After prison, I returned to London to live with Lofty, the pacifist friend from my army days. He was renting a three-bedroom house in Perivale, west London, with his girlfriend Cathy. Lofty hadn't changed much since the army. He still spent his time puffing weed, reading Greenpeace leaflets and strumming his guitar. He didn't seem to be able to get his head together, probably because he couldn't find it.
Lofty's commitment to non-violence made him an unlikely pal for me. We were chalk and cheese, really, but I liked him. His semi-detached outlook on life and our cash-strapped situation always made me laugh. Each week was a struggle to meet the rent. On Friday nights, when the landlord called to collect his dues, Lofty would play the record 'Let's Lynch the Landlord' by The Dead Kennedys. I don't think the landlord ever got it.
One evening, my brother Paul came over from Clapham to see me. We were sitting in the front room watching TV when we heard a loud bang on the front door. Cathy had just gone to visit a neighbour and at first I thought it was her returning. Several more loud, urgent bangs followed. I became alarmed, because it sounded like someone was trying to kick the door down. I was concerned for Cathy I thought something might be happening to her. I picked up a hammer and ran to the front door. Paul got there before me.
Whoever was outside was kicking the door and shouting, 'Open the door! Open the fucking door!'
Paul pulled it open and two men in their early 20s burst in and ran towards me. I swung the hammer and hit the first one on the side of the head. A jet of blood spattered the wall as he went down. His friend turned and ran back out. I stamped on the man at my feet until he stopped moving. Then 1 dragged him outside by his feet. It had been snowing. He lay there motionless with a bleeding head. His friend had disappeared. I didn't know the man, and neither did Paul nor Lofty, who'd joined us outside. Suddenly, the stranger sat up in the snow and began moaning, blood all down his head, chin and chest.
I said, 'What the fuck's going on, mate? Why were you trying to kick the fucking door in?' He saw the hammer still in my hand, so he lay back again in the snow, covering his face with his hands. He said, 'Please don't hit me again.'
With a little coaxing, he explained that he and his friend had been chased from a nearby fairground by a gang wielding weapons. He said they'd run for their lives to the nearest house. They'd banged on our door for help. I said, 'You should have said something, mate.'
He said, 'You didn't give us a chance.'
I felt bad about the poor bloke. But I believed that, in the circumstances, a forgivable misunderstanding had taken place. I gave him a towel to mop up the blood, called him a taxi and wished him a safe journey home. Lofty had been watching everything in disbelief.
Cathy came home and saw the blood in the snow, the damaged door and the arc of blood up the hallway wall. I couldn't pretend nothing had happened. Lofty filled her in and she went berserk. I was already feeling shitty, so I didn't need her on my case. Anyway, I thought her outrage stemmed from the minor damage to the interior decoration, rather than my inhospitable treatment of a fugitive seeking sanctuary. In the end, I told her it had fuck all to do with her. Lofty joined in on her side and, in a flash of temper, I ended up bashing him too, though not with the hammer. He was, after all, a friend.
The following day, I packed my possessions and moved to south London to live in a bedsit near Paul.
CHAPTER 6
AWAY DAYS
Once my self-righteous anger had died down, I felt really awful about having beaten up a hippy. Lofty was a good bloke and I liked his company. Bashing him was hardly the best way to cement our friendship. I disliked myself for having lost my temper yet again. Sometimes, I just can't control it. I have this anger in me that never seems to go away. It can just well up and then explode, often for quite petty reasons.
I decided I needed to apologise to Cathy and Lofty. I thought I'd apologise first to Cathy at her workplace, then later I'd go round and take her and Lofty out for a drink. Cathy worked in a high-street shoe shop. I walked in and saw her at the other end, serving a customer at the counter. As I reached the shop's mid-point, her eyes met mine. The colour seemed to drain from her face and her mouth opened slightly, as if about to let out a scream.
In a few more steps, I was standing in front of her. I hadn't even opened my mouth when she shouted, 'Get out! Just get out! Or I'll call the police.' I tried to explain I wanted to apologise, but she didn't want to listen. To this day, I don't know quite how I did it, but I accidentally stepped back into some sort of glass display. It broke. The shop filled with the tinkling of glass. I was deeply embarrassed. Standing up to my ankles in plate glass, I said, 'Shit. I'm really sorry Can I clear it up?'
Cathy just screamed at me, 'Get out now. I'm calling the police. Go!'
I found myself getting angry again, so I left. I never saw Cathy or Lofty again.
Moving back to south London brought me back into more regular contact with Adolf and the lads. They used to travel over to east London to sell National Front newspapers in Brick Lane, an area with a significant Asian population. I began joining them. There'd usually be no more than ten to fifteen of us selling the papers. At our side stood four police officers. Across the road, a group of Anti-Nazi League protesters would be screaming abuse. Another five policemen would keep them at bay.
There were no skinheads among the paper-sellers. Apart from me and my friends, the other regulars were three men in their 50s, sombrely dressed in dark suits, and two blokes in their early 30s who looked like City computer operators. Most of the people who ambled past the market stalls in 'the Lane' were Asians. Some would stop and buy a paper, which surprised me as they usually bore the brunt of the abuse inside. White customers would often shuffle up ashamedly, head down, as if buying a porn mag.
The paper, which I only rarely bothered to read, blathered on about 'war on the streets' and 'direct action', but when I once suggested to one of the suits that, instead of standing in silence, we ought to try now and again to bash the howling reds across the road, I was told to 'show restraint'. All in all, it was rather tedious.
Adolf invited me to a few meetings, usually held in the locked back-room of a pub. Behind closed doors, our 'leaders' bravely displayed bloodlust - before telling us to make sure we didn't leave any rubbish behind and to stack the chairs neatly. Equally tiresome.
I soon got to know a few of 'the Movement's' 'faces' and found myself being invited to go on 'away days'. These were coach trips to flashpoint areas like Liverpool, Leicester and Bradford. We'd go on marches and to meetings organised by groups like the National Front and the British Movement. We'd show support, swell the numbers and be on hand to defend the cause if these events provoked the violent reaction they were designed to.
The police always knew we were coming. Either they'd already be waiting or they'd turn up soon after our arrival. In Liverpool, they once met us at the motorway exit and turned us back. In
Bradford, they stopped us entering a community hall for a meeting. Around 250 reds had congregated for a howling session outside. A few bottles and stones flew towards us as we approached, and the police ushered us into a closed-off car park. Then they put us back on the coach and escorted us in two police cars to the city gates.
The coach, with about 50 on board, drove on, up into the hills. The meeting took place on a deserted and windswept slope far from civilisation. Having achieved what we'd come to do - that is, hold a meeting ('No Surrender') - we jumped back on the coach and headed triumphantly back to London.
It might sound naive, or slightly dull-witted, or an attempt to avoid taking full moral responsibility for my actions, but although I'd become more and more involved in these fascist activities, I didn't strongly identify myself or my mates with 'Nazism'. However, if you hang around with Nazis, go to Nazi events, support Nazi policies and express Nazi views, then you are, to all intents and purposes, a Nazi. I see that clearly now, but back then I didn't feel myself engaged primarily in a political struggle, an Aryan crusade. Mainly, I saw
myself as just taking part, as I'd always done, in gang warfare.
I'd just found a new gang. White gang versus black gang, right-wing gang versus left-wing gang, working-class gang versus middle-class gang. Indeed, for me, the political dimension had a lot to do with 'class war': me and my mates, the white working class, fighting the red middle-class tossers. I saw these Anti-Nazi League, Socialist Worker, WRP, Red Army Faction 'students' merely as spoilt junior members of the bourgeoisie dabbling in left-wing activism before settling down to a comfy job in Channel Four News and a life sucking cappuccinos while reading The Guardian.
I felt that, apart from spending a short interlude slumming it in a free-love squat in a 'deprived' area, most of these middle-class red bastards would end up living in Kensington or Windsor, like mummy and daddy, and not in the sort of multicultural ghettos they wanted to foist on us. Those at least were the gut prejudices that filled my mind. As I never actually spoke to any of the reds, let alone had the chance to enquire about the circumstances of their upbringings, it was probably a bit ignorant of me to generalise in the way I did.
However, I can't say these ways of thinking helped me justify my actions, because for a long time I never thought I was doing anything particularly wrong. Self-righteousness came naturally to me. We returned several times to Bradford. Hostile crowds always greeted us. 'Winding up the Pakis', as Adolf called it, was a popular pastime. There was usually a bit of violence, but nothing serious. Sometimes, someone would get hit by a missile, or punched in the face by a 'dyke'.
We always went 'tooled up' with coshes, CS gas, knuckle-dusters and knives. On the coach, there'd be a lot of bravado, with people waving weapons about, boasting of their readiness to use them. On one trip to Bradford, someone produced a large, bone-handled Bowie knife and started bragging about its 'razor' sharpness. My mate 'Benny the Jew' disagreed. He said, 'That couldn't cut butter. It's blunt, mate.'
An argument developed. Benny suddenly snatched the knife and shouted, 'It's fucking blunt, see?' He jabbed his own chest with it only to discover he'd been wrong. The knife was sharp. Very, very sharp. The blade went straight in, right up to the hilt. He slumped back in his seat and went white.
I couldn't believe it. Everyone started shouting for the driver to pull over. I thought Benny was either dying before my eyes or already dead. Then he started making little moaning sounds. The coach driver took a few minutes to find an emergency phone on the motorway.
We came to a stop. I helped carry Benny from the coach. We laid him down on the hard shoulder. Someone phoned for an ambulance. The emergency operator was told it was 'a stab wound', so we knew the police would be sent too. We threw all our other weapons down the embankment.
The coach driver was panicking. He assumed one of us had stabbed Benny. Perhaps he feared he'd be next. He said, 'I don't need this, lads. Keep me out of it. I'm only here to drive the coach.' Everyone told him to shut up. He started walking nervously up and down the hard shoulder, chain-smoking and muttering to himself.
Benny had lost consciousness. I could see very little blood. A police car pulled up as we all stood around. The coach driver was now sitting on the grass, shaking his head and coming to the end of his cigarette packet. Two policemen got out of the car and walked briskly towards us. They looked down at Benny, who was moaning gently, with the knife still protruding from his chest. The first policeman said earnestly, 'Can anybody tell us what happened, lads?'
We told them the truth, but they didn't believe us. You could tell by their faces they thought a serious crime of violence had been committed, the perpetrator or perpetrators of which still skulked in their midst.
The second policeman said, 'He stabbed himself by mistake. Have I got that right?'
'Yes, officer. He stabbed himself by mistake.'
As Benny was being loaded into the ambulance, we were being loaded back onto the coach for a trip 'down to the station'. One of the policemen got on with us, presumably to prevent any 'evidence' being thrown out the window. The other led the way in his car.
At the station, they searched us before interrogating us individually. They remained steadfast in their conviction that someone had stabbed Benny. They fought hard to get at 'the truth'. The interrogators tried doggedly to break down my 'wall of lies'.
'You're lying, son. Tell the truth.'
'I'm not lying. He stabbed himself.'
'You think we're stupid up here, don't you?'
'No, but I'm telling the truth.'
'A bloke ends up with a big knife sticking out of his own chest, and almost dies, and it's just an accident, is it?'
'Yes.'
'He "accidentally" stabbed himself.'
'Yes.'
'You think we're stupid up here . . .'
In the early hours of the morning, they released us, reluctantly. They said Benny was recovering and was 'sticking to the same story' that he'd stabbed himself.
Benny stayed in hospital a few more days before returning to London. The knife had missed his important bits, so he recovered quickly. He said the police had visited him several times to implore him to tell 'the truth'. They'd said that only if he cooperated could they bring his 'attacker' to justice. They even sent along a 'Victim Support' officer skilled in counselling frightened witnesses.
On Saturday afternoons, we used to meet in a pub in Islington High Street, north London. One afternoon, we stayed later than usual and got very drunk. An argument about nothing developed between Adolf and Ray. They decided to settle their differences outside. Each first put a fifty-pound note on the table. The winner would not only prove his point, but collect a hundred pounds.
Once the two disappeared through the doors onto the street, Benny picked up Adolf's carrier bag and went into the toilet. A few minutes later, he emerged wearing a brand new pair of designer jeans Adolf had bought that morning. Benny had come to the pub directly from his job on a building site. His muck-and-paint-spattered jeans were now in Adolf's bag.
Adolf and Ray eventually returned, looking dishevelled, but uninjured. Each man picked up his own fifty-pound note. We continued drinking until afternoon closing time around three, when we headed back across the river to south London.
A few of us ended up at Adolf's flat in Stockwell. Adolf went to his bedroom. A few minutes later, we heard a scream of rage followed by a tirade of obscene language. 'Bastard, bastard, bastard,' Adolf shouted as he stormed back into the front room. He was holding Benny's dirty jeans in his hands. He said the Asian sales assistant must have knowingly swapped the new jeans for a disgusting pair of rags. 'He's had me over. The Paki bastard's had me over.' He couldn't believe it. 'I know when he did it,' he said. 'He bent down behind the counter to get a carrier bag and he must have done the switch then. Fucking sneaky Paki bastard.'
Adolf said he was going back to the shop. As soon as he slammed shut the front door, everybody collapsed into laughter.
Adolf returned a few hours later. He said justice had been done. He'd got a minicab to take him back to the Islington shop and told the driver to wait outside. He'd marched in and said he wanted to speak to the Asian sales assistant who'd served him earlier. This man turned out to be the manager. Adolf punched him in the face without saying a word. The manager had fallen to the floor. Before marching back out, Adolf had shouted, 'That's for the fucking jeans, you clever cunt.' Adolf wasn't told immediately about Benny's 'prank'. He wasn't amused when he found out. The jeans were returned. For the next few months, Adolf targeted Benny for abuse.
Larry 'The Slash' was looking for somewhere to stay, and I wanted to move out of my bedsit, so we decided to rent a flat together. Eventually, we moved into the ground floor of a terraced house in Evelyn Street, Deptford. The upper floor was occupied by a group of radical students who posted leaflets through our letterbox inviting us to attend anti-Nazi rallies and Rock Against Racism concerts. Most annoyingly, they played jazz all the time, really loud. Jazz is probably the only form of music I loathe and detest. The whole house would
reverberate to the heart-sinking sound of Miles Davis.
We tried to be reasonable. At first, we asked them politely to turn down the music, which they did, only to turn it up again a few hours later. Gradually, we increased our threat level ('Turn the fucking music off or we'll turn you off). Finally, we decided we'd either bash them or burgle them.
We opted for the latter on a Friday night when we knew they'd be out rocking against racism. We broke in, stole their stereo and sent Miles Davis flying against the wall. 'The Jazz Cats', as we called them, never bothered us again. They even stopped leafletting us.
A barman called Buzz started working at our regular pub, The Royal Oak. He was either extremely brave or extremely fucking stupid, because he began giving evidence to the police when bad behaviour occurred on the premises. In the first incident, two of our friends, including Adrian 'Army Game', threw a few chairs over the bar after he asked them to leave. The chairs didn't even hit him, but he still made a statement. Both our friends ended up imprisoned for a few months. Buzz had placed himself in great danger. One evening, Ray knocked on our door in Deptford. He looked a bit shaken. He said he and Colin had launched a revenge attack on Buzz in the pub. In the fight, a barmaid's arm had been broken and Buzz had been repeatedly stabbed in the body. Buzz made another statement.
The police were now looking for Ray and Colin. Ray left home and came to live with us for eight months. Colin went to live with his dad in Stratford, east London. After a while, when he thought the police had lost interest, Ray started visiting his mother on Saturdays. One morning, the police swooped and arrested him. At his trial, he pleaded not guilty and refused to say who he'd been with on the night. Buzz went into the witness box and fingered him as one of his attackers. Ray was sent to prison.
Buzz's behaviour outraged us. He'd sent yet another of our friends to the hate-factory. That was a diabolical liberty that could not go unpunished. At least once a week, the pub's windows were smashed. Then a shot-put was thrown at Buzz from the second floor of a block of flats overlooking the pub. It didn't hit him, but it made him jump.
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