The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  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.

  In his corner, Nat Sellers and his seconds tried to revive Jimmy with ice at the base of his skull. He remained unconscious for three minutes. It was seven or eight minutes before they were able get him standing between two of them and assist him from the ring.

  Instead of leading, which was his right as the winner, Jackie followed. He saw the empty seats with the strips of white paper saying ‘RESERVED’ on. He looked up to the wide perspex window of the VIP room where none of them had apprehended what had just taken place below, but were only waiting for their name to be called on the public address and listening to hear the volume of cheering which would go up when they stepped into the light and formally bestowed their presence on the fight-goers from the badly sprung and blood-spattered ring. They had been speaking of this or this or looking around to have their drink freshened and had failed to catch the catastrophic moment when a man hurt his brain so badly that he would still be learning to walk and talk and lift a spoon to his mouth in a year’s, even two years’, time.

  The brain is a jelly-like mass suspended inside the skull in cerebrospinal fluid. Think of it like this (the white-coated specialist in his dusty basement office explained to Jackie): the brain is like a blancmange
in a box, connected by thin strings which are the blood vessels. As a punch shakes or rotates the head, those ‘strings’ are being ripped apart. The blood flow puts pressure on the surface of the brain and the pressure of the added blood compresses the brain, causing unconsciousness, coma, and sometimes death. Repeated ‘sub-lethal’ blows such as those sustained in training are more dangerous than one-time knockouts. But it is the devastating knockout that most often causes death.

  When the end came for Jimmy six weeks later – an end that Jackie would always remain convinced he had contributed to – Jackie was there. It was another small-hall promotion at Caledonian Road Baths and Jimmy this time had been put in against a Welshman called Boyo Morgan who was a lanky, unmuscled, string bean of a boy, shy to the point of invisibility outside the ring, but lethal inside it, with a punch like a mule. Jimmy had complained of tiredness and occasional dizzy spells since the KO by Jackie but, always co-operative, amenable, whatever anybody asked of him, he was quite sure he wanted to go on.

  It was a hot night at the end of an exceptionally hot summer. All the doors and the windows in the hall had been jammed open in an attempt to get some air flowing through, but the fight was fought in torpor and strength-sapping heat. (Jackie had a clear memory of glancing up at the dome above the ring and seeing several figures tilted in against the slatted glass and another cobalt summer-night sky.) A number of men in the audience were stripped to the waist by the close of the fight, swabbing themselves with their shirts.

  Jimmy gathered himself. He weaved and swerved into and out of distance, and he scored cleanly and well and probably shaved the first two rounds. In the third, Morgan dropped him with a right cross and a left hook to the head, but he was up again after three or four seconds. Honours in the fourth were even, but Jimmy walked on to an arcing right uppercut in the fifth and by the sixth he was already looking spent. From the sixth round onwards every punch thrown by Boyo Morgan jarred Jimmy. In the eighth Jimmy was forced to take two counts. In the ninth it seemed more than likely that the referee would be forced to stop the contest to save him. At one moment he stood defenceless rocking on his heels as Morgan measured him again and again, driving hard rights and lefts to the jaw.

  By the start of the twelfth round Jimmy had been on the canvas four times. For most of the audience it was a relief when Morgan chopped him with a hard, loping left to Jimmy’s head, dropping him for the last time. He was unconscious before he hit the canvas and his relaxed neck muscles allowed his head to thud against the boards.

  ‘It didn’t feel particularly special‚’ Boyo Morgan told the reporters from the local papers who crowded round him afterwards. ‘Just everything I had.’

  Jimmy was in a coma for a month. He had suffered an acute haematoma, an injury most often seen in car-crash victims.

  After a month, he started to show the first signs that he was coming out of his coma. By November, he was able to communicate by blinking, and in January moved his right arm and leg slightly for the first time. By May he was able to form sentences and respond to simple commands. After a year he was still paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, as he would be for the rest of his life. He was able to feed himself when not feeling too tired, and was learning to talk again although his speech would always be halting and slow.

  Jackie brought bulletins on Jimmy’s progress from St Bartholomew’s Hospital back to Great Windmill Street, but he very quickly sensed Mr Solomons’ interest melting away. He was a busy man and they were, after all, hectic times with, just in the year of Jimmy Li’s personal tragedy, many wheels to grease and fires to stoke. Mr Solomons had Woodcock-Mills, Mills-Maxim, 50,000-seaters, fights that were energetically promoted to the status of national occasions. Then he had Mills’s retirement which left him with no British-born fighter capable of drawing these full houses of on-the-nose paying customers. But then along came the infant prodigy Randolph Turpin, youngest of the three fighting Turpin brothers and, in spite of being half black, box-office dynamite.

  In 1951, Mr Solomons had Turpin-Sugar Ray Robinson 1, an event complicated by the cross-examination of Robinson’s camp followers following the disappearance and murder of a little girl last seen alive near his training quarters at Windsor, and further calamatized by Jack’s brother-in-law Izzey Cohen taking a heart attack and dying ringside. He had the return, Turpin-Sugar Ray 2, and the headaches and shlemozzel arising from Turpin’s arrest in New York for allegedly raping a girl in his shower. He had the former high-earning prodigy Eric Boon, who was down but refusing to declare himself out, and this one and that one and the never-ending daily parade of coat-tuggers and mitt-glommers pleading special cases for his time. Plus, Mr Solomons had never been under any illusions, as Jackie knew.

  ‘They want to see it done to you, or you do it to the man. But they want to see it‚’ he had once told Jackie. ‘Everybody likes to see the fights. You watch the faces in a boxing crowd when it gets exciting and you see expressions on people’s faces you don’t see anywhere else. It’s a different expression. Motor-racing, the crowds are always on the bends. That’s in people. You haven’t got long enough to understand what’s in people. The cameras are looking at you; the people are there howling for your blood. A guy is punching you to pieces. It’s all very basic. There’s just something in all of us.’

  It was out in the open where Mr Solomons stood. It was spelled out on a plaque which hung over his head: ‘WINNERS WIN. LOSERS MAKE THEIR OWN ARRANGEMENTS.’

  ‘This Jimmy Li. Very nice boy. I’m very sorry what happened‚’ he said. ‘But he knew when he came over it wasn’t going to be no game of doughnuts. Nobody ever told him it was a top-hats and tea party. So?’ He shrugged.

  Jimmy Li was still learning to walk and talk when Jackie snagged his foot in the canvas and did his knee and had to stand and watch his own career go down the pan following his title eliminator at the Empress Hall against Alby Ash. He was handed the sponge and the bucket and delegated sole responsibility for Mr Solomons’ wife’s, Fay’s, fight-night needs and hot-dog snack requirements.

  So there it was: Jackie and Jimmy gimps and losers both; both relegated from being prospects to a future of small returns and the lowly, grubbing-around end of the food chain. At least Jackie had the compensation of being mishpochah; he was still regarded as family.

  The fact was that, even when Jackie was being groomed for a champion and still training intensively, Mr Solomons had imposed on him to run little errands on his behalf – take to that person, collect from this person, and a here and a there, no questions. Jackie was part of the special intelligence-gathering operation that Mr Solomons referred to as his ‘SI6’. ‘Sooner or later‚’ he assured Jackie, ‘every mug, pug and slug’ – he really did talk like this, taking great pride in spieling his own script in colourful Runyonesque words occasionally stretching to more than one syllable – ‘every mug, pug and slug finds his way to the cafés, pubs, milk bars, dance dumps and billiards barns within spitting distance of this office. A million tongues wag there every minute of the day and half the night and if I didn’t plant a smart ear or two to snap up unconsidered trifles for me, well, Mrs Solomons’ little boy would indeed be a sap.’

  No matter how on the bottle and given up to the moment Jackie appeared to be at the Latin Quarter or the Modernairre or Club 11 or wherever he happened to have arrived on his nocturnal round, part of him still acted as the boss’s ears, flapping for Jack in the snakepit that was the cradle of the noble art. If there was, say, somebody having trouble making weight for a fight and weakening himself with steam baths and laxatives and sucking on copper coins to make spit – that would come back. Or a boxer in training with a damaged eye or fist that he was trying to cover up. Or the wide boys saying for the benefit of the mug punters they had their money on x when they were in fact on y. Or some mockie manager facing up Mr Solomons for £250 for a fight when Jackie knew from Ben and Dolly at the Archer Street café that he would be overjoyed to sign for £150, because he had been in for a
tea and a rock bun that morning, that would also count as valuable intelligence and be marked up as Brownie points. Jackie was authorized to slip the odd note to Greta at the Corner House and to any one of a dozen doormen and sharpies around town and had built up an effective, low-level network of his own.

  He had been married to Tina from the Greek café in Frying Pan Alley for a little over six months at the time of the accident that forced him to hang up his gloves and living in faraway Streatham with Tina’s mother and father, Mary and Hercules Metaxas, and the rest of the well-meaning but rackety Metaxas clan. Tina had lost the baby that he didn’t know she was carrying while Jackie was in hospital recovering from the series of operations on his knee. And this, combined with the dip in his professional fortunes, had confirmed what they had really known since the day Herky Metaxas had made them legitimize their entanglement: that it wasn’t going to work.

  Metaxas wanted to bring his son-in-law into the family business but Jackie understandably wasn’t keen to give up the eventful life he had found for himself in the West End in order to compete with various neck-bracelet-wearing brothers and hairy-backed little relatives to become chief olive-pitter or head griller of the aubergines or staying up half the night basting the slow-cooking knuckles of lamb they called klephtica. It was another greasy, heartburn-inducing food and another non-indigenous way of life and Tina was obviously destined to marry the ouzo-importing cousin she did end up marrying just as soon as her brief liaison with Jackie could be pronounced kaputted and officially over and done with, no hard feelings on either side.