violet provided most of what discipline they got. Charles was regular with the housekeeping, but he seemed less and less involved in his family. The little black-haired dolls in the angora coats were emerging from babyhood, loved and adored by everyone around them. Their mother was still the only one who could be sure of telling them apart; they were inseparable and seemed to need no one but themselves, certainly no other children nor their brother. They were late talking, but showed signs of being telepathic. As they got older they shared dreams and thoughts quite naturally. If one decided he was hungry or wanted to go to the lavatory, so would the other. If one got hurt, the other one would cry although he might be in another room. They had a private language, liked the same food, laughed at the same things and lived in a self-contained world of their own. They never argued. Neither seemed dominant. Their mother still dressed them the same, but she was beginning to wonder if it was right to treat them so alike.

The twins were unusually healthy babies. At three neither had caught anything much worse than a cold. But when Violet Kray found Reggie feverish and sick one day she took it for granted that Ronnie was going to be ill as well. By evening both the twins had temperatures and the following day the doctor diagnosed measles. At first Violet refused to worry. The twins were sturdy, but they got worse and by next evening Ronnie had difficulty breathing.

‘He was in a dreadful state, poor little thing, gasping away for breath, and none of us able to help him. None of us knew what it was until I saw his nose-holes moving in and out. I knew it was the diphtheria then and called the doctor again.'

Diphtheria it was: both twins were infected, but Ronnie worse than Reggie and the doctor decided to isolate them in separate hospitals; Ronnie in the isolation ward of the General Hospital, Homerton, and Reggie in St Anne's Hospital, Tottenham. There they stayed for the next few days; isolated, and extremely ill.

It was the first time they had been parted more than half an hour; the first time they had been without their mother. She was permitted to peep in at them through a small window at the end of the ward. After a fortnight, Reggie was recovering and within a month was ready for home; his brother remained critically ill. And although Ronnie finally began to mend he was apathetic. Three months after the twins were taken ill, Reggie had recovered and was back playing happily with other children in Vallance Road. Ronnie remained in the Homerton isolation ward.

Violet decided to assert herself. ‘I understood my Ronnie better than all them doctors. They couldn't see what was really troubling him. He was just fretting for his Reggie an' for me. So I told the hospital I was taking him home. They warned it could be dangerous, but it wasn't no good leaving him there. When he was home I nursed him night an' day, had him in my room with me of nights. He picked up in no time.'

‘His mother saved his life,' said Charles. ‘No question of it. If it hadn't been for Violet an' what she did then, he'd 'ave been a goner.'

The twins were three now, but the balance between them was disturbed. Violet tried to treat them as before and be scrupulously fair. She still dressed them identically and gave them identical presents on their birthday. If one had an ice-cream, she would make sure the other had one too. They even started sharing the same name now: when anyone wanted them he would not call ‘Ronnie' or
‘Reggie' but always ‘Twins'. It was as if they were a single person.

But Violet knew that there were differences between them now: she could not forget that Ronnie had needed her most, that he had fretted for her in hospital and that she had nursed him back to health. She saw things other people missed. Physically the twins remained the same, but Reggie was brighter. He talked more than Ronnie, was easier to handle and got on better with people and with other children. Ronnie seemed slower, shyer, more dependent on his mother than before. His moods were always changing. Children of this age can be permanently impaired by a severe attack of measles and diphtheria. Suddenly Ronnie began to sulk and to have difficulty talking. As he grew he seemed slightly bigger and clumsier than Reggie. Despite this he always needed to outdo him.

At first this competition took the form of vying for their mother's attention. Violet saw nothing wrong with this. ‘It was as if he had to make up for all the love he'd missed in the hospital.' But soon Ronnie would do anything to get his mother's affection; scream, sulk and think up ways of putting Reggie in the wrong. Then once she noticed him Ronnie would smother Violet with love. As he grew, this never stopped, and soon both twins became affected.

‘When Ronnie was just a toddler he would be watching all the time to see Reggie never did better than he did. And Reggie was soon watching him as well. They watched each other like young hawks.'

There is a photograph of them taken the summer war broke out, on Southend Pier: a wistful picture of two solemn bright-eyed little boys staring into the camera. All Violet's doting care is obvious in the neat suits and the carefully brushed-back hair but there is something else, something about their eyes, a look they never lost. It is as if one face is watching itself mistrustfully in a mirror. A former pimp who grew up with them says, ‘Even when they was very young the twins never seemed like other
children. Didn't laugh nor lark around for the fun of it. They seemed to have something more serious on their minds.'

Violet knew this too. She knew her twins were ‘different' from other children. In some ways she was proud of this. They always had been special; they were twins. That made them extra precious; they needed more love than ordinary small boys.

‘They seemed to gather trouble; fighting with other boys already, breaking things, getting in mischief for the hell of it. They had a devilish streak in them.' But Violet knew she must be patient.

‘Twins always stand out. Bein' twins they're naturally conspicuous. Other kids pick on 'em.' And there always seemed to be older children ready to lead the twins into trouble. So it was their fault, not the twins'. For Violet knew how vulnerable they were behind their toughness – Ronnie particularly. And she could never bring herself to be hard on them. Ronnie always longed to be the favoured twin. But this was difficult with Violet determined to be fair to both, and it was clear that with his greater quickness and his charm Reggie had the advantage. So gradually Ronnie learned to manipulate things so that if he couldn't always win the love he wanted he could make sure Reggie never had it either.

One of their cousins says, ‘When we was kids together, I have seen Ronnie sit down and count out the peas on their two plates, then throw a scene because Reggie had a couple more.'

Whenever Reggie was in favour, Ronnie could usually redress things. Sometimes he did it with a sneer.

‘Look at Reggie, Mummy's darling. Sweet little angel, ain't 'e?'

At other times it was necessary to get him into trouble. This wasn't difficult either. Reggie was no angel, whatever Ronnie said, and Ronnie knew exactly how to handle things. He knew quite well that in a fight Reggie would
always back him up and always rise to a taunt of cowardice.

Gradually the twins worked out a private code of behaviour. Good was what brought them praise and love, chiefly from their mother but also from anyone they happened jointly to admire. Evil was the opposite. And just as their lives had always been ruled by what was absolutely fair, so they began to balance up any excess of praise with an excess of trouble. The pattern is simple to identify, repeating constantly throughout their lives. What was not so easy for the twins was to come to agreement over precisely what was fair between them. There could be no cheating. Each knew the other, watched the other far too well for that. Each motive, every move they made was under mutual scrutiny. There was no escape. Everything one did was known and judged by the other. Often this became too much: one would revolt and they would fight like demons.

One of the family says, ‘No one could ever stop them once they started, and none of us ever understood what the twins fought about. In the end we got used to it and let 'em fight it out. But I never seen ordinary brothers fight like those two did. They would hurl themselves at each other and scream every obscenity they knew. Ten minutes later it was over and forgotten, the twins content and quite inseparable again. I think they had to have these rucks to let off steam. They loved each other really, but sometimes I thought they'd kill themselves.'

Violet had always longed to move from Hoxton back to Bethnal Green. Now on the eve of war one of the houses on the corner of Vallance Road fell vacant. Charles agreed to move. Violet and the twins went home at last and Lee Street reunited.

178 Vallance Road was tiny, the second in a row of four Victorian terraced cottages. There was no bathroom, the lavatory was in the yard and day and night the house shook as the Liverpool Street trains roared past the bedroom windows. For Violet none of this mattered. Her
parents were just around the corner; so was her sister, Rose, the wild one with the gipsy looks. Her other sister. May, was next door but one, and her brother, John Lee, kept the caff across the street.

When war came it was in this stretch of Vallance Road, under the shadow of the soot-stained viaducts, that Violet Kray and her family built a protective colony of three generations; it became known as ‘Deserters' Corner'.

This would remain the centre of the children's world, the hideout of their cockney clan: those front doors always open, letting them scuttle through the warren of small houses, the hot little kitchens at the back, thick with the smell of stew and washing, where Aunt May or Grandmother Lee would always find them cake and a cup of tea; special treats from wild Aunt Rose who never let a week go by without buying them a toy or a bag of sweets from the housekeeping; and old Grandfather Lee, who was to cycle to Southend and back to celebrate his seventieth birthday, and who still kept his famous left hook in trim, punching a mattress hung up in the yard. He would sit with the twins for hours in his armchair by the fire, talking about the perils of drink and the East End of the past and how he broke Mike Thompson's nose when he had set on him with a brick one night in an alleyway in Wapping, half a century before. Sometimes he would recite his poems. Sometimes he told them of the great boxers he had known: Jimmy Wilde of Stepney, ‘who had his strength in both hands where I had it only in my left'; Kid Lewis who grew up just around the corner to become champion of the world at three separate weights, ‘a good clean-living man and one of the gamest fighters ever to enter a ring'. And sometimes the old man would talk about the other heroes of the old East End – its criminals: Spud Murphy of Hoxton who killed two men in a spieler in Whitechapel and shouted to the police that he'd bring a machine-gun and finish everyone off before he was caught; Martin and Baker, from Bethnal Green, who took the nine o'clock
walk after shooting three policemen at Carlisle. And for the old man, Jack the Ripper's murders were almost local happenings; the house in Hanbury Street where he had killed Annie Chapman was just round the corner.