Fallen Angels Vol 1

by Mick Norman

  It was only a few years ago that they would have been on a run at least once a week raising a fair amount of hell. Now, life for an Angel was very different. Authority had come down on them in the biggest way possible and any gang member caught wearing his colours or riding a chopped bike was likely to draw a punitive jail sentence. There was another hazard if you fell into the sticky hands of the fuzz. An unlikely percentage of bikers appearing before the new local magistrate’s court were either carried into the dock oh a stretcher, or walked in with broken ribs, teeth missing or other facial injuries. The magistrates had stopped asking questions and the Angels had never complained anyway. There wasn’t any point ‘Resisting arrest, he had a fit in the cell and it took seven of us to restrain him. He broke one of our staves with his elbow.’ Some of the coppers could still say with a straight face: ‘He must have fallen down some stairs and banged himself. What the fuck did it all matter any way? The only thing you did was be bleeding careful that they didn’t catch you in the first place. If you got caught you knew what was going to happen.

  At first it was real class to wear your colours anyway and blow the minds of the citizens with your hair wild and long, your Harley or your Norton screaming at the world and your mama clinging to the back of your levis like she was a second skin. That was okay to begin with, but too many of the classy brothers were getting busted. So, slowly, things had changed. But, for many of the Angels things had changed too little and too late. Towards the end of the sixties there were well over a hundred motorcycle gangs with membership running up towards eight thousand – with nomadic organizations like the gangs it was difficult to make any sort of accurate estimate.

  Now, as far as the authorities knew, there were only about five gangs left, with a total membership of less than four hundred.

  In the southeast there were the Last Heroes with their leader, Vincent. In the Birmingham area there were the Jokers; the Martyrs came from Manchester; Glasgow had the Blues. The fifth gang was a more nebulous entity and was reputed to roam the whole of Wales from the Rhondda to the isolated cwms of the Lleyn. The gang’s name was doubtful but was popularly supposed to be the Wolves.

  The Angels had become the first true Underground in Britain for centuries. For the dilettante scribblers of the early seventies the name had been a collective affectation – for the bikers it was a necessity of existence. Either they hid their true colours or they were busted or they were run down by posses of paranoiac motorists and the self-styled social protection groups, or vigilantes, as they preferred to be called.

  Although the right-wing tabloids and the less responsible T.V. programmes screamed otherwise, the run had now become a rare and treasured occasion. Once every couple of months, the Last Heroes came together at the old missionary college, driving grey, undistinguishable vans and trucks with enclosed side panels. Often they got their mamas to sit behind the wheel, while they lurked in the back, guarding their precious machines; the polished, revered hogs.

  For a couple of days after each run they went to ground like the killing animals they had become, until the spoor was cold and pigs were occupied elsewhere, maybe with one of the increasing number of race riots. So late on that Friday evening, nearly twenty-four hours after the slaughter of Jerry Richardson, the Last Heroes relaxed with their drugs, their drink and their old ladies and talked about good days gone and the great times that were still to come.

  When the diversion came, it was welcome.

  Tiny Terry had been sitting near the end of the long, overgrown drive, his back against a tree. Officially, he was supposed to be on guard. Unofficially, he had his right hand clasped round the remains of a cheap bottle of Graves, while two fingers of his right hand were busy inside his mama. She had unzipped the fly of his filthy jeans and was gently rolling his semi-erect penis between her finger and thumb.

  Terry suddenly pulled her hand away and simultaneously extracted his own fingers. Hissing at her to keep quiet, he stood up and edged behind a tree. Di, his mama, was used to the unexpected – like the time Terry had temporarily swopped her for two gallons of petrol. At least he had come back for her, although he had left it a bit late. The garage-hand was actually inside her before Terry reappeared like an apocalyptic angel, Di smiled when she remembered the amazed look on the guy’s face as the chain made its first cut into his white, thrusting buttocks. Now, she stood close behind her man and waited for him to make the next move.

  ‘Go and tell Vincent. Somebody’s coming. Sounds like two of them. Tell him to send Mealy and Dylan – if the fuckers are sober.’

  Di sneaked away without another word. Behind her, Terry started to move quietly from tree to tree. The three joints that he had finished in the last couple of hours and the best part of a bottle of wine had hardly touched him. He was a big man, over two hundred pounds, but he made virtually no noise as he crept through the trees. The evening wind had begun to move the leaves on the trees and any sound he made was swallowed up by that

  He paused for a moment and listened. Somewhere close, probably just the other side of the drive, there were two people moving. One of them was doing his best to move in approved boy-scout fashion but his companion was making it difficult. By the querulous squeakings it was obviously a girl, and a dissatisfied one. Terry moved across the drive and began to close in behind the rash couple.

  Gerald Vincent had been thinking for some time now that his idea, which had seemed so good and idealistic in the warmth of his bedroom, might not be quite so good after all. And he wished he hadn’t brought Brenda. She had been keener than he had to begin with. She had talked about the Angels as ‘the last hope for the left’ and ‘the ultimate apostles of freedom’. Now she moaned that it was getting dark, that she was cold, that her new boots were pinching her feet and how could they be sure that the Last Heroes were going to be there anyway?

  ‘You saw the news last night,’ hissed Gerald. ‘We know that this is their centre and we know that they always come here before and after a run. It must have been them killed that blind guy last night down in London. So, they must be here.’ Even he realised that he didn’t sound all that convincing.

  Gerald was twenty-eight years old and, like nearly three million of his fellow countrymen, he was without a job. He was an arts graduate who had found that his degree was totally useless. There was a glut of teachers, the result of the saturation induction to the profession during the nineteen-sixties. Although he was short and slimly built, Gerry had been able to get into the army and had done particularly well in unarmed combat and general weapons handling. He had signed on for five years and had seen a lot of service against both the Irish Republican Army and against the Protestant Defence Force – known as the Paisleyites, after the first great Protestant martyr of the twentieth century.

  Gerry had seen atrocities on both sides; women mutilated when a public house burst into fragments around them; a child’s head explode into shreds of bone from a bullet meant for the soldier seeing it across the road; whole streets of houses burnt down by their owners rather than see them fall into the hands of people of a different religion; factories wrecked, mindlessly, in a country whose unemployment figures were the highest in the whole western world. When his five years were up, Gerald would not be persuaded to sign on again. He preferred to go with all the others and endure the petty humiliations of clerks whose sole virtue to themselves was that they had a job. He found life difficult, but he could sleep again at nights.

  He had met Brenda at the Young Anarchists and had been impressed with her enthusiasm and idealism. Like her, he felt that the country was being run down by the old and reactionary. Like her, he felt that personal freedom had gradually been eroded. It had reached the stage where people had forgotten what it meant to do something on one’s own – to take an individual decision – to spit in the eye of conformist society. They both thought that there had been something in the ideals of the old Angry Brigade, but that was long over. Now, there really wasn’t that much left She had con
vinced him, rather against his inherent prejudice, that the country badly needed a force like the Angels that would help to purge it of its complacency and would raze the shibboleths of conformity.

  Now they were in a wood above a small village in east Hertfordshire, it was nearly dark and their idealism was about to be put to the test.

  From a previous visit, Gerry knew that they must be getting near to the house. He turned to help Brenda over a muddy bit of ground and saw her face change from irritation to horror. He let go of her arm and swung back to face the house. In front of him, appearing from the ground like a pantomime demon was Tiny Terry.

  In an age of smart suits and short hair, the Angel looked literally unbelievable. He stood a couple of inches over six feet and was big-built. His hair was shoulder length, matted and oily. He had a full beard, partly tufted, with short lengths of greasy ribbon tied in it. His teeth were mostly broken or missing; those that still remained whole were blackened. He wore scuffed flying-boots, torn Levis and his colours over a bare and filthy chest. In the centre of his chest was a red-winged skull tattooed, with the words: ‘Hell’s Angels – North London Chapter’. Down the outside of his right arm Gerry could just read the roughly marked words: ‘Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we fear no evil, because we are the evillest mother fuckers that ever walked in the valley’.

  As he looked up at this monstrous apparition, Gerry was conscious of two things. One was the almost physical aura of fear and crude power that emanated from the Angel. The other was the stench from the colours – the sleeveless jacket worn by all Angels. It was the smell of ground-in machine oil, urine, stale vomit, spilt drink and simple sweat.

  ‘Who the fuck are you? And, what the fuck are you doing?’

  Heavy silence hung in the air. Gerry could hear leaves rustling in the wind. Far off he could hear crashing in the undergrowth as someone came their way in a hurry.

  ‘We’ve came to see Vincent and the Last Heroes’, said Brenda, recovering some of her former courage. ‘Will you take us to him?’

  Terry ignored her and looked at Gerry. ‘You want to see Vincent?’ he asked, disbelief in his voice. ‘Are you a fucking reporter?’

  Brenda pushed past Gerald. ‘We want to see him because we want to join him.’

  The crashing grew nearer but Terry took no notice. Still ignoring Brenda he said: ‘Do you always let this big-mouthed cunt do your talking for you?’ He laughed, ‘You really want to join us?’

  For the first time Gerald spoke. ‘Yes. If you’ll have us. If not we’ll just go away.’

  A bush on their right disintegrated as two more Angels hurtled through it, pulling themselves to a stop when they saw that Terry had the situation in hand. They were both a little shorter than Tiny Terry, but their general appearances were similar.

  ‘What’s going on, Terry? Who are these two?’

  ‘We haven’t got round to names but they say that they want to join us – if we’ll have them.’

  ‘What if we don’t want them? Or him anyway.’

  ‘He says,’ here Terry affected the rather more refined speech of Gerald, ‘that they’ll just go away’.

  The three Angels fell about laughing at this ridiculous idea.

  Mealy pointed at Brenda, continuing the send-up of Gerald’s speech. ‘Oh, won’t you first stay for some tea and a bite to eat. I’ve got something to fill your mouth with.’ He bellowed with delight at his own humour.

  ‘Are you going to take us to Vincent or not?’ snapped Brenda.

  Terry, Mealy and Dylan just watched her. She turned to Gerald. ‘Come on Gerry, it’s pointless. They aren’t like I thought. They’re just animals.’

  All three men moved but it was Dylan whose fist got there first, catching Brenda at the corner of her mouth, chipping a front tooth, and throwing her on her back. Her head hit the base of a tree and she lay there for a moment, stunned, her lips bleeding. She put her hand to her face and tried to get up but Dylan stood over her and stamped his foot down onto her breasts, knocking her back.

  ‘Watch your fucking mouth! You do what you’re told and keep quiet. Cows like you think you know it all. You know fucking nothing. Now get up and shut up.’

  Brenda pulled herself to her feet and leaned against the tree, crying quietly to herself.

  During the sudden spasm of violence Gerry hadn’t moved. He had enough experience of brawling to know that he couldn’t have done much to help her, unless he had been very lucky. Anyway, he reckoned that she had really deserved it. He stood there and waited for the Angels to make the next move. He didn’t wait long.

  Terry grabbed him by the arm, while Mealy pushed Brenda in front of him.

  ‘Let’s all go and see Vincent.’

  Di had prepared the other Angels for their visitors and all of them who could still stand were waiting in the grand hall. Sitting in an old chair he had found in one of the cellars, was Vincent

  In the early days of the seventies an American Angel had been interviewed for an English magazine. He had been asked about the then-embryonic British chapters. He had said: ‘They’re just a bunch of kids with big names and no class. I guess most of them are jumped-up kids in grey suits. I hear that their mothers wash their colours for them every Saturday morning.’ The average age of the American Angel was then about thirty while that of the English equivalents was ten years less.

  Things had changed. The Wallace-Nixon coalition had created a new post – Secretary of State with Special Responsibilities for Social Hygiene. What that really meant was someone who would rid the Land of the Free of the freeloaders, the hippies, peaceniks, deviants, longhaired students, black militants, communists and – Hell’s Angels. There was only one obvious contender for this position as the Government’s knight in shining armour. And Reagan did the job in just fifteen months.

  Techniques that would not have shamed the police in Montevideo or Southern gentlemen in their pillowcase hoods were employed. Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger, probably the greatest and most archetypal of all Angels, suddenly found that his beloved Harley had no brakes. Sadly, he didn’t discover that fact until he was gunning into a sharp curve on the Sacramento Freeway at over ninety miles an hour. When they buried what was left of Sonny, the police arrested every one of the many hundreds of Angels who showed up to pay their last respects to the late President. That one single day broke the back of the Angels in the United States. Chapters folded everywhere and it was believed that there were less than one hundred Angels left in the whole North American Continent. Even that tiny handful lived in total secrecy and may, possibly, have been apocryphal in a land of law and order.

  In Britain there had been a parallel decline but there had not been the equivalent total fall. The numerous gangs of soft young boys had been replaced by the small number of hardcore men. The age had crept up to an average of over thirty and those that were left were very tough indeed. They had to be.

  Vincent was the archetypal new Angel. Physically hard, he also had an intelligence that put him into the top one per cent.

  He had dropped out of his university when he saw that graduation wouldn’t give him any priority in the dole queue. Like Gerald, he had tried the army but had deserted when it became obvious that his particular talents did not include tolerance of discipline from people who thought themselves his superiors.

  He had risen slowly through the ranks of the North London Chapter of the Angels. As the police pressure increased he found his progress easier. His predecessors as President had all suffered from the one failing of stupid, needless pride. They had all gone the same way.

  Vincent had been able to convince the other Heroes that discretion actually was the better part of showing class. He instigated the plain vans and encouraged as many members of the chapter as possible to cultivate a straight appearance. He developed their highly sophisticated security systems which had, so far, kept them a lucky jump ahead of the pigs. Vincent was very tough indeed. He had to be.

 
Vincent sat back and looked silently at Gerald and Brenda. He waved Terry, Mealy and Dylan away from them.

  ‘All right Nice and short. Just tell me who you are and what you want here.’

  Brenda stepped forward but was pulled roughly back by Gerry. ‘For Christ’s sake let me talk. Unless you want to get beaten up again.’

  He pushed past her and stood directly in front of Vincent. For the first time he felt a shifting of the tightness in his stomach. This was a wildly different sort of animal from the big thug who had brought them here. Vincent had none of the crude power, none of the physical revulsion. He was just on six feet tall and only weighed about one-eighty pounds. Like most of the others he wore his colours over a bare chest, with denims and motorcycle boots. But he was considerably cleaner than virtually any of them. His hair was long by contemporary standards, but it wasn’t likely to attract more than a second glance. He had no beard but wore a moustache of the type favoured by the trendies several years ago, turned down at the edges, below his mouth. The sort that Marlon Brando had when he played Emiliano Zapata. His eyes were veiled by heavy lids and he looked older than his thirty-two years. The only odd thing about him, Gerry noted with a start of surprise, was that the papers, for once, had got something right Vincent’s left ear had been cut, or ripped, from the side of his head. All that was left was small hole and a scrap of gristle.

  Gerry tore his eyes away from the bizarre sight and replied to the question.

  ‘All right. We both want to join you.’ He paused. ‘Is that short enough and simple enough for you?’

  There was a brief silence, then laughter. Vincent didn’t laugh. Nor did his eyes change. The laughter and the movement stopped.

  Behind Gerry there was the noise of a scuffle and he turned to face it, ready for whatever trouble there might be. His body relaxed and he couldn’t resist joining in the new outbreak of laughter.