by Rita Smith
That wasn’t a one-off. It happened over and over again. It really used to upset me, so what did it do to those little boys?
The strange thing was that he could be a nice man with a dry sense of humour, but inside he must have had something dark and nasty for it to come out when he’d had a drink.
My cousins never spoke of what went on and in later years buried it in their minds, but deep down they must have hated him. You might think that when they became “gangsters” as the papers called them, they might have sorted him out once and for all, but they didn’t.
Ronnie walked into the kitchen one night just in time to see his mother taking a slap. He grabbed his father by the throat, threw him up against the wall and said to him, “It’s because of you I hurt people. Because of you somebody else is going to get badly hurt.” As though out of some misplaced respect he would do to others what he really wanted to do to his father.
Eventually he overcame whatever it was that held him back and beat Charlie up, telling him, “If you touch our mother once more we’ll kill you”. Whether or not his father thought he was capable of it, he never did hit Violet ever again – at least as far as we were all aware.
Toward the end of my aunt and uncle’s life she hated him. She might have hated him since early in their marriage, but she kept it all inside and only shared what she felt in private with her sisters. But later on in life her dislike of him was open. He had a chest complaint that made breathing difficult and I’ve seen her deliberately shake a dusty cloth in his face to make him cough. Almost sixty years too late, in his own way he tried to make up for what he’d done to Auntie Violet, but she would have none of it. She scorned and put down every little thing he tried to do, whether it was to buy a small bunch of flowers or maybe make a cup of tea. He brought everything on himself, but when I look at late photographs – and my aunt’s body language says it all – in a strange way I feel sorry for him.
I often walk past where our little row of houses stood in Vallance Road, and it never fails to bring the memories flooding back. Grandad stuck up on the roof when the kids took his ladder away; coloured lights strung along the front of his house. With the fact that he painted it every few weeks, passengers passing on the trains that overlooked us must have thought it was a fairground. People would say to Nanny as she sat outside her front door, “Morning, Mother Lee. See the old man’s been having a paint up again.”
Everything’s changed except the railway arches where we used to shelter from the bombs and laugh at Grandad as he sang and danced on a stage he’d made up, so we wouldn’t be frightened.
In later years, Sunday afternoons were a time for being entertained by Grandad. Reg or Ron would give him some money and he’d be straight out of the door and up to Brick Lane to waste it on old and often broken musical instruments. An accordion with some of the keys missing, a violin with only two strings or a banjo that had seen better days. One afternoon he pushed a battered old piano all the way home then got it into the front room on his own. Then we’d all have to sit and listen to him sing and play for a couple of hours. He couldn’t read music but it didn’t matter what the instrument was, he could get a tune out of it.
If I’ve got time to dawdle I can stand on the corner looking and the “self-build” houses that are on the site now disappear and I can see our old places with the arched-top doorways as clear as anything. I can see all the posh cars lined up – Mercedes, Rolls-Royce, Jaguar – that the twins and their friends had. And I can see my mum, Rose, Violet and Nanny sitting side by side on chairs they’ve brought from indoors. Strangely enough the council pulled those old houses down and you’d never know they’d ever been there, yet they left the pavement just as it was. I played hopscotch on it and every one of my family walked on it. Almost all of them are gone now, so that gives me a little bit of comfort sometimes. Let in the paving slabs just up from the corner there’s one of those metal water tap covers. It was right outside my mum’s door so I’d always know exactly where she used to sit.
I know the new houses are only a few years old, but sometimes I wonder if the ghosts we had are still hanging around. They say we had gypsies in the family a long, long time ago, and most people know that they’re supposed to have psychic powers. That’s the only reason I can think of to explain why we used to see things and occasionally have premonitions – and I mean all of us.
I was in bed one night and in the light of the street lamp I saw an old man standing at the foot of my bed. He wasn’t horrible or anything; in fact he was smiling. I pulled the covers over my head and told myself I was a silly cow and that I was imagining him, but when I looked again he was still there and we just looked at each other until he disappeared. You might say that it’s quite normal for a young girl to dream something like that up, like conjuring up in my mind somebody I’d seen outside somewhere, but the next time it was someone who I could never have known. This time I was coming down the stairs and at the bottom stood a little old lady. She was wearing a black bustle skirt and a tight fitting jacket-like top with lots of buttons up the front. She had a cameo brooch at the neck and her hair was rolled up like they used to in the old days. I don’t know why, because I’m not the bravest of people, but I wasn’t frightened. Really it looked to me as if she wasn’t aware I was looking at her. When I told my nan what I’d seen she wasn’t a bit surprised. “Oh ’er,” she said. “That’s Mrs Doyle who lived in your place years ago. She’s always turning up.”
One early evening Auntie Violet wanted to get one of Reggie’s shirts from upstairs but she heard noises and got a bit frightened. She went and got Auntie Rose and she came in full of her usual “I’ll have them” sort of attitude, but for some reason she couldn’t climb the stairs. Afterward she said it was like something was holding her back. In the end they asked a passing policeman to go up and have a look, which he did but he couldn’t find anything out of place.
We lived with rats and mice all the time we were in those houses and we knew the difference between their scratching and scampering, so whatever it was it wasn’t down to them.
Reg was haunted. Not by anything he saw in this case, but by the memory of the little boy that was killed by the van. A friend of ours called Alfie used to help the Wonderloaf man by doing little errands like running the loaves to the doors. He was only nine so it wasn’t really a job – just something to earn a few pennies. I was playing round the side of an old shelter and Reg was talking to Alfie on the corner. The next thing I was aware of was the two boys running past me looking terrified and both crying. I thought some big boys had hit them, so I ran after Reg and followed him into his house. He was in a dreadful state and no one could understand what he was saying because he was hysterical. I still didn’t know what was going on and eventually Auntie Violet and Rose took him outside. Mum made me stay indoors so I never did see what had upset him, but I was told about it later on.
It seems while the van driver was having a cup of tea in one of the houses the two boys had sat in the van and pretended to drive it. In those days you started motors with a button and when Alfie pressed it the van didn’t start but it jerked back because it was in gear, and crushed a small boy against the shelter. He was killed outright. It went to court for an inquest and they ruled that it was an accident, which it was. To save his own neck or the firm’s, the rounds man told Alfie never to tell anyone that he was working for him, so by that saved himself getting the sack and the firm from paying compensation to that poor boy’s family. What seemed to make it worse for Reg was that the little boy was a twin, same as himself, though it was a boy and girl in that case. Not long after the mother moved away because she couldn’t bear to walk past the shelter where it happened.
I don’t think Reg ever got over that experience, and going back to talk of haunting and ghosts – for a long time he thought the boy might turn up in the house. More than once he’d ask me if it could happen, and I’d try and reassure him by saying that it hadn’t been his fault in any way – he just
happened to be there. Even the boy’s mother didn’t blame him but it never stopped him brooding about it.
Years later it would pop up in the newspaper saying “First killing at eight years old,” as though this was the beginning of a career of violence. On the other hand over the years Reg and Ron didn’t do themselves any favours with what they wrote about themselves. In a funny way they were like entertainers giving their public what they wanted to hear, whether it was the truth or not. How many times have I read lines like “We were right little sods,” or “We were evil little bastards,” and this referring to when they were little kids.
When they got older they became a lot of things. Selfish, manipulative, even arrogant, but always with one eye on the newspapers that loved to pick up stories of their violence and spreading the word that here were two men not to be messed around with. As far as the papers went, if it was one punch they’d turn it into a battle, or if it was to do with an empty gun they’d turn it into a war. But I’ll never believe that the word evil could be applied to either of my cousins at any stage of their lives. Evil is Peter Sutcliffe or Brady and Hindley and people like that – not the twins, whatever they did.
So while they might have liked to put over that they were little tearaways as boys, to go with the later image, that’s not what I or the rest of the family saw.
As I’ve said, fighting was actively encouraged. They saw it in the family and if it wasn’t Rose telling them to “Go out and do the bleeders” if they’d been hit outside, it would be Grandad or Nan telling them that if they got punched once, then give the boy two or three back. At the end of the day it was only kids’ stuff – a bloody nose or a red cheek.
I can’t remember a time when they, or me for that matter, ever answered back to an adult or gave them cheek. It wasn’t that we were frightened to, it just wasn’t done. I don’t remember respect being drummed into us; it just seemed the natural thing to do. Whatever might be said against the twins, no one could ever accuse them of being disrespectful to either the elderly or women – which is fortunate when you consider those boys were brought up in an atmosphere where their father actively demonstrated that if a woman stepped out of line she should be kicked or punched.
What wasn’t encouraged in the Lee houses was stealing. Almost any book you pick up that deals with the East End gives the impression that everyone’s “at it” as though we were all thieves. If any of us three swiped a bubble gum or a packet of Smarties and they were seen, indoors it was “Get that right back where you took it from – now”. And that would be worse than anything to have to go into Mr Blewitt’s shop under the arches and pretend we’d forgotten to pay for it. He knew – and of course we knew – but he never said anything because he was a nice man, and after that we didn’t do it again, so it was a lesson. I’m not suggesting it didn’t go on – I’m sure a little bit goes on in every family. What I’m saying is it was frowned upon most times.
I laugh when I think that the one you’d least suspect of being light-fingered did something right in front of me. I was out with my two aunties and we came past the furniture shop near our house. Rose said, “See that lovely plant stand – I reckon that would look smashing in my front room”. We all looked at it then walked on. Auntie Vi said, “Hang on a minute,” went back to the shop, picked up this stand and came back to us. “’Ere you are Rose – a little present.” When Rose said, “You cow – you never paid for it,” Violet said, “Well it was stood on the pavement – expect he was chucking it out anyway.” And they both laughed. I didn’t say anything; I just thought, “Ooer – she shouldn’t have done that”.
Billy though was an exception, and because of the way he was, everyone expected it of him. Because his dad had left home when he was only a baby his mum, Auntie Rose, had to go out to work, what with being a one-parent family, so he was virtually brought up by Nanny Lee. She loved him to death and he couldn’t do wrong in her eyes.
We were all sitting in her front room one evening about half five, and we heard this banging and crashing coming down the road – sounded like old tin cans being thrown about. Then the door opened and in came young Billy with kettles and pans all tied on string and hanging from both shoulders. He’d nicked them from where he worked. The whole family had a share of this tinware and Nanny kept saying, “Oh, isn’t he a good boy?” The next job he had was with Howard Ward Lighters, and everyone in the street ended up with two or three lighters from their stock. He used to stutter a lot and I’m not surprised – his nerves must have been in shreds with what he got up to.
Then there was the story of Grandad’s weighing scales – the ones he never paid for, and we all knew it off by heart. He might be reading the Gazette and he’d comment on some local thieving or other and say, “Little bleeders – want their effing hands cut off ”. If Uncle Joe was there he’d wink at us and say to him, “What about them scales then?” Grandad would get all huffy and we’d burst out laughing because it happened time and time again.
Even those on the other side of the family, the Krays, weren’t thieves or villains. Uncle Charlie’s brothers were dealers the same as he was, and I suppose there was always the chance of something a bit iffy, but generally none of them were bad people. Yet because of that name (that most of them have now changed to Gray or something like) and our relationship as Lees, a lot of people assume we’re all part of Reg and Ron’s gang. Nothing could be further from the truth. Again with his writing Reg hasn’t helped the way people think. He has said, “The only way out of the East End was either by sport or villainy,” and he’s not the only one to trot that out. Famous actors from around here often put in magazines or on the telly that if they hadn’t taken up acting they would’ve ended up in prison because there was no other way. I suppose that makes them seem tough or colourful, but my blood boils when I hear this and I feel like shouting, “What’s wrong with hard work?”
Grandad Lee came out of awful poverty, like it was in the old days, yet not only did he work from the age of thirteen, he was still working at the age of ninety. True, he might have been more of a hindrance than help at that age, particularly when he helped out a local builder. As Uncle Joe said, “You’d be better off paying him to keep away from your house”. But whatever, he was prepared to roll his sleeves up because he just didn’t know how to stop working.
Uncle Johnny, Uncle Joe, Cousin Joe and Cousin Billy – I can’t list all the names of the family that worked hard and made something of themselves, and none of them ever in trouble with the police. My own two children, both born in Bethnal Green, have never caused me a day’s worry, and I brought them up on my own. David works in the banking business and my Kimmy, who Reg loved to bits, used to be a children’s nurse but now she’s a housewife.
My own dad, Albert, should have been an example to Reg, Ron and Charlie, because unlike other men in the family who moved away, he was right under their noses proving that regular work pays the best dividends in the end. His life wasn’t exciting or glamorous, but he loved my mum and me, gave us a good stable home and managed to put a bit by out of his wages. They say crime doesn’t pay, which I don’t think is strictly true, but in the times that it didn’t, who did the boys turn to when they were short of a few bob? My dad, of course. It might only have been fives and tens, but he had to work hard for that money and most of the time he never saw it again. It wasn’t that he was a soft touch; he just couldn’t see anyone go short when he knew he had the cash to help them out. Not a lot of it, mind you, because his wages weren’t all that, but they were regular and he didn’t waste it on drink or going out.
Years after the twins and Charlie were sent to prison Auntie Violet came to him with an old cine camera she’d found in the boys’ bedroom. Which one it belonged to I don’t know, but she was very short of money and wanted to sell it. If she’d come to dad without this camera he would’ve given her money, but leaving her with self-respect he made out it was just what he wanted and would she take a hundred pounds for it? Realistically t
he camera must have been worth about twenty pounds, and Dad needed something like that as much as a kick up the behind, so he was doing Auntie a favour. Nothing was said but he knew she wanted the money so that she could pay her fare to three different prisons and take her boys tobacco and a few bits of toiletries.
As soon as she went out the of the door Dad put it into the back of a cupboard and it stayed there without seeing the light of day until after he died. It was only then that we discovered that there was a film inside it. When we had it carefully printed, because it was old and cracked, there was footage of my cousins, Nanny and Grandad and my Aunts. In fact it was the only piece of film with the twins on that was ever kept from the old days, apart from a few minutes they both did on a television programme.
Like it or not Reg and Ron were very famous by the time this film came to light. Famous for all the wrong reasons as far as I was concerned, but people out there couldn’t get enough of them. So in a way these images from when they were young should have been worth a fortune, but Mum was no businesswoman and, same as my dad, if somebody asked for the coat off her back she’d give it without question – and throw in a pair of shoes as well.
Somehow word leaked out that this film existed and one of the television channels came knocking on our door very quickly, with the result that they got an exclusive and rare piece of history if you like – and Mum got a one pound coin for something that should have been worth thousands. A pound coin, when at that time a packet of soap powder would’ve cost more than that. She put it in the back of her purse and it was still there when she passed away.
Going back to hard work, the twins were willing and quite capable of getting their hands dirty on honest labour, at least when they were young, but their father discouraged it. In any other family it would be the complete opposite, with fathers insisting their kids get out there and do something – but not old Charlie. “You don’t want to work for a guv’nor, they’re taking the piss.” Or, “You don’t want to get out of bed for peanuts”. That’s what he drummed into the twins. They tried their hand at all kinds of work but in the end Charlie’s sneering at their efforts made them think he was right, so they stopped trying.