by Ronald Kray
My own room is very brightly coloured and I have made it very comfortable. The colours I like are yellow and peach and nearly everything in my room is in these colours. I have floral curtains and a floral bedspread. I have a few ornaments and a few photographs. I have my record player and my books. I spend most of my life in this room and I am happy here. In this block there are no bars on the windows because the glass is unbreak-able. For the first time in nearly twenty-five years, no bars on the windows. I have turned this room into a home, but not all the patients do. Some leave their rooms completely bare and leave the hospital-issue bedding on their beds. It’s as if they are refusing to accept that the hospital is their long-term home. But it is, of course, it is. Some patients cover the walls of their rooms with photographs, usually of nude women or young boys, but I do not choose to do this.
There is more room to move about on this new ward and the paintwork is bright and clean. There are two television rooms, one in the dining room where you can go for a smoke and a chat, and the other is in a special room which is just for watching the TV. There is also a quiet room, where you can read or just sit and think, and a games room with a snooker table, a table tennis table, a games computer, and a radio and cassette machine. I don’t bother much with this room. All of us like this ward and our rooms but we are told that if we misbehave the rooms will be taken from us and we will be given smaller ones, and for any bad misbehaviour we will be moved back to the old blocks.
Another reason we don’t want to move back is that in this new ward we have our own laundry with washing and drying machines, and a good shower and bathroom. It’s not like life on the outside, of course, it can never be that, but it’s a thousand times better than what we had. Now I expect some people on the outside, including MPs, will be saying what I have described is too much for madmen, that they are making life too soft for us. Believe me, although our surroundings are better, life in Broad-moor is as tough as it ever was. It is a hard place to be.
As recently as 1988, the Health Advisory Service compiled a report on Broadmoor which condemned the hospital. It said •that changes should be made on 256 separate issues, ranging from the management and day-to-day running of the hospital to more effective ways of treating and rehabilitating patients. The report was concerned about the widespread use of drugs on patients by doctors and nurses, and that concern has been repeated in recent television documentaries. One, in 1993, exposed a doctor here who - it was claimed - has bullied patients and carried out drug experiments on them. Some of his male patients even started to grow female breasts. Three patients have died in drug-related incidents in the past seven years. An inquest on a patient called Orville Blackwood heard how he died within three minutes of being given a drug to control his behaviour. Blackwood, who was suffering from schizophrenia and depression, was given the drug when he became violent on Abingdon ward. The pathologist said he did not believe that Blackwood died from natural causes; he said his death was due to heart failure caused by phenothiazines, calming drugs.
The fact is, a hospital like Broadmoor cannot do without drugs. The question is, are too many used? And too often? Sadly, drugs make life worth living for many of the patients here, and I know that they have made my life more controllable. Forget the newspaper stories, though, about drugs being brought in from outside, by patients’ visitors, in massive quantities. That doesn’t happen any more. Ignore stupid tabloid stories about male and female patients having sex orgies. There is no daily contact at all between male and female patients. We are almost totally segregated: the only time there is ever any contact is at occasional dances, but these are strictly supervised and there is no sexual contact. All the same, one or two hospital romances have started at these dances, and ended in marriage. I don’t go to these dances. I hate enforced gaiety.
I have been married twice, nearly three times. Just before we went down in 1969,1 almost married a girl I knew in the East End. We were good friends and we thought it would be nice to get married, but Reg’s and my life sentence put an end to that. I have always enjoyed the company of women, I like them. Both of my marriages have been in Broadmoor. The first was to a woman called Elaine Mildener, who had two lovely children, a boy and a girl. She started writing to me as a penfriend. Lots of women have written to me over the years, some of them find people like me interesting, I don’t know why. Anyway, she started coming to visit me in Broadmoor, and I liked her, we got on well. She wasn’t really glamorous, but she was a nice lady. After we were married, though, she got a lot of publicity in the papers, which she didn’t like, and it wasn’t good for her kids. So she stopped coming to see me. I understood, and we were divorced. I like the feeling of being married, it gives you a feeling of security. And if ever the authorities are considering releasing a patient they like to know he has a steady wife and a comfortable home to go to. My second marriage was to Kate, the woman who is still my wife. I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her. She had been writing to my brother Reg before she started writing to me. She sent me photographs and I could see she was very attractive. Finally, she came to visit me.
She is a very attractive woman but I love her most because of her lovely personality. She is very much like my mother and she makes me laugh. She understands when I am going into one. She has been under a lot of pressure herself because she is married to me, but she handles it well. There is no sex between us, because that is not allowed, but one day I hope there will be. I have never made any secret that I am bisexual. I have liked other men but I am also attracted to women. Why would a woman like Kate marry a man like me? I don’t know, you’d better ask her. But it is a fact that many women find the patients here attractive. A lot of women even write to and visit Peter Sutcliffe.
Apart from Kate and my brother Reg, my best friend is a patient here called Charlie Smith. He is in for two murders, but they were committed while he was under the influence of drugs, and a kinder feller it would be impossible to know. There is a good chance he will be released before long and I hope it happens, because he is still young enough to make something of his life. He is a brilliant guitar player and with the help of a good friend of ours on the outside, a young record producer called Scott Pine, he recorded an album of his own songs, called Caught In Time. Charlie wrote the songs and sang them into a tape recorder in his room in Somerset House. Scott took them away and put the rest of the backing on in a recording studio. It was very good. Both Charlie and I were very upset when Scott died in 1991, and the Broadmoor authorities showed compassion when they let Charlie go to his funeral.
One of the things that makes Charlie Smith special is that he cares about other patients. Even though he has problems of his own, he makes time for others and tries to help them with their problems. One he befriended was an old feller called George, who’d been here for thirty-five years before cancer killed him. George used to grow tomatoes the size of cricket balls and they were really good to eat. Whenever you met him, George always swore blind he’d been fitted up by the FBI, the CIA, MI5, the KGB and every government agency he could think of. It wasn’t what he said but the way he said it, and every time he told his story it would be different. If you didn’t know he was insane you could easily have been convinced he’d been framed. But, as Charlie says, did anyone ever bother to check George’s story? Maybe it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, and it has happened before. The author of Midnight Express knows only too well what can happen to people in the hands of corrupt officials.
So, this is my life and, in my way, I am happy with it. As happy as I can be. My philosophy is this. I believe we are all just like actors on a stage. We are each given parts to play, and we have to play them to the best of our ability. We may not like the role we have been given, but we mustn’t grumble about it; it is not up to us to question the part that has been given us. Look around, you will find there are people with worse parts to play, and others with better parts. But we must see it through to the end, to the evening of life, until the sun goes do
wn - and hope for a worthy ovation. We must consider the other actors on the stage, our friends and the people we love. Even the people we hate. We must not take for granted the good things about ourselves that God has given us, and the beauty of the things around us for all of us to see. ‘There is none so blind as those who will not see, and none so deaf as those who will not hear.’ Those are my sincere beliefs. The beliefs of the Lifer.
The years roll by.
You can see the winter turn To summer by the sky.
Home seems far away.
How much longer within these walls must I stay?
I say a prayer for my fellow men behind bars Who gaze up to freedom at the stars.
We think things are bad for us,
But there are crippled children who make no fuss.
Let us awaken from our sleep And be as free as sheep.
Let our hearts soar high,
As high as birds in the sky.
As we think of being free,
As at long last the end of the road We can see.
And I would ask you to think about the words of a poem I wrote about Broadmoor. I called it ‘The Troubled Mind’.
As I walk along the Broadmoor corridors I see my fellow men trudging the floors Getting nowhere, like a boat with no oars.
They all have a troubled mind Most are looking for the peace of mind They cannot find.
Some are cruel, some are kind.
God forgive them who have the troubled mind. Only when they go to the Great Beyond Peace will they find.
CHAPTER SEVEN: Kate’s Story
My name is Kate. I am thirty-five. I am a divorcee who’s never had children.
I’m not boasting, but I think I am attractive, quite intelli-gent, fairly amusing, with a bit of a bubbly personality. I have a good figure and I dress well. I live on my own in a nice flat in a town in Kent, and I drive a BMW. I have been involved in various business ventures over the years, including a kissogram company, and achieved success.
I have never been a notorious sort of person. I have never made newspaper headlines. I never expected to and I never wanted to. But, none the less, I did. Because I am the woman who married Ronnie Kray. I am the lady who really did say, ‘I do, Ron, Ron. I do.’ And I’m not kidding!
Sometimes, I’ll be honest, I find it hard to believe myself what has happened. But it’s a fact. For better or for worse - and often it’s been for worse - I have been Ron’s wife since 7 November 1989. And, as I write, I am still Mrs Kray. In that time I’ve known laughter, tears, bitterness and happiness. Some- times, when I see silly headlines in newspapers, like ‘Blonde tells of her love for Mad Ronnie’ and ‘I stole Ronnie Kray’s heart with laughter’, I still find it difficult to believe it’s me they are writing about.
I first became involved with the Krays in 1987. How it came about was really strange, though I knew from an early age that I would have a long association with a prison or someone in a prison. I don’t know how I knew that but I always did, it was like a premonition I had inside me.
It all started at the end of a day’s shopping in London. I had just missed my train home to Kent and, while I waited for the next train, I thought I’d have a look at the books and magazines at one of the bookstalls on Charing Cross, station. I’ve never really been a great book reader, I’ve never seemed to have the time and I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book for myself in my whole life. For some reason I found myself looking at the books in the crime section and one book seemed to catch my attention. It was called The Profession of Violence by John Pearson. Perhaps it was the photograph on the front of the book which held my attention - a photograph of two rather grim-looking young men. I picked up the book and started flicking through the pages and saw some more pictures of these same young men. They were, of course, the Kray twins. I’d heard of them but I didn’t really know much about them. To this day I still don’t know why but I felt compelled to buy the book. I also bought a couple of magazines and it was them that I read on the journey home. I put the book in my bag and forgot all about it. It stayed there for about three months and then, one day, I found it again and started to read it. I found that I couldn’t put it down, I was completely enthralled by this story of Reggie and Ronnie Kray. I just found them fascinating characters.
When I finished the book I felt I just had to write to Reggie Kray, to tell him how much I had enjoyed reading about his life, to find out what had happened to him since he was imprisoned. Don’t ask me why I felt like this, I’ve never done anything remotely like it before. I’ve never felt compelled to write a letter to a complete stranger, especially someone like him, but it just seemed the most natural thing for me to do. I wasn’t lonely, I wasn’t a weirdo and I certainly wasn’t any kind of ‘groupie’. I still can’t really explain what made me do it. Anyway, I rang a newspaper and discovered that Reggie was still in prison - at Gartree, near Market Harborough, in Leicestershire. Then I sat down and started to write.
Looking back on it now I suppose my letter must have seemed a bit dumb. In it I told him about reading the book and how I wondered what had happened to him since. Because I wasn’t quite sure what else to write I asked him daft things, like had his hair gone grey now round the ‘Shirleys’ (temples) and did he still have his own teeth! Really daft things, just trying to be amusing, I suppose. I also sent him a photograph of myself so that he could see I wasn’t some old dragon who was writing to him. I honestly never expected to get a reply but I’ll never forget it when I did. His letter arrived on my birthday and I was chuffed to bits.
We wrote to each other for about four months, at least one letter every week. He turned out to be a prolific letter-writer though I sometimes found his writing hard to decipher. It was very squiggly and scrawly, as though he’d got a thousand things on his mind and he was rushing to get them all down, and he was clearly a bad sleeper because he told me that he wrote many of his letters in the early hours of the morning. He told me about his daily routine in prison, the people he’d met, and how he’d spent the years since he was sent to prison. He told me about the things he liked, music and so on, and he also mentioned his twin brother, Ron, a lot. He was obviously very fond of him. He told me Ron was at Broadmoor. I knew it was a special hospital for criminals but I didn’t know much more than that. I wasn’t even sure where Broadmoor was. He also asked me lots of questions about myself.
I wrote to him about my life which must have seemed pretty tame compared to his. I told him how I’d been born Kathleen Anne Reville, on II June 1956. That makes me a Gemini, the sign of the twins, which, I suppose, was another omen. My dad was Irish and my mother a half-caste. My dad is a carpenter and my mother has worked in the same factory for twenty-three years. I had an ordinary enough childhood for the neighbourhood in which I was brought up. Times were a bit hard for my parents so I was brought up in a large boarding house, in Dartford, Kent, with my nan and grandad and their eleven children. My nan was half black so we were called ‘those little Woggie West kids.’ I don’t know why but as it was never said viciously it never really worried or upset me.
In any case we were all too busy trying to survive to worry about people calling us names. We never had much as kids and I remember always wearing hand-me-downs from other kids. We never had new clothes of our own. And it wasn’t until years later that I discovered it was the norm to have milk on cornflakes and not boiling water. But what my grandparents lacked in money and material things they tried to make up with kindness.
They were great story-tellers and used to enthrall me when they told me about the history of the family, which seemed to me to be very dramatic. They told me that, at the time of the Civil War in America, there was a big uprising in Alabama, which was where my great-grandfather - my grandmother’s father - was bom. My great-grandfather was only three years old at the time and his father hid him on a ship while he went back to collect the rest of his family, so that they could escape the uprising. Well, he never returned and the ship - the Princess Alice -
sailed with the little boy still hidden on board. Finally he was discovered but as it was too late to turn back the crew looked after him and the captain, who was called Johnnie, took a liking to the little black boy and named him Johnnie Alice.
He eventually arrived in Portsmouth, was ‘adopted’ by a woman who ran a whorehouse in the port, and grew up quite happily there. When he was older he had four children, one of whom was my nan. I used to love listening to this and other stories that my grandparents told me. Life was a bit chaotic when I was young because I also had two brothers and a sister and my nan was still having children while I was growing up. I’ve even got an uncle who is younger than me!
I did have a problem when I was about six years old, when a friend of the family offered to take me and my younger brother on an outing. I remember he made my brother wait and turn his back while he took me into some bushes and tried to molest me. I can remember being very frightened and I ran out of the bushes, grabbed my brother’s hand and we ran home together. I was too scared to tell either my parents or my grandparents. I later learned that this same man had been sent to prison for molesting a child.
When I was eleven years old I met two boys, one of whom I was later to marry. I was married for the first time when I was sixteen. I was pregnant at the time and had an abortion which was done badly. I got peritonitis because of this which, I later discovered, had left me infertile. It wasn’t that I was promis-cuous, I think I was just terribly ignorant. No one had ever bothered to explain the facts of life to me. I had to learn the hard way about sex and men.
My first marriage lasted only a year and a day. I can remember the wedding vividly. It was on 1 June and I had a big white wedding with as many trimmings as we could afford at the time. He wasn’t a bad boy, he meant well, but I can recall walking in the back door of his mum’s house, where we were living, three months after the marriage. He was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a pair of pink striped pyjamas and smoking a pipe. I thought to myself, ‘God, is this what it’s going to be like for the rest of my life?’ That was really the beginning of the end of that marriage. Needless to say it didn’t last a lot longer. I finally told him it was all over and, as I left, he said to me, ‘I hope you find what you’re looking for.’ Well, I can honestly say a man in pink pyjamas smoking a pipe wasn’t it!