Our toilet was in the yard next to the big wooden coal bunker. Years later, after they had demolished the house, we discovered railway sleepers in the foundations. The house had probably been built on a disused railway track. In front of our place was a brick railway embankment leading to the Southern Railways trucks and wagons, which were shunted and left above some stables. Locals in Sheepcote Lane would break into these on a regular basis and nick saleable goods. Throwing caution to the wind, they would then pitch a stall and sell the goods on their front doorstep.
Nice cars were a target for us local urchins. We’d jump on to the running boards for a game and honk their horns in innocent fun. This was our street and we didn’t like outsiders. They’d interfere with our football and cricket and another game called bridge where as many boys as possible would leapfrog on your back and cling on until you collapsed under their combined weight. If nothing else, the game built up your strength.
My immediate family were amazed that I developed strong bones and a strong physical presence, because as a very young boy I was sent to a nursery suffering from malnutrition. I had rickets, so they put me in callipers to keep my legs straight and fed me all this cod-liver oil, malt and egg custard. A nurse would go around to everyone with a big spoonful of enriched vitamin mixture, which you had to take and lick clean.
As poor as my parents were, they would not have anyone say I was undernourished; they did everything to make sure I got enough to eat and exercised my little muscles. Mum used to have a mangle which, with great effort, I turned in order to squeeze dry her washing, and she’d say, ‘My, you’re a strong little boy, Freddie,’ as I swung on the handle and struggled to pull it round. She used to go to Shaftesbury Welcome, a church hall run by a charity, where they’d sing a few hymns and say some prayers. On their way out, the mothers would get a quarter of tea, a pound of sugar and a packet of biscuits. It was a hard life.
Living at Sheepcote Lane was like being part of a permanent fairground. Horse-drawn carts would constantly rumble past our house, scattering chickens as they went. Street traders came with candy floss and choc-ices. The knife sharpener would loudly announce himself and out you would run with all your mother’s knives.
Another horse-and-cart man with a small hand-driven carousel would play music as you sat in tiny wooden seats and rode slowly around a central glass dome with two figures, like a wedding couple inside. The kids loved it.
Billy goats chased us children down the lane, and every now and again you’d see policemen grappling with men resisting arrest. The muffin man would come by regularly, with trays of muffins on his head. But the most exotic attraction was ‘the coloured man’ – Prince Monalulu, who was coal black and an expert on the horses. The street was fascinated by him. Barefooted children followed him down the road, a mystery Pied Piper from foreign lands. ‘Aah got a horse,’ he’d begin and then write out little betting slips and give a rundown of horses he claimed would win races.
That would tickle my grandmother. She was a terrible gambler. She’d have betting slips in every available vase. ‘Just for reference,’ she’d say. Granny Foreman was born Stacy Flynn, of good Irish stock. She was a real scrapper, and would regularly fight with her neighbours on Saturday nights after leaving The Flag pub.
Almost everything imaginable was offered for sale in our street. From goats’ milk to stolen motorbikes, huge blocks of salt, accumulators for radios – if you were lucky enough to own one – and vinegar by the pint. As a kid, you were amazed and fascinated at the polished brass of the gypsy caravans at the bottom of the road. Those caravans were spotlessly clean inside and out.
Sometimes, for a treat, you’d be sent with a tray to the local butcher and return with specially cooked pease pudding and faggots with saveloys on the side. It was a lovely meal consisting of mashed peas made into a thick paste with brains, herbs and saveloys. You can still get it today in Bermondsey. Other than that, we’d eat a lot of bread pudding. Meat was a luxury for Sundays only and for afters my favourite was rhubarb and custard; we’d fight over who licked clean the custard basin.
Our heroes were the faces on cards given away with cigarettes. They were usually boxers like Welshman Tommy Farr (British and Empire champion), the German Walter Neusel, Ben Foord (South African champion) and Jack Doyle (Irish champion). We’d swap these with other kids as you would swap stamps. I remember listening to the Tommy Farr/Joe Louis fight in America in August 1937, when I was five. I still vividly remember us being gathered around our crystal set and excitedly awaiting the verdict. We all felt that Tommy Farr had won on points but it was a home-town decision.
All the entertainment was in pubs and you might be lucky enough to see singers and vaudeville acts at the Grand, Clapham Junction and the Princess Head in Battersea (where the army had nicked my old man). The famous blind jazz pianist George Shearing lived in Alfred Street, near The Flag pub, and used to walk past our house with his mother on the way to school for the blind.
Although we were Church of England, my father never believed in religion. He had a strict code of morals that he stuck to all his life, though. He was a proud man who would not accept charity: if he was down to his last penny, he’d stay out of the pub rather than accept drinks he couldn’t afford.
At home, he would never curse, and moral issues were spelled out in black and white. You would never steal from neighbours or your own, or from people as badly off as yourself. And a cardinal rule was that you never trusted a policeman or told them anything. I stuck to that code throughout my career as a villain. My targets were always large financial organisations or stores. I never broke into houses or mugged people. In spite of the poverty in our road, doors were left open because most people respected these unwritten rules – unlike today.
My biggest treat during those early years was to persuade my mum to allow my brother Bert to take me to a Bela Lugosi film. For weeks afterwards I paid a terrible price for this indulgence by having nightmares about zombies.
As one of the older boys, Herbie was always going to the pawn shop with something of my father’s and then retrieving it a week or so later. The old man’s suit used to get hocked as regular as clockwork. One day a woman stopped Herbie and asked him a favour. She asked him to buy her five Woodbine cigarettes, giving him the money. ‘That shopkeeper doesn’t like me,’ she said. ‘I’ll hold your brown-paper parcel,’ she continued, pointing to the suit tied up with string. When he came out of the shop with the cigarettes, however, there was no woman and no parcel. She’d done a runner with the suit!
Looking back on it, I realise how impoverished my parents were in those times. Thankfully, that era came to an end when us boys were old enough to work. From then on, we started to live reasonably well.
Herbie used to work at the Eccentric Club in Ryder Street, St James. He started off as a lift boy, and graduated to the billiard room as billiard marker. He got Wally a job replacing him on the lifts, while George worked at Whitehall Court, an exclusive apartment block on the Embankment next to the National Liberal Club.
Many famous names used the flats at Whitehall Court during the week, before returning to their country bases at weekends. Among them were George Bernard Shaw, Mr John Dewar (of the whisky family), Sir David Llewellyn and Sir Ernest Tate from the Tate and Lyle sugar family. Sir Ernest was a mean old boy and George, whose wages were then 10 shillings a week, was never tipped by him for shepherding his girlfriends into the lift up to his apartment. Most of the other gents were always generous to the hired help. Lord Wakefield, from Wakefield Oil, used to give half-crown tips every week – enormous money for those times – and John Dewar generously arranged for a whole lamb, turkeys, boxes of shortcakes and hampers to be delivered at Christmastime, along with a white £5 note. What a good old man he was. Always smiling – even though he only had one leg…
One day my father took me to a boxing match at Blackfriars Ring, near The Cut on the south bank of the Thames, to see ‘Kid Chocolat’ fight (there weren’t many black fighters in those days, and he was very famous). At around the same time, just before the war started, my brother Herbie was doing a bit of amateur boxing himself. There were pictures of him in the local newspaper when ’Erbie and Albert Bessel fought to raise money for the International