by Rita Smith
My mother was what you’d expect a proper mum to be and her sisters were all the same. In fact because of the way we lived, all close together in Vallance Road, it was like having four mums. All the doors were open and I went in and out of each house as though they were my own. Whichever one was the nearest when anything happened to me – like falling over or knocking my head – that’s the one I would go to for a plaster or a cuddle.
Nanny was on the corner and I spent hours and hours sitting by the fire with her, just listening to her talking about when she was a girl and stories about the family. I don’t think I ever saw that fire go out. She had a large brown teapot that sat on a trivet next to the flames so there was always a cup of tea on the go. One day she asked me to put some water in this pot and when I took the lid off it was full to the brim with tea leaves – must have been there for weeks and weeks with her just topping it up without emptying it each time.
Then I had the boys to look after me or play with, and I looked upon them like real brothers. As soon as I got up in the morning, so Mum told me, I wanted to go and find the “two-ones” as I called them. They were so alike when they were young and most of the time I couldn’t tell which was which, so in my mind they were one person.
Something else Mum told me that I would be too young to remember, was her, Violet and Rose were sitting in the kitchen when Reg came marching in from the yard, smacking his little fat hands together and saying proudly, “Done it. I’ve done it.” When they asked him what he had done he took Mum by the hand, led her outside and showed her my pram that he’d tipped completely over, with me underneath. For him, getting on for four years old, it was a big achievement and he didn’t see anything wrong in it at all.
Any other boys would’ve run a mile from a little girl following them everywhere they went, but if Reg and Ron did get fed up with me they never once showed it. Quite often they would come and find me and take me round the park to push me on the swings, or help me up the steps of the slide – always very protective, even at that age.
We all went to the same school up Dunbridge Road, called Wood Close. On the way there or back they would both hold my hand and make sure I looked right and left before crossing the road. If other boys were getting too rough kicking a ball around or tearing about, Ron would stand close behind me and Reg in front, making sure I didn’t get knocked over. They didn’t threaten any of the boys or become aggressive because they weren’t like that then. In similar situations in later years, when the rough houses would be men, their protectiveness would be more intimidating.
With the three boys gone now, and in fact almost every one of the family I loved so much, I often sit and try to understand what went wrong with the twins. Every paper or book I have picked up over the last thirty years or so has branded them as evil monsters. Much of what they did I can’t deny or defend – it never made me stop loving them, but often I thought the media were writing about two different people from the ones I knew.
It’s difficult to come to terms with what was to happen when I compare it with the happy life we all shared in those early years. A time when they were more polite, more considerate and more caring than most other boys of the same age. I’ve seen them playing with dolls – not because they wanted to, but because they knew it would please me to join in. It makes me smile now to think how they both used to suffer in silence as I brushed and combed their hair, and stuck Kirby grips into their heads as I pretended to be a hairdresser.
Aunt Violet kept chickens at one time, and in the back yard was a disused run and little wooden coop. The three of us took this over as a den – put an old carpet inside and sat and read comics, and drank lemonade from my tea set. As we got older, but not too much, the twins would say to me, “You go and get some matches and we’ll try and nick some fags”. Then we’d sit there puffing away as though we were really grown up.
One day a voice came over the fence: “Before you lot go indoors you’d better chew on some of that mint, or your mothers will kill you.” This was Aunt Rose and she didn’t care about anything. As for the mint, that was growing all over the yard. I didn’t just chew it, I swallowed a lot and was sick.
In the end my mum and Auntie Violet caught us when they spotted clouds of smoke coming out of the wire in the sides of the coop. No one worried about the dangers of smoking in those days so I think they were more concerned in case we burnt the shed down with us in it.
Reg and Ron were in their own house one afternoon. Violet was out shopping and they were sitting under the table on the cross pieces, with the table cloth right down to the floor, pretending it was a tent. My mum called in and with nobody being there, stood for a little while admiring how clean the place was. She was always talking to herself, so as she’s looked round she’s said, “Mm, very tasty – very sweet,” then gone back home. Well, those boys couldn’t wait until their mum came in so that they could tell her that Auntie May had come in and eaten a cake or something out of the kitchen because she kept saying it was very tasty. That gave them all a good laugh, but when I innocently told tales it caused a bit of trouble between the sisters.
I was in Aunt Violet’s house and playing quietly on the floor while her and Rose were talking and taking no notice of me. Typical child, I was pretending to be engrossed in my dolls but really I was eavesdropping like mad to their adult talk. And were they giving this Dinah some stick. She was this; she was that – in all, a bit of a cow, and I was dying to know who she was. That evening I told my mother that my two aunts had been saying terrible things about a woman called Dinah – did she know her? I couldn’t believe the way she reacted. “Know her? I effing well know her all right – that’s me they were running down, and I’ll effing well have them,” and she stormed out. They came to blows over that and I felt really guilty. Later Mum told me that when she was a little girl cab drivers used to line up opposite her house. She was a pretty little thing and every time they saw her they’d sing that song “Dinah, is there anyone finer,” and the name stuck.
Another time I was in Nanny Lee’s with Uncle Joe when my mum came bursting in, hair all over the place and a swollen eye. Jokingly he said to her, “Who you been having six rounds with, sis?” She said, “You want to go and ask that effing cow next door [meaning Rose]. She did this.” Next day it would all be forgotten and they’d be the best of friends.
When I think of the language I heard every day as a child it’s a wonder my hair didn’t turn curly. With a few exceptions everybody around me swore, but to be honest it was so much part of life I didn’t take any notice. I somehow knew not to use the words myself, but accepted all the b—s and f—s that popped out in every conversation. My father didn’t use it and I can’t remember hearing Aunt Violet say as much as a “damn”.
In that film, which we all find ourselves coming back to time and time again, they seemed to take the personalities of Rose and Violet and swap them over. There is a scene in the hospital where Violet gets aggressive and says, “You b—s are not keeping my Ronnie”. And when we watched it we all said, “That’s not Vi – that’s Rose”. I don’t know why she was so different from all the rest, she just was.
This might be the same with most families, but the two people who seemed to keep us all together were Nanny and Grandad Lee. At some point during the day every single member of the family would at some time call into their house, even if it was only for five minutes – and that includes those that didn’t even live in that bit of road the locals called Lee Street. I think it gave us all a feeling of stability because where they were concerned, nothing changed. To open the front door if it wasn’t already wide open, all you had to do was pull the key through the letterbox where it was hanging on a piece of string.
The dining room was very Victorian, which shouldn’t be surprising, as that was the time they both grew up in. There were heavy maroon velvet curtains up at the window and matching velvet tacked round the mantelpiece with yellow tassels hanging down. Everywhere you looked were little china orna
ments that would be called antiques today and be valuable, but then nobody thought of such things.
When she wasn’t outside the street door saying hello to everyone that passed, Nanny would be beside the fire shelling peas or sewing. She always looked the same: pinafore dress on, dyed blond hair, with a bead necklace round her neck and big dangly earrings. Grandad would be opposite in his favourite armchair and sticking out of the fire between the two of them was always a big lump of wood. He said it wasn’t worth the trouble of sawing up because it burnt just the same, but you always had to be careful in case you tripped over it. This firewood was often as much as four feet long and Grandad would just keep nudging it in with his foot as it burnt down.
Balanced on the arm of his chair he’d have his tin of Nosegay tobacco, and sticking up by the chair was a long thin gas pipe that was alight day and night. What he’d done was run this pipe from the gas stove and bent it to shape so that it was just at the right height for him to light his roll-ups. He was proud of that because he said it saved him a fortune in matches, but as it burnt twenty-four hours a day for years, the cost of gas must have outweighed the cost of matches at a penny a box. If the flame got blown out when somebody opened the door he’d eff and blind because he had to waste a match relighting it.
He was like that, always making or inventing something. It’s only now that I think that none of us gave him the credit he was due. We just used to laugh behind his back and think he was a bit strange.
We all went to Margate one day in Uncle John’s charabanc, and along the front outside the arcades were glass cases with mechanical dolls and clowns. Put a penny in and they danced to music. Every one we came to he’d stand sucking his one tooth and scratching his head. Days after we came back, he copied one of these things and it worked. No case or music, but the three little figures twirled round and lifted their arms up. I thought it was wonderful.
He could be so clever on one hand, then so silly on the other. Like the time he made up his mind to build himself a car in the upstairs bedroom – a full-sized open-topped metal car. He worked on this for months, clumping up and down the stairs with sheets of tin he’d cadged or found. As it took shape and he put seats in it everyone who called had to go up and sit in it. The twins and me spent hours taking turns at pretending to be driving it, or just watching him banging and snipping shapes out. We were too young to see the obvious, and he was so engrossed in seeing it finished that neither had he. But what the rest of the family thought and didn’t want to ask him was how was he going to get it out of the room? Whether he thought they could lift it out through the window I don’t know, but he got my cousins Joe, Billy and Charlie up there one Saturday to give him a hand, and it was only then that the penny dropped.
Wasn’t his fault though, it was the “poxy hole he lived in – effing windows too small – effing door not big enough,” and so on. The last we saw of it was on the back of the scrap man’s cart, all broken up in pieces.
Something he did invent should have made him a lot of money, but such things as patents would never have entered his head. This was before I was born but Mum told me about it.
My Grandad Lee’s sister, Aunt Poll had married Jim Jollie, who was the manager of a gum factory in Digby Road over at Homerton. I’m not sure what this gum or resin was but I know it came from abroad and they made glue and polish from it. My mum and Auntie Rose worked there, but not Auntie Violet. What they did was sit in front of large trays and separate it into different sizes by hand. Grandad was often round there, so I suppose his brain started ticking over, and in no time at all he made a working model of a machine that would grade this gum automatically. Uncle Jim got to hear about this and brought his boss round to see it. Mum told me that they said it was very clever and praised him up for a well-thought-out piece of work but they couldn’t see that it was possible for it to work on a larger scale.
In this factory there were obviously a lot of rooms but there was one that the girls were never allowed to go in. That was enough to make all of them desperate to get a peek in there, and one day when whoever was in charge left the door unlocked my mum managed to have a quick look. I can’t imagine what they all thought was going to be behind this door, but whatever it was Mum certainly didn’t expect to see a half-built, very much bigger version of the model gum grader that her dad had made.
She was really mad and when she saw her Uncle Jim she gave him what for, even though he was her boss, and told him she was going to tell her dad as soon as she got home. And she did. It caused no end of trouble. Grandad was angry and him being the way he was it’s a wonder he didn’t go round and “up” his brother-in-law, as he was so fond of saying. But for once he didn’t and though he tried all ways he never received a penny from the firm and it must have earned them thousands.
Nanny’s father, John Houghton, managed another gum factory in Kelday Road but this was a different firm entirely.
When I think of what Reg and Ron were to get up to in later years, hurting people and eventually killing a man each, I shouldn’t really be surprised. One half of me can never accept everything that was said about them. I suppose I must be biased in their favour, but that’s only because they kept that sort of thing away from me. My other half looks back at those early years, when they were children, at the violence and fighting that flared up in the family almost weekly. It seems to me that every argument within the family – no matter how trivial – was answered with fists.
I’m not making myself any better than the others, but when I think about it I was the only one who never did lift my hand to anyone. Perhaps I was shy or delicate, I don’t know, but I was certainly the odd one out. Auntie Rose was the worst. There was some sort of upset with my cousin Joe – he hit Billy or threatened to – and Rose went for him. Uncle Joe stepped in and she grabbed a knife and tried to stab him. It was that sort of influence that didn’t do the boys any favours because they idolized her, particularly Ron, so if she said this sort of thing was normal and acceptable, then they would follow it.
They weren’t always the tough men they turned out to be, and if they got a punch or slap from some other boy while they were playing, Rose would egg them on to go out together and get stuck in. Even Auntie Violet, as kind and caring as she was, wouldn’t allow herself to be put upon, and more than once ended up punching and pulling hair with my mum or Rose. I doubt the twins were even aware of what they were soaking up because it was just part of everyday life.
Rose got into an argument with old Charlie outside in the street. They were shouting and swearing at each other, and in the end Charlie took a swing at her – because that’s the sort of man he was. He missed, but right at that moment cousin Billy came along, saw what was happening and punched him to the ground. As he went down his head hit the kerb, splitting it open and knocking him unconscious, though because of the blood they all thought he was dead. They carried him indoors and laid him on the floor, and all the while Rose was screaming, “Oh God, my Billy’s going to hang because of that bastard”. It didn’t worry her that he was dead – only that her son would get into trouble.
For ten minutes he laid there without moving a muscle, then he sat up effing and blinding, went into the kitchen and put his head under the tap. He must have been concussed because for the rest of the day he just sat in the chair staring at the wall. That wasn’t the end of it. His brothers Bert and Alfie got to hear about what had happened and told everyone they were going to do Billy over. Uncle Joe went after them and they swore they’d never said anything of the sort because they were frightened of him. Still word kept coming back that they were going to smash him up.
Billy was a right little tearaway but he was everyone’s favourite. He got up to all sorts, but never in a nasty way. When Nanny Lee heard what they were saying she said, “I’ll fucking well give them hurt my Billy”. And she went down the market to sort them out. They had a stall down Brick Lane, and she caused a real scene. They told her the same story they’d told Uncle Joe, that
people must have got it all wrong, but she said to them, “Listen, you gutless pair. If you so much as touch a hair on that boy’s head I’ll be back and turn this effing stall on top of you.” One of our neighbours came in and told my mum that he’d been up the market and had seen what went on. He said, “I see Mother Lee up the Waste and cor blimey was she giving them Kray boys what for”.
None of them seemed to have any time for the Krays, and Grandad often said, “They ain’t worth two bob, not one of ’em”. Although it was in the past and supposedly all forgotten, I don’t think he ever came to terms with Violet going off with Charlie like she did.
I could never blame Ron, Reg or young Charlie for their loyalty toward their dad, at least publicly. Each one of them at some time or other wrote in their books that he never laid hands on them or their mother. Young Charlie was beaten unmercifully time and time again, yet he was the quietest, most gentle boy in the family, who only ever looked for his father’s approval.
The twins, true enough, never took any real physical punishment from him, but the mental torment of things they were witness to must have gone a long way toward how they would eventually turn out.
When they were too young to understand why or be able to stop it in any way, they would have to watch as the mother they loved more than anything was slapped, punched and kicked by their father. But there was worse – much worse – and the shame for her and the horror it must have been for those boys doesn’t bear thinking about.
But it wasn’t just behind closed doors. When he was drunk Charlie didn’t seem to care who saw him being a bully. I was in our yard before the fences were taken down, and Auntie Violet was standing on a box hanging washing out. I could see her head and shoulders and she was singing away to herself. I said “Hello, Auntie,” and as she said, “Hello luv, are you all right?” an arm came up, punched her in the face and she disappeared. I looked through a knothole and Uncle Charlie was kicking her on the ground and shouting, “Where’s my effing dinner?” I ran screaming in to my mum and she got Rose and they ran round and managed to stop him.