Local heroes

When I was six or seven I went up to London with my father in his car. As we passed through Whitechapel in the East End, he pointed out a pub called the Blind Beggar. ‘That’s where Ronald Kray shot George Cornell,’ he said. There was an element of something approaching pride in his voice, as if the grim-looking pub set back from the road was a significant cultural landmark of which I ought to take note.

I did take note (I was an obedient and faithful child), and later, when I became a reader, I tried to find out everything I could about Ron and Reg and their criminal ‘firm’. This wasn’t difficult because, on the back of the insatiable public interest in the Krays, virtually every member of their gang turned their hand to literature afterwards and published a memoir. I developed an unhealthy taste for these paperbacks and have read the lot. (The one I’d most like to read, and the only one that never got written, oddly enough, was that of ‘Mad’ Teddy Smith, a Kray associate of unimpeachable psychopathic credentials, whose stated occupation was that of ‘writer’, but who disappeared in mysterious circumstances as the net closed in.)

Later, in my early twenties, I lived for a while in a cottage on an Essex farm owned by an associate of the Krays. The farm mainly produced reinvented stolen cars, I think. But to give the place some kind of credibility there were six calves in a shed, which I looked after in return for a rent reduction. Around the farm I wore overalls, and on the rare occasions he saw me dressed up to go out, he would politely inquire whether I was ‘goin’ whorin’’.