Joyce was a little bit on the tarty side – very attractive, with a nice body and cheeky eyes. I used to take her down a dark alleyway and she was quite as happy having it there as anywhere. She used to work at the button factory on the Wandsworth Road, where quite a lot of the young girls used to work. One of Joyce’s workmates I copped for once had acquired a strange reputation in the factory: she was always the first in at work and the last to leave. It was subsequently discovered that she liked to lean on a certain part of the machinery, which vibrated like hell, so that she could enjoy multiple orgasms all day long! But she was too much for me. As some might have said back then, I was like Superman: faster than a speeding bullet – and no match for the girl at the button factory!
Anyway, my relationship with Joyce thrived until I saw her with another guy walking down the same alleyway that I’d thought was ‘special’ only to us. Obviously I was wrong. She was not true to me, but I was infatuated with her. I was with Lennie Sunbourne, a relation of mine, when she walked past. I hadn’t seen her at first because I was buying a cup of tea and a hotdog sandwich at a stall. Then Lennie pointed her out and I pretended I didn’t care. But, of course, I did.
I went down there just as they were coming out of the alley again and chinned the geezer. He went spark out. I then gave her a backhander and called her a fucking slag. My ring had sliced open the geezer’s cheek and Joyce got down on her knees to help him. ‘Look what you’ve done!’ she cried.
I told Joyce not to come near me any more and walked back to the flats.
A short time afterwards, I heard an ambulance siren and then a worried Lennie tapped on my door. ‘Did you do him with a brick, Fred?’ he asked. ‘He’s in a hell of a state, hasn’t regained consciousness.’
I had a right dodgy night worrying about the cossers coming round. But it had only been one punch, a right hander. Anyway, the guy never grassed me to the police so I was OK.
Later, Joyce came to my local and tried to make up. I was nearly tempted but in the end I simply blanked her. I was hurt and felt she had done the dirty on me. In fact, looking back, she was just a lively and lovely girl who worked in the button factory. A good little jiver, too.
Anyway, there were always plenty of other girls about. I had quite a lot of romantic little flings, as you can imagine, and I know that there are one or two little Freddies about, but I can’t go into details as I don’t want to embarrass anyone who may be married with a family. The last thing I want is to cause any problems. I often feel that I would like to hire a hall and get all my old friends and family together for a big nosh-and drink-up and chat about old times and see the kids who have grown up.
I retired from scaffolding after falling from a second-floor level. Although I landed on my feet, I got pinned to a plank of wood with this rusty old nail. It went right through the sole of my shoe and into my foot. I was taken to Hatfield Hospital and given antibiotic injections. My leg felt like a war was going on inside. It throbbed like fuck for about a week. In fact, it was a good time to leave the scaffolding job: winter was coming on and scaffolding wasn’t much fun in lousy weather. I went to see George, who was still shovelling coal, and told him he had to stop that and do a bit of work with me.
We met a guy who said we could earn good money for a few months’ work pile driving. We needed two extra men to make up the work team, a steel fixer and another to control the pile driver and change the sections over as the holes for building foundations got deeper. It was a bit like drilling for oil. A big crane smashed down these metal and concrete tubes deep into the ground, some 25 feet or so, till it hit rock bottom. Then I would slip the steel cage that I had fixed and that fell to the bottom and the steel rods would stick out of the top, ready for the concrete. Once that was poured in and set, the foundations would be solid enough for blocks of flats, or flyovers. I suppose that’s how the stories of Ginger Marks’s disappearance came about – the speculation that he had been buried under a flyover. Mind you, if you did stick someone down one of those holes, they would have to pull the whole building down to find anything, so it’s not a bad idea, and it did cross my mind on one or two occasions years later…
On most Saturday nights, we’d go to the dances, for the big-band sounds. All the town halls put on English bands like Vic Lewis, Ted Heath and Ivor Kerchin, playing American big-band music. I remember seeing Ted and Barbara Andrews and their daughter Julie singing on stage at the Grand, Clapham Junction. Most of the upcoming stars would appear there too, including the Goons Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine. Harry Secombe’s farmyard imitations would bring the house down, as would Sellers’s impersonations of film stars. The Grand would also put on boxing exhibitions with the likes of Freddie Mills and Frankie Hough. The entertainment industry had started up again in a big way because during the war large numbers of people were prevented from congregating in one place in case they were bombed. Needless to say, manpower was at a premium.
We enjoyed the sounds of Ted Heath and his orchestra, the Squadronairs, Vic Lewis, and the Ray Ellington quartet. My mates at the time included Patsy Toomey, Lennie White, Jimmy Turner, Tommy Wisbey, Tony Reuter, Jacky Cramer, Arthur and Teddy Suttie, Billy Adams, Freddy and Dinny Powell, whom we called Nosher, because his father was a horse trader at the arches behind the Elephant and Castle. The name Nosher came from the ‘nosh-bag’ that hung around a horse’s neck containing food.
At the time, I was a member of the Battersea Boxing Club, run by a Mr Hall. One of his trainers was old Billy Whitely, who used to come to parties at my parents’ house and load me up with pennies. I introduced the gang to the club because they were all pretty keen to learn, as we often fought with other gangs in the streets.
One time, I had problems with a gang down the Wandsworth Road, so we got together to sort them out. During one street fight, a guy jumped out of an upstairs window on to my back while I was battling with his brother. He was a lot older than me, and in the navy, and he looked well muscled in his white vest. But I think he must have regretted coming home on leave from the navy, because some of us beat the shit out of him. We really fancied ourselves at the fight game. Patsy Toomey would ask, ‘Who’s the best fighter around here? Go and fetch him and I’ll have a straightener.’
On one occasion, we were at a stall down the World’s End in Chelsea. Patsy challenged this guy and I held their coats. There were five of us and about 30 of the other gang. Everyone crowded around to watch the fight with cups of tea in their hands. ‘Patsy, you better win this one,’ I said to myself. But he came unstuck: the guy he was fighting had him pinned down and sat on his chest punching his head in. I couldn’t stand seeing my pal hurt, so I interfered. I pulled the guy off and smashed his head against the kerb and the next thing I heard was running feet followed by blow after blow smashing down on me. They were laying into me with their boots. I rolled under a parked lorry and got up on the other side. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s make this one-to-one.’
One stepped forward and said, ‘I’ll have him.’
We started to fight and, being a strong kid, I held my own for a long time until, exhausted, we both ended up on our knees facing each other, still punching it out. By mutual agreement, whispered in each other’s ears, we’d had enough. That signalled an honourable tie-breaker. We stood up and shook hands and everybody went back to have another cup of tea. In a way, it was like history repeating itself: we began where our fathers left off.
The dance halls and pubs also became a major venue for our brawling. We’d go into the pubs and bars, get tanked up and, if anyone tried to chat up any one of our girls, you would have a row and the place would degenerate into a free-for-all. Going to dance halls in different parts of London was like going to a football match and meeting the other team’s supporters. If it was the Lyceum, you took a pitch in the corner and no one else was allowed there apart from us south-London and Elephant and Castle boys.
Before the end of the night, there’d be a row and the girls would get excited and want to go home with you afterwards. It was all very