by Rita Smith
Even my old man got a similar lesson from his dad. Same thing – getting bullied at school, so Grandad’s taken him out in the yard and shown him how to defend himself. That was keep going forward, don’t step back – attack all the time. My dad tried it and never looked back.
Years later Grandad Lee was still teaching the same moves to me, to Charlie and to the twins. If you ever saw them in the ring that was their style – keep the other fella on the run, keep after them. Perhaps we all saw ourselves as potential Kid Lewises, who was our hero, and we took it serious.
Two minutes after walking in the door at Grandad’s and he’d have us out the back with the gloves on. One time me and Charlie got stuck in and by the time our mothers knew what was going on my lip was cut in two places and he had a bruised forehead and blood running out of his nose. While the women are kicking up a fuss, Grandad’s rubbing his hands together and saying, “They’re boys – they’ve got to learn”.
Him and my old man had a go one day, friendly like, and by the time they’re finished Grandad had a lump hanging off his eyes as big as a plum. Dad had accidentally caught him with the laces on the glove, and it had filled up with blood. Grandad didn’t give a monkey’s and was going to use the old fighter’s trick of cutting it with a razor and draining it off, but my dad stopped him.
When he was younger Grandad used to get the gloves on his sisters and they’d do each other a bit of damage. One of the times Aunt Polly broke her arm but none of it must have done her any harm because she went on to live until she was a hundred and three.
As for Reg and Ron, they never gave us a minute’s peace. Whether it was Charlie or me, you couldn’t sit down for five minutes without them saying, “We’re ready – we’ve got the gloves – when you coming out?” They was no match for us because we were a lot older, but they’d have a go. Thing is you didn’t take one on, you had to take them both – like everybody would years later.
They was crafty even then. Reg would come at you from the front then Ron would sneak round behind and give you a belt. I always took it a bit steady but Billy Wiltshire would give them a right pasting if he got them cornered up – never made any allowances at all. I don’t know what it was with him but he didn’t know how to torment them next.
There was a big metal barrel out in the yard, and he’d get it, take it in the road and stick those two boys inside, then roll it up and down the cobbles banging into whatever got in the way. They’d come out all dizzy and covered in bruises, and he’d think it was the funniest thing in the world. If it weren’t that, he’d have a rope round their necks trying to strangle them. When we went round to the local bathhouse he’d hold their heads under water until they went blue in the face. One time he nailed the pair of them up in the cupboard under the stairs. They’re screaming the place down because it was dark and full of mice and spiders and Billy couldn’t get the nails out, so he had to wait until Grandad came home.
Funny when you think that these two little nippers, who would grow up to be called the most dangerous men in London, were nearly being seen off by our Billy before they got into long trousers.
My Aunt Rose kept a few chickens out the back, same as near enough everybody did then, and she wanted one killing for dinner. Well, Billy and me knew as much about necking a bird as flying, so were looking at this thing and scratching our heads. Then the twins chipped in – “We can do it, we can do it” – so we said, “Go on then, get on with it”.Well, they tied this bird by the feet up on the washing line and knocked the bollocks out of it with lumps of wood and all the time it’s squawking and flapping. They got right excited and by the time they were done they were covered in blood and no one could’ve eaten this chicken because it was smashed to bits. Shameful really, and cruel, but I don’t think it would be fair to make any comparison between that and what they would do to people years later, though to my mind it seemed like they got more fun out of that than was natural. On the other hand, never mind what other people say, I thought they were violent little bastards from day one, but they was crafty enough to keep that side well hidden from the women in the family.
By the time war broke out in 1939 most of the Lees were settled in Vallance Road. Last in was my Aunt May and Uncle Albert, though I think he was away by then, what with being called up. Johnny and Maude was in 172 and 174 was derelict. Rose lived next door to Nanny, just round the corner in London Road (which they eventually changed to Dunbridge Street), then she moved into 176. Aunt Violet took over 178, and of course Nanny and Grandad Lee stayed right on the corner.
May went to see the landlord about 174 but he said no chance because it had no floors or nothing. When she offered to get the work done at her own expense if she could have it, he must have thought it was his birthday and gave her the key.
Grandad was doing a bit for a local builder so he got him to do the place up on the cheap, but just your basics because these houses were practically falling down anyway. Take the wallpaper off and they’d have collapsed.
My family and me weren’t too far away, but that lot stayed shoulder to shoulder for years – some of them until the houses were pulled down.
I think the East End took the worst of the batterings because of the docks, and in the thick of the bombing places all round us were being flattened every day. Sod’s law, me, Connie and Mum and Dad had just moved into a lovely block of flats they were throwing up everywhere around that time, and we thought we were in paradise. Inside toilet, nice bathroom and hot running water – unheard of. Sirens went off and we made a dash for the shelters and bang. Bomb’s dropped on the flats and that was the end of that. Our place was completely wrecked and dangerous really, but I can still see the old man fighting his way in there to get a few bob he’d hidden in a wardrobe. He was in there for ages and we’re worried in case the place fell down on him – but no. Out he came saying, “Fucking door was jammed but I got it open”. So like thousands of others we were homeless.
The family down Vallance Road took us in. We were lucky really when I think of some of the things that happened.
If you walk up Vallance Road now, there’s a bit of open ground that’s a playground for kids – swings, slides and all that caper. Back then Hughes Mansions stood there, which were three blocks of flats with mainly Jewish people living there. One V2 and the whole lot was destroyed and about 140 families killed. I remember going up there and watching them digging all these people out, and it went on all week. Even the queen turned up, the one who’s the Queen Mother now, and I can remember she had a blue coat on and a hat with a feather in it. She couldn’t do nothing but it says something that she’d come into Bethnal Green to pay her respects.
Then there was that business up at the Salmon and Ball in the new underground. What people did, and Mum and us two kids did the same was, if you didn’t want to or couldn’t get in one of the air-raid shelters, you went down the underground. We used to use Liverpool Street and it was no joke because they were packed full and stinking. Kids crying, talking, laughing, singing – you couldn’t shut your eyes all night.
With this other place, what happened was that there’d been an air raid and it was all over, so people were all coming out. Hundreds of people. Then for some reason an anti-aircraft gun was fired over in the park – might have been a German straggler or something – and this set off a terrible panic. Thinking the planes were back, all those people that had got outside turned back and made a mad dash to get back down into the underground again. Trouble with that was the builders hadn’t finished off all the work in the station yet and there was no handrails. So with crowds coming up and that lot pushing down, people were tipping over the edge of the stairs, with the result there was chaos and two hundred people finished up being crushed to death.
My old man knew a lot of the people that died that day. One of them was Dickie Corbett, a champion boxer. Another was the wife of Johnny Boxer. She was carrying her little baby, but as she went down somebody grabbed it and passed it over the heads of all t
he people and it was saved. Johnny was on war service at the time, and the authorities wouldn’t even give him leave to come home and bury his missus.
Funnily enough him and the boy that was saved ended up living near my dad at Harold Hill, but of course they’re both dead now.
Every day there was tragedy after tragedy happening right under our noses, but when it struck my family it was nothing to do with the war or the bombings. My elder sister Connie hadn’t been too well for a long time and after a while they diagnosed her as having tuberculosis, something you never hear of nowadays. From what I was told the family seemed to think she probably picked it up from a boyfriend, but wherever it came from she had it bad.
After a while she was taken into a hospital over at Eltham in south London and we were backward and forward as often as we could to keep her spirits up. She was a lot like my Aunt Rose, fiery like and never took any nonsense from nobody and she fought against that illness same as Rose would hers years later. My cousin Rita was getting on for about five years old at the time, a proper little doll with her blond hair, and Connie thought the world of her and she always spoke about her. I mean, May couldn’t visit because of the risks to Rita but they was always writing to each other and my sister would be saying, “How’s my littlest cousin?” and, “I can’t wait to get better, then me and you can go over the park with her”. What it was, Rita was a bit of a novelty in the family, being a girl among all the blokes and she gave Connie something to focus on while she was having treatment and away from home.
She never did get to go over the park though because she died in the June. It should never have happened. She was on the threshold of her adult life and suddenly she was gone and all of us were knocked for six. Devastated doesn’t even cover it.
She used to have my father wrapped round her little finger, like most girls with their dad, and he took it real bad – we all did. And all these years later I still think of her, but what can I say? When it’s your own sister it never goes away.
The twins missed some of the worst of the bombing because Violet and May had taken them and young Rita off to Hadleigh in Suffolk. Hundreds of kids were taken away from their families and sent all over the country as evacuees and had a rough old time of it. Little brown suitcase, label round the neck and bosh – away from everything they’d ever known, so our three were fortunate they didn’t have to suffer that. Charlie wasn’t evacuated as such because at his age he was big enough to look after himself, but he went along anyway, mainly to keep an eye on his brothers and to help his mum out. I think he got himself a bit of a job in a local shop so he was well out of all the carry-on back home.
From what they said when they came back Reg and Ron loved every minute of it. Well, they would because I don’t suppose they ever had such freedom. There wasn’t too many woods and fields in the East End and with them being right out in the sticks they could run as wild as they liked and not get into any bother. May and Violet didn’t take to it at all and missed the rest of the family, what with being so close before. What brought them back in the end was that old Charlie started to turn up there and getting up to his usual with the drink. Might have made things a bit embarrassing where they were billeted – I don’t know. In the end Johnny drove down in his lorry and brought them all back, and that was the end of that.
About the same time it was my turn to take off because I’d volunteered to join the navy. Both Charlie and me signed on at the same time because when you’re that age it all seems like a bit of a lark. We did our basic training together and all that, but by the time I was sent to Davenport in Plymouth I was on my own. All in all Charlie didn’t spend too much time in the navy, and from what he told me when we caught up with each other, he didn’t see any active service. The only fighting he got into was in the ring because he did a lot of boxing and tournaments and what have you. I thought that was a bit strange considering the medical board signed the papers saying he was unfit for duty and let him go. Seems like he had a dodgy ticker – murmur they called it – but as it kept banging away for the next fifty-seven years I’ve got a strong feeling he’d managed to pull a stroke somehow. Though when I found myself clinging on to a sinking ship I couldn’t blame him one bit.
What it was, they’d stuck me in Combined Operations, and the idea was to invade France. We sailed across the channel and no sooner got in the landing craft to make for shore when a storm came up. Being well overloaded with blokes and laying low in the water, we got swamped out and it keeled over leaving half of us hanging on and the rest in the sea. There was men drowning and we couldn’t do nothing to help them. Terrible thing to have to go through, and hard to come to terms with when you’re only eighteen. Eventually, those that made it through were picked up and shipped straight back to a survivors’ camp in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer in France, which for anybody fit enough was in walking distance from the beach. Pretty soon them up top gave up on the French operation and us navy fellas weren’t needed, so they decided to second us all into the army.
Now I’d enlisted in the navy in the first place because I knew if I didn’t it wouldn’t be too long before I got my papers and ended up with all that square bashing and what have you. So you can imagine I wasn’t too best pleased when they told me I was going to end up as a squaddie anyway. We all kicked up a fuss but we might as well have saved our breath because once all the paperwork was sorted, me and loads of other blokes were given a train ticket and told to make our own way up to a camp near Liverpool.
I’ll always remember jumping down on the platform at the other end with another fella I’d palled up with. It was freezing cold, we were pissed off and Liverpool was a bit of a hole back then. We looked at each other – both said, “Fuck this” at the same time, crossed the line and jumped on the first train back to London. They could stick the war up their arse – I was off home. I mean half a dozen lines here doesn’t begin to explain what me and thousands like me went through – and for what?
Greasing over the side, or deserting if you want to put it like that, had nothing to do with cowardice. Blokes out of the East End just wasn’t used to being pushed around by a load of jumped-up nothings. You’d get some geezer who couldn’t find his own arse in the dark, suddenly made up into officer and giving us orders – and all our lives we’d been standing up for ourselves and fighting for everything we had. No, it wasn’t for me, and as it turned out it wasn’t for half the geezers I knew from around those parts.
I’ve just said I was making for home, but that wouldn’t have been a very clever move because before the day was out the army would have notified the police and my name would be on a list with all the others, and they’d have been banging on my mother’s door. So I hid out at my Aunt Rosie’s and don’t ask me why but really the law never came looking for me there at all.
Trouble was, my Uncle Charlie never even got as far as putting a pair of army boots on before he went on the run, and when he wasn’t away he took turns at which house in Vallance Road he hid in. I think local coppers thought he was taking the piss and it became a challenge to get hold of him, so that made it difficult for me. A couple of times they nearly got me when they were looking for him.
I suppose the twins got mixed up trying to remember all those years ago, but a couple of incidents they put down to their father in their books actually happened to me.
I was in Aunt Violet’s one day having a cup of tea in the kitchen when the law arrived. They didn’t hang about waiting to be invited in – bang on the door and walk in. “Mrs Kray, I’ve had a report that your husband’s in the house.” Luckily she kept them talking long enough for me to squeeze under the sink and pull the curtain across – no fancy units then. They turned the place over and never thought of looking there. Another time they burst into Johnny’s at 172 so fast the copper slipped on the mat and skidded across the floor, ending up on his arse.
It was down to my uncle that I didn’t get lifted the second time. Him and Maude had opened a café on the corner opposite our hous
es and he was standing outside watching some coppers who’d just gone into Rosie’s, where I was living. Then he clocked me coming under the arches so he’s jumped in his motor, swung it round in the road, and managed to get to me before I got to the door. I didn’t know what was going on but when he told me to jump in I did without even asking.
This wasn’t happening every day, and if it wasn’t for old Charlie I’d have been all right, but I got fed up living on my nerves and made up my mind to take the risk and move in with my mother for a bit. Some risk. I was arrested after two or three days, slung in detention for three months, then without even being allowed to come home, shipped straight overseas.
By the time the war was over and I’d managed to get back to the East End, Reg and Ron was getting themselves in the paper and making a name for themselves. But for a while the “write-ups” were praising them up and not knocking them back because they were following in the footsteps of all the other blokes in the family (except their old man) and had taken up serious boxing.
4. The “two-ones”
Rita Smith
When I was born in 1936 the twins were about three years old, and Charlie would have been ten. Right from the start I was their little sister and that never changed for the rest of their lives.
I look back and can’t help thinking that I grew up in the best environment anyone could have wished for. I had everything. My dad, Albert Filler, was the nicest man you could ever meet. He was quiet spoken, never raised his voice or hand to either Mum or me. He worked steadily all his life and loved us both to death, and I suppose what made him more special was when I compared him with the father the boys had.
Fortunately for all of us Uncle Charlie was away a lot, but when he was home and he’d been drinking I used to be a bit frightened of him because he was loud and violent.