by Hannah Lowe
‘Darlin’, have a go!’ Sylvester said, dropping the dice into my hand. He wore a gold ring on his little finger. ‘Blow some luck into your fist.’ I blew into my balled hand and rolled the dice, then scooped them up, and rolled them again. It was a hot evening in the garden, the sky a soft shade of pink. I felt small and safe with those tall men on either side of me.
‘Yes, yes, we training you,’ Frank said, and put his hand on my head. They were laughing. I knew I’d been included in a ritual I wasn’t meant to be a part of, and I liked it.
Afterwards, they carried the tables upended down the alleyway at the side of our house and put them into the truck pulled on the drive. It was nearly dark. I was feeding the fish in the pond, letting them kiss my fingers, when John came through the alley gate, his hat in his hand, showing his shiny head.
‘You like the dice,’ he said. ‘You see your daddy play?’ His smile showed his gold teeth. ‘Not bad, not bad.’ I didn’t know what to say. We stood side by side, watching the fish.
‘I see you liking it,’ he said. ‘Your daddy is a good man.’ He sat down on the grass and crossed his legs. ‘Let me tell you a story.’ He paused to make sure he had my attention. I took my hand from the pond reluctantly, not sure I wanted to hear it.
‘I came from Castries, thirty years ago,’ he began. ‘You know where Castries is?’
‘St Lucia?’ I asked.
‘That’s right, clever girl.’ He winked. ‘My mother told me, “John, go on now. Be always good. Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” She said, “You have a gift for wood and England will be rosy.” ’ He pointed to himself. ‘I was seventeen. Oh, it was a scary place, the ship, the sea. I couldn’t sleep, played cards the whole long journey; what I lost the first night, took me sixty days to win again.’ He sighed dramatically, his head bowed. ‘I came to Paddington. So lonely. I met your daddy dealing on the Edgware Road. All the fellows in the upstairs room, below a yellow bulb, and no one going home.’ He raised a finger. ‘A gambler is never lonely – is another man who always wants his money.’ I realised I was listening to John’s confession, and he was in no hurry to let me go, lost in his own reveries.
‘Every gambler has his curse,’ he said authoritatively. ‘For me it’s horses. The devil prowls around, seeking someone to devour. Then a letter in my post box said my mummy is dying, am I coming home?’ He looked up, tears in his eyes. ‘It was thirty years since I came from Castries.’
Suddenly I felt sorry for John. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
He sighed. ‘I took my money to the bookies and I lost it all. In bets there is a fool and a thief.’ He shook his head. ‘It was your daddy give me work and lend me what him can. Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.’ He smiled, showing his gold teeth. ‘I made it home. Her hand in mine, I help her on from this life to the next. Amen. Amen.’ He stood abruptly, put his hat on and tipped it. ‘Be good. Listen to your father who gave you life. God loves you. And love your daddy, don't forget. He was whistling as he walked away.
♠
Clearly my father had magical powers when it came to dice, and could manipulate playing cards in all kinds of ways, but beyond knowing this, his night-time activities were a mystery to me. There was a cupboard in our hall, below the stairs, where the hammer and screwdrivers were kept, along with tins of varnish, buckets, rollers, a paint-splashed stepladder. A bare bulb lit the space, which always seemed mysterious, as though its dark corner might slope off to a secret room. The shelves held an assortment of cake and biscuit tins of different shapes and sizes. Inside these were my father’s dice – not the small white dice of a Monopoly board, but large red and green dice, transparent, the shades of rubies and emeralds with big white spots. Other tins held packs of cards, always Kem, the American brand, plastic backed with swirling red or navy blue patterns. Alongside them were marker pens and pots of ink, pins and needles, Stanley knives and razor blades, and right at the back of a shelf was a very small guillotine. I didn’t know it then, but these were the tools of my father’s trade.
It was my mother who filled me in, years later, repeating my father’s motto – If you can’t win it straight, win it crooked, meaning that he cheated when he needed to, in a variety of ways. These included counting cards, marking them, or slipping them in and out of play. She didn’t know about this when they first met, but later she saw him practising and he would leave things out around the house – the pens and the blades for shaving cards, a dentist’s drill for loading dice. Back then he was playing all the time, out all afternoon at dice games in Whitechapel or Bow. He’d come home for dinner and to change his shirt, blow her a kiss and be gone. He might come back at twelve if things were slow, or he mightn’t come home until the following day. We needed the money, she said, so I didn’t complain. He was winning big all the time – three hundred pounds here, four hundred pounds there – a fortune in 1968 for one night’s work. My mother was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the way my father earned his living; in her mind, there was a distinction between his methods – counting cards and using sleight of hand were expert skills, but marking cards was dishonest. Regardless, all of them required hours of practice. Your dad had a photographic memory, she said. ‘He might have been born with it, but he honed it well.’ Here, my own recollections corroborate her words. I used to watch him dealing out cards to memorise them, mouthing the numbers and suits to himself. He’d be at it for hours. He could recall the order of an entire deck, so he always knew which cards were in the pile and which were still in play. He used to deal the other players what they needed, but he always had the better hand. One time he came home raging mad, complaining to my mother that a man he’d dealt a jack of spades to hadn’t played it. Like he’d done your father wrong, my mother said, and not the other way around!
He also had incredible sleight of hand, and was able to slip cards in and out of play. I think he learned all that in Jamaica, she said. Some Chinese fellow used to show him tricks. He was brilliant at it. But he marked cards too. I wasn’t sure about that. It wasn’t moral. Indeed, the whole world of gambling, according to my mother, was immoral and dangerous. A few people – ‘confidants’, my father called them – knew what he could do, and would pay him to prepare a deck or load a pair of dice. It was a nice earner, she said, but I worried that they’d tell on him. Nothing good would come of getting caught.
I always thought my father had false front teeth because he was old, but in fact some fellow who thought my father had cheated him had knocked them out. Another time, in Ladbroke Grove, another chap accused him of palming a card. Things got nasty and my father had to leave. It hadn’t ended there. There were lots of phone calls and worry – who knew what and who’d seen whom – but one way or another my father finally charmed his way out of it.
He was older than many in the gambling fraternity and he was renowned among them, for his dexterous dealing and his winning streak, no doubt. He was considered a kind-hearted gentleman in that tough, edgy world, but surely his cronies can’t have known the truth of what he did? My mother didn’t think so. If you can’t win it straight, win it crooked. They can't have known my father lived by that motto .
♥
My father was a complicated man, full of contradictions and morally ambiguous – on the one hand, seemingly happy to cheat his fellow gamblers out of their money; on the other, happy to lend or give money when he had it, to just about anyone who asked. From either side, it was as though he didn’t value money in the way that other people did. Some days he had it, some days it was gone.
Years of gambling must have taught him to read situations well. Yet there were other times when his skills of intuition failed him completely. He’d once been arrested for, in his words, ‘doing a friend a favour’. This friend was Ginger Brian, a local criminal everybody thought was mad. He had a shock of red hair and small, rabbity teeth, and was missing a finger and a thumb, apparently lost to a dog. Brian organised illegal dog fig
hts and rumour had it he beat his dogs with chains to toughen them up.
My father knew Brian from the bookies, but they weren’t close. It was a mystery as to why he phoned the house one day and asked my father for a lift to town because his car had broken down. Anyone else might have smelt a rat, but my father told him yes, no problem, and arranged to pick him up in Forest Gate. But in the car, Brian pulled out a gun and started waving it around, telling my father that he planned to kill a nightclub owner in Piccadilly who allegedly owed Brian money. The details are a little fuzzy here. For some reason, perhaps because he was scared, my father drove Brian to the club, but as soon as they got there, before they’d even stepped out, the police surrounded the car – and not just any police, but armed police, and my father and Ginger Brian were arrested. They kept my father in a cell overnight, and all the next day and the following night.
My mother was frantic with worry and phoned every number in my father’s phone book. He finally called her from the police station, asking could she come and get him and could she ask her brother Terry if he could put some money up for his bail? He’d been charged with intent to commit affray and possession of a firearm. The silly git, my mother said. I should have left him there.
In the end, the case was thrown out. It turned out that Ginger Brian and the club owner had been waving guns at each other for weeks, but no one was quite sure of the reason, including them. Nevertheless, my father had to spend two nights in jail for doing Ginger Brian a favour, or, as my mother said, for being bloody thick.
You might expect a gambling man to be reckless or profligate, unconcerned with the affairs of the wider world, but in fact my father felt his responsibility as a citizen and was surprisingly political – a committed socialist, in fact, since, as a young man in Jamaica, he’d been involved in the country’s struggle for independence. In England he’d joined the Communist Party and sold the Daily Worker outside the Tube. Then, when Harold Wilson became prime minister in 1964 – the year my parents got together – they both joined the local Labour Party, went to all the meetings, posted leaflets at election time. My mother used to staff the polling station on election day, keeping a list of who’d been in, while my father drove his car around our neighbourhood, knocking on people’s doors. He would bring old ladies to the polling station to cast their vote, or teenagers who hadn’t known they were old enough.
Aged six or seven, I remember trailing with him up and down our neighbours’ garden paths, a stack of bright red Labour leaflets in our hands. I didn’t understand elections or politics. I used to watch the police attacking the miners on the television and Margaret Thatcher speaking in her bright blue suits, her bouffant hair always looking thin and wan. I didn’t understand the things she said, knowing only that I didn’t like her. When I misbehaved, my father used to hunch his shoulders, pull a face and say, ‘You better watch your step, or I’ll send in Mrs Thatcher.’ From this, I gauged her villainy. In my childish world, it was enough to know Labour liked the colour red and were the good guys, while the Conservatives were blue and bad.
♣
The incident with Ginger Brian was not my father’s only run-in with the law. Apparently he had been caught at an illegal poker game sometime in the sixties, just before getting together with my mother. Betting shops were already legal but card gambling was still prohibited, and police raids on gambling parlours were common. My father been arrested at a card table – red-handed, as it were – playing cards in hand, a pile of cash in front of him.
In court, he chose to represent himself, taking the stand in his smart suit to give an impassioned speech against the current gambling laws. His argument had two threads – the first was that the criminalisation of gambling was a moral censor initiated by the church, who associated gambling with the sin of selfishness and could not tolerate participants’ faith in chance over God; and secondly, related to the first, the laws were a paternalistic form of social control, penalising and patronising the working classes whose agency and self-determination they denied. The transcript of the speech was printed in the evening newspaper and my father preserved the cutting, proudly glueing it onto the first page of an empty scrapbook, perhaps hoping to fill the rest of the pages with further reports of his campaign. Like many of my father’s ideas, it came to nothing in the end. The judge in the case listened with amusement as my father extolled his views, then imposed a hefty fine.
There were other minor misdemeanours. Small-time criminality went hand-in-hand with gambling, and my father often brought home ‘swag’ from the clubs – leather coats and shoes, plates and silver cutlery, expensive towels. He brought home a microwave and a Moulinex food mixer my mother loved. Everything knocked-off, of course. She turned forty in 1984 and the day before her birthday he dragged a bin-liner of dresses in from the car – ‘No tat,’ he said. ‘Upmarket frocks.’ She hung them in her wardrobe: glitzy dresses with pleats and shoulder pads, not her style at all, and she never put them on, except for the bright red dress she wore the night of her birthday party. It was red satin with a black sash across the middle, like something worn by a character from Dynasty or Dallas, my favourite TV shows at the time.
My memories of the party are slightly hazy, mainly because I was blind drunk. My mother’s friends arrived at Ashgrove Road in droves – mostly teachers she had known from the different schools she’d worked at over the years and neighbours from our street. Sam and I and the three cousins were banished upstairs with Joseph, my father’s niece’s son, all the way from Peckham. At fifteen, he was the oldest. He wore his Afro in a flat-top and when he laughed, his eyes creased up and made him beautiful. The girls and I swooned.
We sent Alf down to steal the alcohol, bottle after bottle, then, clueless what to do with it, we mixed it in the way we’d seen our parents do, on the ironing board we set up as a bar in the big spare room. We had no mixers, so gin was mixed with lager and rum with Babycham, concoctions we then downed with great bravado, grimacing, until our heads fizzed and we couldn’t stop laughing. Hits Five was playing on the tape recorder, the volume turned right up. We drew the curtains and put the lamps on for a nightclub feel.
‘Let’s limbo!’ Maria shouted, holding up the broom, and the six of us straddled, bumped and shook below it, lower and lower, until I bent so far I thought I’d snap in two, as though the alcohol had made me bendier. Then Susanna had a nosebleed and had to lie on her bed with her head hung back while Alf pinched her nose. It didn’t work. I was sent downstairs for ice to stem the flow of blood.
From the top of the stairs I saw a small man with highlighted hair standing by the front door. He was naked except for a leopard-skin loincloth. In his shaking arms he held my mother, who must have weighed three stone more than him. The red dress was hitched above her knees to show her shiny thighs, a black lace garter sunk into the flesh. She was flushed in his arms, her head thrown back, laughing. Everyone, including Tarzan, was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ at the tops of their voices.
‘Everyone! Tarzan’s downstairs!’ I ran upstairs and shouted, but the limbo dance had resumed with Joseph nearly on his knees to slide below the broom while the others cheered him on. By the time I went back to look, Tarzan had disappeared, as though I’d dreamt him. My father was standing in the hall with Charlie Walker, both smoking and talking conspiratorially. The pair of them looked out of place and shifty among my mother’s friends. Back in the bedroom, Sam had disappeared. Alf and Susanna were passed out across the bed, and Joseph and Maria were in the dark corner, their arms wrapped around each other, kissing.
♦
We went on holiday in Dorset that summer, to the same campsite we’d been to with the cousins for the last five years. We packed our trailer, fixed it to the car, and off we went in convoy to Osmington Mills, just outside Weymouth. Two weeks on the green cliffs above the sea, barbecues every night or fish and chips, the adults supping beer on benches outside The Smuggler’s Arms, us playing on the swings and slides, as the sun went down over the hill
s.
I had my first bikini that holiday – bright blue with Minnie Mouse’s smiling face embossed on the top and bottoms. My mother had found it in a seafront shop in Weymouth. I remember little Alfie running to the campsite pool to tell me I had a present waiting at the tent. I ran back and my mother handed me the bikini. I loved it from that moment and didn’t take it off all holiday. Imagine my surprise when, years later, she confessed she’d stolen it. It wasn’t only my father whose attitude to the law was flexible. Annoyed at the long queue in the shop, she’d snuck it into her bag and ambled out, making a getaway along the promenade. My father had chased her and grabbed her arm.
‘What, you going to call the police on me?’ she said incredulously, shrugging his hand off.
‘You can’t just steal it!’ he said. ‘You must take it back.’ In his view, receiving stolen goods was fine, but stealing them in the first place clearly wasn’t.
‘Not on your nelly!’ she replied.
♠
I nearly drowned that year in the campsite swimming pool. I could just about doggy-paddle, but when Sam told me I should try jumping into the deep end, I did, wanting to impress him. The pool was packed with children leaping and diving in, with rubber rings and lilos. I panicked, flailing, then sinking down, my lungs too full of water when I cleared the surface to call for help. I was only a few feet from the edge and I remember a blonde girl clinging to the side in arm-bands, watching as I sunk and surfaced over and over again, the strange silver-turquoise light of the water and the kicking legs and feet all around me. I knew I was going to die, until an arm was around my neck and pulling me clear as I gasped for air, my eyes fixed on the clear sky above me.
It was Maria, standing on the tips of her flippers, wading through the water from the shallow end where she’d seen me struggling. She dragged me out onto the concrete and held me as I caught my breath and cried into her thin brown shoulder. I was scared and exhausted, shivering in the hot sun, wrapped in my towel. Later we walked across the fields to the tents, and vowed we wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. We both knew it was serious – I was lucky to be alive.