‘It’s still wrong,’ I insisted.
‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong,’ Kitty replied. ‘That’s for a good, sweet, kind-hearted girl like you to waste her life away working in a factory for a parcel of greedy pigs who would leave you to die in the gutter. Look at the state of you – sure your eyes are like two burnt holes in a blanket. They’re wearing you out.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ I tried to protest.
‘You’re no better than a slave to them, Violet. They don’t give a — about you.’
I was speechless. I had never heard a girl say — before.
‘Anyhow,’ Kitty went on. ‘I don’t intend to spend the rest of me life doing this. I’ve got a plan. I’m not going to spend all I earn. I’m already putting some money by and in ten years or so, I’ll have made enough to buy a little tea room of me own. Maybe not as posh as this one. Something simple. I’ll bake Irish bread and scones and folks who’ve left the old country to live in England will come from miles around. Got it all worked out, see? I’m going to call the place Kitty Ryan’s. After me Gran. That was her maiden name and she was good to me when I was a little girl.’
‘I don’t know what to say, Kitty.’
‘Say you’ll join us,’ Kitty replied, her green eyes sparkling as bright as the emerald ring I had noticed on her finger. ‘They’re always looking for new girls and you’re pretty enough to suit them – or at least you could be, with a bit of sprucing up, your hair done and some new clothes. I can put in a good word for you, so I can. You’ll be well looked after. Look at me, sure – would you ever have believed it? I’ve got me own rooms in a respectable house, me own money to spend on nice things. I really am putting on the posh. Look at this dazzler,’ she added, holding it up to show me more closely. ‘I’ve never had it so good.’
‘I’m so happy to see you again,’ I said to Kitty after a long moment’s silence. ‘And I’m glad that you’re doing well. I just wish that there could be some other way.’
‘Life is hard, ducky. Do yourself a favour.’
‘I can’t, Kitty. I couldn’t. I just wasn’t raised that way and I couldn’t live with myself. I would rather be poor, even a slave as you say, than to be a criminal.’
We talked a little while longer, but my heart was heavy. Finding an excuse to leave, I thanked Kitty for the tea, and took her new address. We made plans to stay in touch and go out together as we used to. Little did I know it as I left the tea room, but I would be seeing Kitty again sooner than I thought.
Three days later at the factory, Slacker finally acted on the vile, salacious urge that I had been seeing building up in him for weeks. I was at my inspection station when he interrupted my work and directed me to go to fetch something from a storeroom. I suspected something, but couldn’t refuse an order from a supervisor. But the moment I entered the empty storeroom he suddenly appeared, and locked the door shut behind him.
I tried to cry for help, but before I knew what was happening he pushed me to the ground and stood over me, unbuckling his belt and saying the most disgusting things. I was just a simple girl and knew virtually nothing of the world, but I understood very well what his intentions were. To this day I’m sure that the filthy animal would certainly have forced himself on me, if another foreman had not happened to visit the storeroom just in time and, finding the door strangely locked from inside, started thumping on it. Startled, Slacker pulled up his trousers and beat a hasty retreat.
An older, wiser and more confident girl living in a more modern time might have reported him, but I was young and frightened and this was 1922, when a woman’s word counted for far less in society. Instead, I said nothing to anyone about the incident, left my job that very same day and immediately began looking for other employment, to no avail. Within a short time I realised that for an uneducated girl like me, the factory offered the best chance of half-decent work I could hope for. That hope was gone now, and every door seemed closed to me. Every door but one.
The next morning, after a long and sleepless night of struggling with my conscience, I spent all my remaining money on a cab ride to Kitty’s house. She was happy to see me, and even happier when I confessed that I was reconsidering her offer of recruiting me to the Forty Elephants.
And that is how I, Violet Bowman, still a month short of my eighteenth birthday, became a professional criminal.
Chapter 20
Ben found himself drawn in by the simple directness of Violet’s narrative. He’d never heard of the Forty Elephants before and had no idea of what to expect next, but a strange sense of foreboding told him that Violet’s account was leading to dark places. He read on.
Soon afterwards, I was introduced to the leader of the gang, a right hard case if ever there was one. She was tall, over five feet and eight inches in height, and had been a criminal since 1912, aged sixteen. Her father, Thomas Diamond, was said to have once put the Lord Mayor of London’s head through a glass door – and the daughter seemed to me no less of a tough, intimidating character. I soon saw how she had earned the nickname ‘Diamond Annie’, from the diamond rings she wore on every finger.
With Kitty vouching for me, I was soon inducted into the gang and introduced to other members, like Maggie Hill, who had a terrible reputation for violence, Louisa Diamond, Annie’s younger sister, and Lilian Goldstein, who also worked for a smash-and-grab gang led by a woman called Ruby Sparks. The rules were simple: learn the ropes, do as you’re told and keep your mouth shut; don’t get caught, and if you do, never rat on your fellow Elephants. Lastly, Diamond Annie instructed me, was I to take up with any young fellow, I must get her approval first. Annie herself was unmarried and most of the girls were single. Any men in their lives had to be completely trustworthy and any hint of betrayal would be severely punished. How severely, I could only guess – but afterwards another member of the gang warned me: ‘See them rings she wears? Ain’t just to look pretty, dear. She took a bloke’s eye out with a single punch once, and she’ll do the same to anyone who looks at her wrong. ’Ard as bleedin’ nails she is.’
I was in now; there was no backing out. But as rough and vicious as she might have been, Diamond Annie was a skilled leader who drilled and organised her gang with military precision. On my first mission as a fledgling member, just two days afterwards, I was posted as a lookout in the street outside while half a dozen Elephants, Kitty among them, swiftly and expertly plundered fur coats and bolts of silk worth hundreds of pounds from one of London’s most prestigious department stores, one of several raids that were taking place simultaneously across the city. I was terrified, but excited and elated all at once, as though my blood had turned to champagne (which I had never yet tasted, but would come to enjoy a good deal).
That evening the Forty Elephants celebrated their successful mission with a wild party and I must confess to having drunk rather too much, being completely unused to wine. I had never laughed so much in all my life. Diamond Annie herself came up to me and, with a smile, pressed into my hand the biggest sum of money I had ever seen, let alone dreamed of possessing. ‘You earned it, my girl,’ she said. ‘And there’s plenty more where that came from. Here, have another drink!’
After having me act as lookout on a few more occasions, Annie decided to give me my first ‘proper’ assignment and I discovered to my amazement that I had something of a talent for the job. I came out of that first robbery wearing so many layers of fashionable underwear and other expensive garments under my coat that, just as Kitty had described, a slip of an eighteen-year-old suddenly resembled one of the great lumbering creatures from which our gang had got its name.
At that point, I am ashamed to say that I was quite seduced by the lifestyle into which I had been plunged. I had fine clothes, trinkets and baubles, a better place to live and a pocketful of money. My social life revolved almost entirely around the Forty Elephants, whose parties were a regular feature. Many of the girls drove fast cars and were often employed as getaway drivers, or to transport groups of
gang members further afield whenever Annie decided that London was too ‘hot’. There was always the risk of getting caught, but somehow that just excited me more. The whole thing was like a game, every new job an elating challenge.
And yet, as time went and the novelty of no longer being poor began to wear off, my conscience began to suffer. I hadn’t been raised this way, and deep down in my heart I knew that what we were doing was terribly wrong. A few times I tried to share my feelings with Kitty, but she just laughed and said, ‘Look around you, girl. Times are good. Maybe you’d rather be back in the factory, making light bulbs ten hours a day with that Herbert Slacker’s hand up your skirt?’
A turning point for me was when, with permission from Diamond Annie, I took a train back home to Cornwall to visit my parents for the first time in the nearly eighteen months since I had left for London. My father was still as unwell as ever, and I thought my mother had aged a lot during my absence. My mother, of course, knew from the larger sums of money I had been sending home lately that my circumstances had changed, though I hadn’t breathed a word of the truth to her. But when she saw me in my newfound splendour (though I had made a conscious effort to dress down for the visit) she was immediately suspicious and refused to believe my story that I had been promoted to the top floor of the factory, as an administrator. How was it possible for an unschooled girl to have enjoyed such career advancement after just a few short months? What was I getting up to? Where did all this money come from? What kinds of sordid liaisons had I become entangled in? Was I the mistress of some wealthy cad? God help us, had I fallen into prostitution?
My mother’s hostility took me completely by surprise, and her questioning went on so that I broke down under its pressure and confessed all to her, in floods of tears. Hearing my story my mother became pale with anger, called me a villain and a disgrace and ordered me out of her house, banishing me from ever returning and declaring that any money I sent from then on would be thrown straight on the fire. I wept, I begged; to no avail. I returned to London a scandalous woman, disowned, disinherited and broken-hearted.
For the next period of my life, while remaining with the Forty Elephants, I vowed to work towards creating a better, more honest future for myself. Kitty had her dreams of setting up her own tea room; for my part I decided to further my education. I started crying off the gang’s parties and instead attending evening classes to improve my reading and writing skills, my aim being to gain some qualifications in typing and shorthand and perhaps become a clerk or a secretary. These classes were taught at a charity school run by Mrs Evelyn Clifford, an aristocratic lady and a Fabian.
Feigning some lingering, debilitating illness, I turned down several jobs for the Elephants in the hope that Diamond Annie wouldn’t smell a lie. The hardest part was to fool my old friend Kitty Kelly, who I sensed was disappointed in her recruit and had cooled somewhat towards me, which saddened me greatly. But the more determined I became to pursue my new future, the more I found myself living in fear that the gang would find me out. When I went to my night classes I took a variety of more and more convoluted routes, constantly glancing over my shoulder in terror of seeing our fearsome leader chasing after me with her ringed fists clenched and ready to gouge my eyes out.
Still, I remained set on my course. It was at the night school that I met a handsome young schoolmaster called Wilfred Grey, who had volunteered to teach English there two evenings a week. Over the following months, he and I grew closer. Sometimes, we met outside of class, and he would read to me and encourage me to read to him, gently correcting me where I went wrong. Wilfred’s favourite books were the novels of Anthony Trollope. I had never heard of him, of course, but I was too embarrassed to say.
Gradually, oh so slowly but with a wonderful feeling that it could not have been any other way, we began to fall in love. Looking back, I think it crept up on both of us, and each was just as surprised as the other. Wilfred believed my tale that I was a lady’s maid. I felt so bad lying to him, but what else could I do?
His own story was terribly sad. He had served as an infantryman in the war, and returned from the unspeakable horrors of the battlefield renouncing all violence against his fellow Man only to discover that his entire family – his parents, a brother and a sister – had died in the devastating Spanish influenza epidemic that had begun to sweep Europe during the last months of the conflict and claimed untold numbers of lives. He was still much affected by the grief of their loss. I had never seen a man cry before, as he did when he shared his sorrow with me, and I was deeply moved. This was a sweet, tender, soft-spoken and so, so gentle soul with whom I could imagine spending the rest of my life. When he proposed to me in April 1923, I said yes without a second’s hesitation.
Now I really was in a mess. Because of course I knew that Diamond Annie would never approve of Wilfred as a match for one of her girls. He was an outsider to our community of crooks and mobsters, a decent and respectable gent even if he had little money, and because of that he was a threat to them. Not long before, I had heard something that sent shivers down my spine. It was the story of a past gang member called Eliza, who had become engaged to a young man called Harry, of whom Annie did not approve. Eliza disobeyed and broke away from the Elephants to marry him, with terrible consequences. The very morning of their union the newlyweds were viciously attacked in the street right in front of the church. The constabulary were called to the disturbance and a violent gun battle erupted in which people were killed – including poor Harry, shot in the heart on his wedding day. I would not, could not allow something like that to happen to Wilfred. If I was to break, it had to be a clean break.
I no longer had any choice but to confess the truth to him, praying to God that he wouldn’t react the way my mother had. ‘I need you to know, my love,’ I said to him through my tears. ‘I need you to know, even if you hate me for it. Even if you leave me.’
But I had found the most loving and understanding man in the world, who listened to my confession without a word of judgement. ‘You did what you felt you had to do, Violet. That took great courage. Now you need to find the courage to do what’s right. Then you and I will leave this city, get married, set up home and begin a whole new life together.’
It sounded so wonderful. But how could we hope to make such a dream come true? My ill-gotten gains had fallen off lately as my commitment to the Elephants slackened. As for Wilfred, he earned so little that he had nothing saved at all. The escape he talked about would cost money, lots of money.
‘I have a plan,’ I said. ‘One more job. One more, and I’m done, I swear.’
‘Is there no other way?’ he asked, pained.
‘Please trust me,’ I replied earnestly. ‘I can put some cash in our pockets. Not a fortune that we can live off for ever, but enough to make our break and see us through until we find our feet.’
He agreed.
In truth, the job had already been lined up. Feeling that I had the potential for it, Annie had been pressuring me for some time to undertake the most daring robbery of my career to date. Now I accepted it. My appointment having been set up using false references, I was to take up a housekeeper’s post at a large, luxurious apartment in Park Lane, the London home of a wealthy gentleman who spent most of his time at his country mansion. I would remain there for two weeks, during which time I would ‘case the joint’ as Annie described it, and arrange for a convenient time for my fellow Elephants to invade the apartment and pick it clean of anything of value.
It was painful to me not to see Wilfred for those long two weeks. I soldiered through it, however, trying to close my mind to the immorality of what I was about to do. In the event everything went beautifully. When at the perfect moment I called in my fellow gang members to do their worst, I took the opportunity to supplement my share of the robbery by filling a large cloth bag with valuables. The gentleman had a great collection of silverware, some very fine collectables, a pair of gold cufflinks and a jewelled pocket watch I found
in a drawer, its reverse engraved with the owner’s name; in another I found a thick bundle of cash that I guessed the gentleman must use for expenses during his visits to London. All of it I grabbed quickly, before the rest of the Elephants arrived.
Lastly, running my eye along a bookcase filled with magnificent tomes, I spied a breathtakingly beautiful edition of an Anthony Trollope novel I had heard Wilfred talking about with great enthusiasm. I had never seen a finer looking book. The cover was inlaid with mother of pearl and gold, as much a piece of art as a book. Its title was ‘Can You Forgive Her’, which I suppose I must have unconsciously considered an apt choice, though this thought process was furthest from my mind as I snatched the book to offer Wilfred as a gift. I fleetingly noticed that it seemed unusually heavy, but there was no time to dwell on the notion as, the very next moment, the Elephants came thumping on the door and I had to rush to let them in, first making sure that my bag of valuables was out of sight.
Within thirty minutes, they had finished their work and they escaped to a stolen van, laden with goods. Alone again in the now-bare apartment, I retrieved my personal spoils, locked up and left on foot.
The robbery had been a roaring success for the Forty Elephants, netting several thousand pounds’ worth of loot, not to mention the few hundred more that I had managed to rob from the robbers. If Diamond Annie had known what I was really up to, she would have taken more than an eye for my disloyalty. In fact I wasn’t alone in this solo enterprise, because during my time with the gang I had managed to make contact with a ‘fence’ who now took from me the gold watch (passing it on to a crooked jeweller who could erase the true owner’s engraved name), the cufflinks and various other items in exchange for a pretty sum. Added to my percentage of the takings, the reward for having played an instrumental part, this amounted to enough cash to fund Wilfred’s and my escape from London and keep us going for a while in our new home. The handsome edition of ‘Can You Forgive Her’, I kept for myself as planned, waiting for the right moment to present it to my beloved.
The Pandemic Plot Page 13