Authors: Victor Gregg
We soon got back into a routine. After breakfast Mum took Emmy off to our gran’s, then went on her way to work leaving me to find my own way to school. All except Wednesday mornings when it was my job to take the ‘bag wash’ round to the Sunlight laundry. This meant cramming all our dirty clothes into a large canvas bag which was held closed with a big brass clasp complete with padlock. Each clasp had a number stamped into it as a means of identification. I had to struggle round to Cromer Street with it and then, after school on Thursday, collect the finished wash. The bag was big and heavy and I could only just manage it but I knew that I was saving our mum a lot of work.
While I was at the home I had been upgraded to the boys’ school and brother John had been moved to a small infants’ school in Herbrand Street, much nearer to my gran in Kenton Street. Losing John affected me more than I expected: now I had no one to play with or take the mickey out of during the long winter nights. To our mum it was a life-saver, but to me our home had lost something. The saving grace was, being just over seven years old, I was now expected to find my amusements outside the walls of our home. This meant that I was beginning to mix full-time with the kids I went to school with.
Although the walk to school only involved a stroll of about half a mile I soon learnt that even that short distance was fraught with danger. The school served three streets and each had enough young boys to constitute a medium-sized gang – Sidmouth Street, Harrison Street and our smaller Wakefield Street.
The Sidmouth Street lot were more vicious than the other two, and it was reckoned that they were the top dogs. Their street was right next to the school. The Wakefield and Harrison Street gangs had to walk together and sort out their differences as they went along. If a dispute arose in the morning and wasn’t settled by school time it would fire up on the short walk home, much to the annoyance of those mums who were still collecting their young from the infants’ school. Mr Reid the gardener used to set about us with a big broom made from the branches of trees. The boys met up in the evening and spent their time working out who had bashed who and looking forward to the next encounter. I had other problems. The semi-naval uniform that the home had provided me with, although much warmer and more comfortable than my old clothes, marked me out as different from all the other boys. While the other mums remarked how smart I looked, I had to suffer non-stop jeering and catcalls. ‘Oi tosher, where’s yer boat?’ was the most common. But I was big for my age and the food and the exercise had developed my body, so anyone taking the mickey had to risk having a fight with me. In time, as my clothes got scruffier, I became less and less a target and more one of the gang.
At Prospect Terrace School the young girls aged between seven and eleven helped cook the school meals as part of their curriculum; they were also taught the arts of knitting and darning. After all, that’s what girls did. The meals cost twopence per child but even that was too much for some parents so the dining room was never overcrowded.
If you looked into the playground you could see the difference between the girls and the boys. The girls would be skipping or playing hopscotch, with much screaming and laughing and playing around. A playful, happy scene.
Not so the boys. By the time we were seven the gangs started to form. The boy with the best fighting ability would be the gang leader and any attempt to displace him could only be achieved by a bundle. These confrontations usually took place in a corner of the playground. The teachers seldom interfered unless it was obvious that real injury was on the cards; a loose tooth or a bloody nose was not considered to be anything to bother the headmaster with, and the boy who came out worse in the argument had the sense to accept the fact that he wasn’t leadership quality yet.
When the mother turned up at the school to collect her offspring, and she saw little Johnny with a bruised face and perhaps a torn jacket, she’d cuff him smartly round the ears, saying, ‘If I catch you fighting again, I’ll tell your dad.’ The dad’s attitude was usually, ‘If you’re going to fight, hit ’em ’ard and don’t come crying to me.’ Boys were raised to look after themselves.
It was the same outside school. The boys had their own corner of the street, to which they returned after they’d been roving about engaged in some mischief or trespassing on a weaker gang’s domain. The girls likewise commandeered a section of the street where they could play out their fantasies, such as pretending to be film stars or maybe a princess looking for a handsome prince. The ‘handsome prince’ was usually one of the boys in the street’s gang. The girls all knew who fancied who, but the boys on the other hand looked upon the girls as an oddity that had to be tolerated. Even so the boys always regarded the girls as their property and any attempt by boys of another street to interfere with or annoy what they called ‘their girls’ always resulted in a bout of serious fighting. Kids from the same street regarded each other as brothers and sisters, all part of a family. Streets were sacrosanct to the people who lived in them. Three or more boys entering a strange street immediately became subjects of suspicion and more often than not they were challenged.
I remember a typical event in the King’s Cross area in the early 1930s. A bunch of six or seven of the young boys in the Harrison Street gang, aged anything between eight and eleven, had got bored with kicking their rag ball up and down the road and somebody suggested that it might be a good thing to go and annoy the Wakefield Street gang, just around the corner,
‘Let’s go and bash ’em up.’ With no further ado off they set, singing and shouting, dragging sticks against the railings, letting everybody know that the Harrison Street gang were on the march.
The boys of the Wakefield Street gang were engrossed in a game of cricket, with a piece of wood shaped like a cricket bat and a hard rubber ball. A few minutes earlier the ball had smashed through one of the upstairs windows of a nearby building. The players were debating whether to scarper or to dare to ask for their ball back.
The boys from Harrison Street arrived and one of them pushed his way into the bunch, addressing one of the smaller members of the Wakefield Street lot: ‘Oi, four-eyes, gis that bat.’ The boy in question, the owner of the spectacles, replied by lifting the bat and swiping the intruder around the head, drawing blood. This was a sudden and unexpected defence of property and the lad who had demanded the bat was now howling his head off, blood streaming from his mouth as a result of the teeth that had been smashed by the blow.
The leader of the Harrison Street gang now made his presence felt. He approached the eldest and biggest of the Wakefield lot: ‘Oo you looking at then, tosher?’ – this was the normal form of address that signified that a bundle was in the offing – ‘I fink I’m looking at a load of turd.’ This question and answer session would go on until one of the boys struck the first blow, which meant the start of an all-out fight between the two opposing forces. But the leader of the Harrison Street gang broke the unwritten code of the streets: never make remarks about someone’s mother. ‘You ain’t got a farver, ’ave yer?’ ‘What’s it to you?’ ‘You’re a barsterd, ain’t yer?’ ‘What yer mean by that?’ ‘Your mum’s had a barsterd!!!’ Without further ado the boy without a father hurled himself at his adversary, giving no quarter, tearing the other boy’s face to ribbons. The brawl came to a sudden halt when one of the boys shouted: ‘Look out, the rozzers are here.’ Quick as lightning, the street cleared of the boys of both sides, all except the one who had dished out the last lot of damage.
The burly policeman, who was nicknamed ‘the Bear’ because of his massive girth, called the boy over, and when he came close bent down, the better to bring himself to the boy’s size. ‘He ain’t gonna talk like that about your mum again, is he?’ The Bear was reckoned by one and all as someone not to mess with. ‘You gonna take me round the cop shop then?’ said the boy, probably thinking that to show some form of defiance might be to his good. ‘Not this time, sonny boy, I saw what happened, but a warning in your little ear, don’t get cheeky with me, and always show respect for the law. Now shove off and behave yourself.’
Later that evening, the plates had been cleared away and little Emmy was asleep in her rough cot, while Mother was stitching some work she had brought home in order to earn a bit extra. Suddenly I said, ‘Mum, is Farver ever going to come home?’ Mum looked at me, ‘Why do you ask that, Victor?’ ‘No reason, Mum, I was just finking.’ Mother put down her work and without warning tears started rolling down her face. I felt guilty that I had made her cry. I put my arms round her and said: ‘Don’t cry, Mum, I didn’t mean to make you cry, we will always look after you when we grow up.’ Mum wiped her eyes and stood up: ‘Come on, Victor, off to bed with you. And, by the way, Mrs Brown next door told me about the happenings of today. Fighting is never a good way to settle an argument.’ This from a woman who had lost two of her brothers in the senseless slaughter of the Great War.
9
Life in the junior boys’ school was harsh, and the slightest deviation from the straight and narrow was severely punished. And in some ways it had to be. Any sign of weakness or hesitation on the part of the teacher would be picked up by the quick-witted assortment of young scruffs sitting in front of him. Our teachers were always men. Discipline was enforced by a swipe with the cane which all teachers carried, and a boy could be caned severely for the slightest misdemeanour. Neither the boys nor their parents thought it necessary to challenge the authority of the school; it was accepted that if the boy had done wrong he had to take his medicine. Yelling while the cane or strap was doing its worst was allowed, crying wasn’t, and if you were silly enough to complain to your father, or in my case my mother, you got another whack for good measure.
One of the boys in our class was a real basher; his mum and dad were reckoned to be people who started a fight if they could find no better way of amusing themselves. On one occasion the boy shouted at his teacher and told him he didn’t give a f–– about ‘’im and ’is cane’, whereupon the said teacher lost his cool and laid into the kid. The boy retreated under the weight of blows and ran out of the class heading for the safety of his mum’s arms.
We all knew what was going to happen to the teacher once the mum found out. Sure enough, late in the afternoon the whole school heard the sound of the boy’s mother screaming her head off, pulling her son by the collar of his shirt into the classroom. She pointed her finger at the teacher, shouting, ‘Is that the barsterd?’ The boy nodded, and without a second thought the woman reached inside the big shawl that hung around her massive shoulders and pulled out a heavy length of wood, setting about the luckless man with some vigour, encouraged by the shouts and cheers from the boys in the class. It’s quite possible that real harm could have been done if the head teacher and a couple of the other masters hadn’t appeared in time to pull the woman away. The mother was escorted off the premises, and that was the end of the matter. The school kept quiet, the teacher learnt his lesson, the boy’s status in the class was raised and the mother added another victory to her list of battles against authority. All’s well that ends well.
10
During the day there weren’t many cases of real violence in the streets. At night it was a different matter: as a gang you didn’t venture into the streets of another gang unless you were looking for trouble. Singly or in pairs was quite safe, you were no threat. Mob-handed meant only one thing, and then out came any weapon that might be to hand. Later, as we turned into young men, knuckle-dusters and coshes all became part of our armoury.
During the summer months, when the evenings were long and drawn out, the temptation to liven things up a bit was always present. We had been banned from the playing fields at the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury (now called Coram’s Fields) because of our ‘unruly behaviour’ and we wondered where else to go. ‘Let’s take a stroll down to the Cross.’ The trouble with that innocent suggestion was that, to get to the Cross, you had to go over Sidmouth Street, not a good idea if you wanted a peaceful evening. The Sidmouth Street gang would see to that. But it wasn’t something that us boys lost any sleep over, to us it was the natural way of life. So long as our boisterous behaviour didn’t cause problems with the law, the grown-ups seldom bothered their heads over a few bloodied noses. ‘Serve yer right, shouldn’t have got in the way of ’is fist’ was the typical retort of a father to a son coming home with a damaged conk.
On a Saturday afternoon a trip down to Somers Town or the market in Chapel Street could yield some fruit. None of us had any cash and to get a handful of apples or oranges we had to nick what we wanted while the stallholder had his attention diverted. This was a risky business as stallholders were known to have eyes up their backsides, in the form of the younger men and boys of the family. Nevertheless, undeterred and full of the spirit of adventure, off we went to the market.
Not one of us gave a thought to the idea that we were stealing other people’s property. No: to our young minds it was a lark. But in the eyes of the law, property was sacred and the local magistrates had a nasty habit of sending young men of my tender years to ‘homes of correction’, not a nice experience. There was one lad in our street who had done two years in one of these places. His name was Charlie Stokes and he was older than me, being in the senior boys when I was in the junior. Everyone knew about Charlie and his mum and dad. Charlie had a brother, Freddy, about eight years older, who earned his living as a professional boxer; he was reckoned to be quite handy with his dukes. But Freddy wanted a lifestyle way beyond what he got for bashing other young men around and so spent half his life doing time for breaking and entering. Young Charlie, quite naturally, worshipped his big brother and did his best to follow in Freddy’s footsteps. Unfortunately for him his lack of ability in the art of fisticuffs left him with but one other recourse – he started mixing with a gang of lads from Collier Street, which was just off the Pentonville Road, and Charlie ended up before the beak in the court in King’s Cross Road. The first time he went down for six months, and the second time saw him put away for eighteen months. In our eyes Charlie was an old lag. Anyway, Charlie came out of the second stretch a completely different person: anything that signalled danger he shied away from; he had been utterly subdued. The cowed way in which Charlie Stokes mooched around was a constant reminder of what lay in store for us if we transgressed.