A screw called Davidson warned me of an impending transfer to a Liverpool prison because I was difficult. Typically, I told him I’d play up to get even. Davidson worked in Records and knew my history. ‘Don’t do it, Ces. They’re itching to certify you as a criminal lunatic and send you to Broadmoor. You won’t get out—ever. You’re sailing close to the wind now.’ I trod on eggshells for months.
I wasn’t out long before a pale redhead with green eyes took my eye, and it wasn’t long before I’d moved in with Dot. Cowboy Joe Armstrong regularly visited us and Dot loved to hear him play banjo and yodel. Dot’s spiteful Geordie landlady, Edna, never took to Dot. One. day Edna bailed me up: did I know Joe and Dot were going to meet in Nelson Street that night? Were they now? If Joe considered stealing my woman he could also rip me off in business. I hid in the shadows off Nelson Street. Joe turned up smartly dressed with his banjo. Dot wore a full-skirted dress, nylons and high heels. I stepped out and walked up to Joe, my head tilted, eyes boring into him with menace. I grabbed his banjo and hit him over the head, smashing it. Both of them ran off, Dot to Edna’s. I never saw Joe again, a disappointing end to a long friendship.
I walked a while. I blamed Dot for seducing Joe. She shouldn’t get off so lightly. I knocked on her door. She opened it and stood looking at me. Without a word I drew my fist back and struck. I heard her nose crack.
The inner tranquillity I’d hoped this would bring never came; I felt wretched, sick with guilt and remorse. I’d behaved like my father again. I drove Dot to hospital, telling her to say she’d hit her nose on the dashboard when I braked suddenly. She nodded. The doctor stuck wires up her nose and moulded a plaster cast over it. We drove back in silence. Edna was in the corridor as I walked Dot to her door. Her malicious smirk gave me the awful feeling I had been a pawn in Edna’s game. I packed and left. It was time to lie low.
I moved in with Spilsbury, an old friend of my father’s, who lived in highbrow Victoria Park where police were seldom seen. Garrulous, he needed a listener not rent, though I gave him a few bob for food.
Several days later I went to see how Dot was getting on. If I felt bad about hurting her I felt worse when I saw her. Two black eyes around a white nose framed by red hair made her a tragic clown, and she was hiding herself away because of her appearance. I invited her to a cafe for dinner. ‘But people’ll say …’ ‘Nobody will say anything.’ And no-one dared. For a while we continued seeing each other, but I didn’t trust her fidelity and she didn’t trust my self control, so it was as good as over.
My relationship with Spilsbury was disintegrating too. He was a heavy drinker and had an unhappy dark side to his nature. Under the influence, he became cranky and unpleasant. After one binge Spilsbury lost his temper. He struck me with a stick with little horns on it. I covered my head with my elbows and forearms but he continued. I saw red. A strong left hook sent him flying. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I’d broken his jaw.
Spilsbury was capable of being so unpleasant the incident would end in court, so I took off. If I was sentenced again, it would be for a long time. I left Manchester fast and went to Tangiers. I knew a British criminal there, Paul Lund, who was also on the run after jumping bail. Morocco had no extradition treaties, so Paul was living safely as a fugitive from justice. I’d kept my passport up to date in case of just such an emergency.
Tangiers was a busy international port, a splash of colour and full of excitement. I loved the diversity of nationalities living together. The streets were a milling mass of people and vehicles, the air was electric with the cries of street vendors, the loud chatter of pedestrians and tooting horns. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, even the blokes riding donkeys. When siesta fell the place calmed down, people drank and slept. It was an unbelievable contrast to Manchester.
Only a stone’s throw away was the European Quarter where Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth’s heiress, owned a grand house. In the harbour was the yacht of the mafia boss, Lucky Luciano, which once belonged to Errol Flynn. It was just a magical place, provided you wanted to lead a life of villainy and were accepted by the other villains there.
Everything I’d heard about Tangiers seemed true. International zone. Free port. No tax. Everyone was crooked and on the make. Paul ran the Navaro bar in the Socco Shic Arab Quarter. He arranged a job, for me, smuggling out of Tangiers to Algeciras in Spain. We landed a boat full of cigarettes on the Spanish coast without a hitch. The Spanish police had already been paid off.
The pay-off didn’t happen on the second run. As our whisky-laden boat approached Spain, I saw police and soldiers watching us from the shore. They started firing. The German captain spun the boat and made off at high speed to a headland. I thought he was mad, heading for another part of the Spanish shore. If we ended up on Spanish soil we could be executed or imprisoned for life. However, the captain knew the waters well and he was heading back to Tangiers. The journey lasted about half an hour and I sweated all the way.
That incident gave me such a fright I went to Gibraltar. I stayed in the Britania Hotel for a week. Although the place was clean, the food was lousy and a rip-off. I decided not to pay the bill and just walked out.
Back in Manchester, the police were still looking for me regarding my assault on Spilsbury. I travelled down to London, broke. I took on a job working for the blind, selling combs and toothbrushes. I could keep a percentage of what I earned and this supplied me with just enough money to rent a room in a London boarding house. The patron of the charity I worked for was Lord Someone. I was a good salesman but found a lot of people suspicious and hostile about this charity. I discovered it was a fraud. The combs and toothbrushes I’d been selling had ‘Made by the Blind’ stamped on them, but only about four of the 12 people in the factory were disabled. Somebody must have dobbed me in: the police suddenly raided my boarding house and arrested me. I was handcuffed and escorted to a police station in London.
The cell door clanged shut. I stood there, slowly taking in the familiar surroundings, but feeling strangely removed from it all. I’d come upon a mental stone wall which prevented me from going further. Imagine a man in the sea who’d struggled to keep afloat for a long time and then thinking, ‘God, I’m so tired.’ He just lets the sea take him. That’s how I felt. I’d been terrified of dying, but now I just couldn’t care. I was ready to go.
I heard the policeman on duty do his round, checking each cell before retiring. The policeman’s footsteps receded. I’d be left alone for hours now.
I picked up a large ceramic cup. It held a steaming pint of tea. I smashed it against the edge of the table. The scalding black liquid sloshed across its pitted wooden surface and dribbled over the edge.
I thought back on my life and the person I’d become. Expelled from most schools in Manchester, two failed marriages, five times in jail including Dartmoor: quite a record of failure for a 31 year old. I felt an overwhelming anger. With the sharp broken edge of the cup, I hit my wrists hard, then harder, really going berserk. 1 was bitter, striking out at my father, schoolteachers, police, warders … People were always putting their boot in, grinding me into the ground. My wrists were on fire, my heart thumping wildly, sick from the power of my emotions and the warm sticky smell of my escaping life force.
Numbness slowly enveloped me. I felt drained. The cup dropped to the floor. I blankly stared down at my wrists and the blood spurting from them. Feeling weak and dizzy, I slumped on the chair, closed my eyes and gave a deep sigh. For the first time, perhaps in my whole life, I felt the beginning of a glorious peace.
The policeman on duty finished his rounds, counting prisoners preparatory to locking up. He later told me that he heard no noise, but for the first time in his life he felt a strong need to go back and recheck the cells. For Ces Waters, it was an excellent thing that he listened to his intuition.
When he looked into my cell and saw the state I was in, he immediately sounded the alarm. I was rushed to a hospital where I was treated and put in an obser
vation ward. When I was feeling stronger I was taken to a psychiatric unit in the same hospital with a lot of other disturbed people. The psychiatrist told me that I was badly in need of psychiatric treatment. I felt very alone and longed for warm human company. I told them I was a Salvationist. It was arranged that one of their disciples would come and talk to me.
Over several weeks a Salvation Army lass regularly came to chat. She told of the terrible lives that people had to endure and made me realise that I really had much to live for. I felt guilty for having been so selfish. The lady told me there was much I could still do to help others. I had the potential to make the rest of my life valuable and rewarding. On the last day she visited, she gave me a Bible. She said, `If you ever give it away to anybody, I hope it will be to a good friend.’
19 Epiphany
Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will
lodge; thy people will be my people, and thy God my God.
Book of Ruth, 1.16
Ces was tried for the assault on Spilsbury and was sentenced to 18 months’ jail. It was to be the last time he was to serve time in prison, though he was jailed and remanded later, both in the UK and Australia. The way he told the story of his suicide attempt was intensely moving. When I was a believer, this story very naturally formed the first chapter of the book. When you consider the broken lives we all encounter, all around us, all the time, Ces’s following account of his personal revelation and redemption was like drinking at the Well of What is Possible in a world short on miracles. It was pivotal in the way John and I told Ces’s story in Rebels with a Cause for television. The tax-collector St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is always good copy.
I was only back in Strangeways prison for about a week when I became aware of some process of change taking place within me, sparked off by the words of the Salvation Army lass, Teddy Devlin’s hanging and other personal realisations regarding my violent, antisocial behaviour. I sat on the chair in my cell and decided something had to be done. The two recent sentences in quick succession had been a shock. It wasn’t the size of the sentences—I’d eaten big porridge before. It was the speed with which I received them. This indicated to me that there wasn’t much future for me in Manchester and I’d better do something about it.
Next, I arranged an appointment to see the Governor of Strangeways. I confidently told him that my first step towards rehabilitation would require a transfer to Preston Prison. I chose Preston because it was removed from the Manchester scene. I wanted to be away from the influence of villain friends who helped perpetuate the vicious cycle of crime and punishment that was dragging me deeper and deeper into trouble. The governor must have thought I was mad and he had a good laugh. Nobody wanted to go to Preston. It had a bad reputation, though it certainly wasn’t as bad as Dartmoor.
The governor gave me the benefit of the doubt and transferred me. I was delighted to meet up with a few familiar faces and was surprised how quickly I was able to mould back into prison life. I was soon helping to organise a few prison concerts and went on some of them as a comedian.
After several months I reminded the Preston Governor I hadn’t been in any trouble and wanted to be a trustee. He agreed to give me a go. Trustees wore a red band and patrolled the area where they burned rubbish in the incinerator.
While I was at the incinerator I collected little bits of lead and melted them inside a dinner dish. I stuck an iron pole in the centre of the dish and waited till it cooled and the lead had hardened. I knocked off the bowl, leaving the lead attached on the end of the pole. I did this on both ends and made myself a nice pair of weights.
Now and again a prison officer called Harris would bring tea which I’d brew on my incinerator fire. As we warmed ourselves by the flames, we’d talk about Jack Dempsey, the boxer, of whom he was a distant relation. Harris also arranged that when I finished my work in the evening, instead of going straight back into my cell, I could jog for 30 minutes around the perimeter of the prison’s wall.
I held the incinerator job until about four weeks before my release. The reason I was taken off the job was comical. I found an exhausted carrier pigeon. in the prison grounds. I watered and fed it until it was strong enough to resume its journey, then tied a little note to one of its legs. It flew away but must have come down exhausted some distance away. Somebody found the note on which I’d scrawled: `My number is … and my name is C Waters. Would the person who finds this please send me a letter at …’ The person took it to the police who referred it to the governor. He called me up and took away my red band as punishment.
In the middle of 1959 I was released from Preston. I asked the governor for a railway warrant direct to London. I knew I had to get far away from the environment and influences that had continually corrupted me. I travelled direct to “Euston Station with a firm resolution to begin a new, respectable life. There were a few hurdles to overcome—I was almost penniless, had a long police record, no job to go to, nowhere to stay and no friends in London—but this didn’t daunt me. I was determined to succeed.
20 Swinging London
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
Dr Samuel Johnson
London was the first chapter in a new life. From Euston Station I wandered like a lost animal freed from a cage in a strange forest. The loose change in my pocket would not last a night. Would I end up like Woodbine Annie, a homeless tramp? At National Assistance a clerk told me I didn’t deserve a penny because of my record, and I told him his attitude was forcing me back to crime; his superiors let me have 5 shillings ‘on compassionate grounds’. To get more I had to find accommodation and apply for a job first, tough when the cheapest weekly rental was 30 shillings. I washed dishes for supper at Lyons Corner House. I bedded down on a platform at Euston Station, rose stiffly at dawn and wandered along Caledonian Road.
I watched a broad-shouldered muscular barrow ‘boy’ arrange fruit for display on a fruit stall, the smell sharpening my hunger. I asked the time. He turned and a smile transformed his face. ‘Where are you from?’ He’d recognised my North Country accent. ‘Manchester.’ `Been there. Bill Tucker.’ And we chatted like old friends. Bill was observant and picked I was skint. He took me to breakfast, cracked jokes and told me of his criminal past. When I mentioned Dartmoor, he asked, ‘Ever know a lag called Roy Webb?’
`You know old Rubberbones!’ He knew all the top crooks in London. He’d fallen out with his girlfriend and invited me to spend a few days at his place while I looked for a job. So Bill’s couch became my bed.
After three days I got a job driving for Knobb’s Drycleaners in Finsbury Park, picking up and delivering garments to and from hotels and shops in the West End. The factory was full of women whose giggly flirtations were a tonic after prison’s relentless maleness.
Bill and I went to the West End for entertainment and birds. We walked out of a cafe once when Dot walked in on the arm of a man. She looked lovely as ever—her nose completely healed. We exchanged a meaningful glance, no words. I met tramps in seedy cafes and stalls who were educated or ingenious or eccentric or philosophers or plain entertaining. Another night two women strolled towards us and Bill gave one of them a pull—‘Hey, where’s you goin’ darlin’?’ kind of thing. They responded warmly and we paired off. Joan looked like an older version of Shirley Temple, baby-faced with long brown hair, slim and smartly turned out. She didn’t take life too seriously so she was easy to get on my couch bed. Bill enjoyed the other girl. There was a lot of huffing and puffing, groaning and grunting at Bill’s that night.
Bill and his girl only lasted that night but, three days later, Joan and I ended up living together for eight months. She introduced me to her hard-working middle-class parents. I don’t think they were impressed with me—partly because she was 17, adopted and they idolised her, and I was 32—but they tried to be kind. Joan told me she’d been on the game. I asked why. ‘I can either get a j
ob in a cafe for £3 a week or make the same in 20 minutes.’ OK by me; it was past history as far as I was concerned.
Finsbury Park was dissected by a busy road. Eventually, they closed the road because toms used it to pick up clients. Joan would say she was off to see her mum, but from the window I could see her heading for the park, not in her mother’s direction. I followed her in my car and watched her saunter along the road in tight jeans and a low-cut top, chat to drivers who pulled up, and get in. I felt perverse pleasure in this; it was flattering other men found her attractive. In more possessive moods I wasn’t so comfortable, but it wasn’t for me to moralise. Joan was remarkably unpossessive: she’d befriend girls she met, bring them home for a cup of tea, and encourage me to make a play for them if I wanted. Her suggestion. Joan earned her money, I earned my wages. It was a partnership of convenience, not a romance. I saved enough to buy an old motor van which I painted pillar-box red.
Bill tossed his greengrocer job and drove for Lebus Furniture. One day Bill pulled up and asked if I wanted to go to the West End. I agreed. It didn’t take me long to regret my decision. He drove like a maniac. I was determined never to travel with Bill again.
A couple of days before Christmas 1959 I decided to drive up to Manchester with Joan for a festive Christmas reunion with my family.
We set off in high spirits with presents and a turkey in the back seat. When I pulled out of a rest area a large truck smashed into us. Joan screamed, glass shattered and metal twisted and ripped. Joan was thrown onto the grass verge. I was propelled out the back door onto the road behind the back wheels. The truck crunched the roof in and the back axle gashed my head as it passed back over me. I dizzily stood up, head oozing blood, my right arm wouldn’t move and it hurt. I eased my coat off and dropped it, I don’t know why. Joan lay shaken but with only a few cuts and bruises. The van was scrap. Ripped presents lay over the road. The turkey lay on the centre line, clawed feet up, flip-flapping as cars swished by. The truck driver and motorists collected things up for us, turkey included. An ambulance took us to hospital where they slung my broken arm, bandaged my head and swabbed Joan’s cuts. An administrator gave me my bloody coat, picked up at the scene, and counted out over £1,000 to make sure it was all there; I’d backed a horse at 22:1 but who’d believe me? We got on the train, attracting attention of course—we looked real sights. Police took us off the train at one station, but verified our story soon enough. There’d been a murder. We were obvious suspects.
Hellbent: Ces Waters & Me Page 19