Читать книгу Gypsy Jane - Jane Lee - Страница 9

I have lived by the code of the old East End.

A code of honour, morals and loyalty.

Being a gypsy makes you different – and I’m different through and through. It’s in my blood and that’s what makes me who I am. My dad always said he was a gypsy, as were his parents, who had a horse and cart for a home. My dad’s name is Ronnie. He brought me up to believe that as a gypsy you had to learn to take what life threw at you – that no matter how many times you were knocked down you had to get back up again.

‘It don’t matter what life dishes out, my girl. You take it on the chin and just keep going,’ he would say. Simple words but wise words too. Dad is getting on now and has gone straight since the age of 30. After his final stretch he started a trade as a painter and decorator on account of him and my mum, Kathy, having me, my older sister Michelle and my brother John, who is a year older than me. I was the baby of the family.

We had a happy-go-lucky childhood and even now it takes a lot to take the smile off my face. My dad spent a lot of time inside for various bits of villainy but he did his best for us and stayed on the straight and narrow for our sakes. But he had the gypsy spirit in him. He was born on his parents’ cart in 1936 and was one of ten brothers and sisters. They lived in that same cart, roaming around for the first few years of his life, until World War II came. By then they were spending a lot of time in the East End of London in an area called Custom House. Like so many other kids in the war, Dad was evacuated and ended up in Tunbridge Wells.

When the fighting was over, many gypsy families settled in the East End and that is what Dad’s family did. But he never forgot he was a gypsy. It was in his blood and in his ways. He loved horses and loved to travel around. He always said that was when he felt really free. But life had changed after the war for so many gypsies. They were tied down for the first time.

Silvertown was where I grew up, in the London borough of Newham. It is a tough, industrialised district on the north bank of the Thames and is named after Samuel Winkworth Silver who opened a rubber factory there in 1852. One side of Silvertown belonged to all the factories that were built on the banks of the river and the other side is where we lived. When I was a kid, the docks were right behind our three-bed council house in Camel Road. But all that has changed now and it’s City Airport that overlooks the estate. It was nicer when I was a kid. We used to watch the ships come into the docks from our bedroom window. We would watch the dockers unloading the ships and loading them back up with different cargo before they set sail back down the river and into the sea

In those days whatever arrived on the ships in the docks for the shops of the land was always on sale in the streets of Silvertown first. There was a booming black market in the area, purely driven by the docks. There have been all sorts of regeneration projects around there but in many ways it is still the same old Silvertown to me.

I was born on 13 September 1966 and got to know the area well in the 1970s. It was so different then. There were rogues and robbers all over the place. There were all sorts of knock-off gear floating around. It was before the days of CCTV and sophisticated alarm systems and all that sort of stuff. It was much easier for anyone to go out on the rob in those days.

Silvertown was like one big happy family. Everyone knew everyone and if you didn’t fit in, you didn’t last long. You were soon marked out if you were dodgy. But everyone left their doors open and every house was like your own. Stealing off your own or burgling from peoples’ houses had never been heard of then. How life has sadly changed for the worse.

It was in those days that I learned my values. What was right and wrong. When you read my story, you may think I have lived by a villain’s code but that is not true. I have lived by the code of the old East End. A code of honour, morals and loyalty. But as I have grown up I have realised that honour among thieves is just a fairy tale. It’s sad but true that most villains don’t live by the code that said we looked after our own and did what we had to do to keep body and soul together.

I remember, when I was young, going round to an older mate’s house to feed her cat for her while she was on holiday. Her bloke was still there but busy doing his own things and I walked into the living room and there was this massive pallet stacked as high as me with £20 notes. My mouth just dropped open. There must have been millions there. I never touched a note though. I fed the cat and left. We were taught never to steal from our own and I never have. Although we had nothing, I had my self-respect and the trust of everyone and no amount of money would ever change that.

The next day I went back to feed the cat again and the notes were gone. I asked what happened. ‘Don’t worry, Jane,’ he said. ‘It’s not even real. You should have helped yourself to a handful.’ Blimey, I thought to myself. I could have got rich there and then – and I was only a nipper.

My dad had already had a family before he went to prison. He had a girlfriend named Josie who had a son they named after my dad. But Josie couldn’t cope with the years of being on her own when he went to prison. She couldn’t cope with the future of visits and lonely times. I mean, two hours visiting every two weeks for years on end isn’t much of a life, is it? So Dad lost his first family when he was inside. When he got out and married my mum Kathy and had us three, he vowed to go straight. He said no amount of money was worth risking his family. He said it might get hard at times – and it did – but he always reminded us we had each other.

Dad was the pushover in our house. He would always say he was going to tell Mum if we drove him mad and that would always take the wind out of our sales and quieten us. But he never did tell on us. I remember Dad once banging his head on the wall and shouting at the top of his lungs, ‘You kids are driving me mad and will be the death of me.’

John and I cracked up with laughter at him until he once more said, ‘Wait until your mum gets home. She’ll take the smiles off your faces.’

We soon stopped laughing and started begging. As always, he never did tell. Just the thought he might grass us up to Mum got us eating out of his hand. He’s a bit of a softie but us kids were blessed to have a dad so loving and understanding. That may sound odd given his criminal past but my dad is old school – a real gentleman. He knows how to treat people properly. What he wouldn’t do or say to a woman, I don’t expect any man to do or say to me. Dad never laid a finger on any of us. He would beat himself up instead, bless him.

I love my dad because, after Mum hit the booze, he was the saviour of our family and I was and still am his favourite, even though he denies it and says he loves us all the same. I think he loves my personality a bit more because I’ve got more gypsy in me than the others. Dad used to take me to the Epsom Derby in Surrey when I was little. It wasn’t just for the horseracing. Gypsies from all over the land would congregate there for the races, which my dad loved, but he also wanted to remind me where I came from. ‘They are your people, Jane,’ he would say as I stared in wonder at all the caravans and the goings-on around the races. I used to love those trips with Dad.

Michelle, or Shell as I always call her, was Mum’s favourite and couldn’t do anything wrong in her eyes. She was Mum’s little princess and, as John was the only son, they both loved him equally. Me, John and Shell are so close now. John was what every girl would want in a brother. He is always there for me through thick and thin. He has never disrespected me in any way and has always accepted me for who I am. Although Shell and I didn’t get on as kids, we’re the best of friends now. It was just sisters being silly sisters when we were young.

It was hard for my mum. She had three jobs and three kids by the age of eighteen. She worked in a factory at night and had two cleaning jobs on the go in the daytime as well. I remember Mum coming home from her night job with loads of copper strips covered in paper and we would sit for hours taking the paper off the copper before she drove it down to the local scrap yard to cash it in.

‘It all helps, kids,’ she would say and treat us all for helping her earn a bit extra.

She didn’t just have it hard, she had it very hard and that is probably what drove her to drink. But back then us three kids just took all her hard work for granted, not realising that looking after us, holding down three jobs and keeping a home together was taking its toll. Being kids, we could only see the good stuff and not the harshness of everyday life. Mum was definitely the boss in our house. What she said was final and, if she had the hump, we all knew that we needed to keep out of her way, or else.

Mum always said I chatted away a lot like a ‘little old granny’. So, crazy as it sounds, I earned my underworld nickname of the Gran very early on in life. When I started school, everybody called me Granny too – and it’s true because I’ve always got an answer for everything. Later on in life as I developed a bit of a reputation it got shortened to the Gran.

Most people didn’t even know my real name at school. It was never mentioned and I have always been Granny or the Gran ever since I can remember. If you asked anyone if they knew who Jane Lee was, people would ask, ‘Who?’ But you if you asked about the Gran, especially later on, and everybody knew who I was.

I was a tomboy in the clothes I wore and the way I acted. I wouldn’t be playing with dolls and a pram like my sister. I’d be out making camps or playing in the factories that had closed down. And I always got on a lot better with my dad than with my mum. But there’s one thing I can say about Mum. Nobody could say anything bad about us to her. It didn’t matter what we’d done. She would back us a hundred per cent. Don’t get me wrong. When she got us home, we would be punished but, while anybody was about, she would die before she allowed anyone to put us down.

One of the neighbours once knocked on our front door and said to Mum, ‘Tell your Jane to stop playing with the ball. It has just hit my window.’

Mum was fuming. She went up to the woman’s house and took her front gate off its hinges and threw it straight through her front window. ‘Now fucking moan, you silly cow,’ Mum shouted as she stormed back home. That was my mum and the tough way I was brought up. As a kid, I found that episode hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing. But I got a good hiding when we got back home for laughing and for letting the ball hit the window.

Another time I’d beaten up two sisters for taking the mickey out of me. They called me scruffy and thought they were clever because they were together. I just battered the pair of them. I was always a bit handy like that for a girl. Not big and strong, just prepared to have a go. Anyway, around came their mum and dad and my mum put the fear of God into them. It got a bit physical and by the time they left they were terrified. Nobody ever complained about any of us again.

It didn’t matter that money was scarce because we always ate well. Every night we had a proper cooked dinner and I’ve never known what it was to be hungry. There was always plenty of food on our table. Yet Mum was turning more and more to drink and that was when things started to get difficult for me. Brandy was her tipple and she couldn’t get enough of it. To be honest, ever since I can remember she was drunk and, believe me, growing up in a house with a drunk who didn’t mind giving me a slap made life hard. Mum was a violent drunk, I think it’s fair to say. At least, that is what she became.

I was just a kid and I had a mum who was eventually drunk 24/7. She would come and beat me in the night and throw me out in the street. I’d sleep outside on the stairs in the flats opposite our house until the morning. As the years went by, I was sleeping under the flats more frequently, yet Mum was always sorry in the morning. It was tough on me. I thought Mum hated me and she was always apologetic the next day. But by dinner time she was back to being nasty and by night time she was well drunk and started getting violent again and I’d be back under the flats after getting a good hiding. Eventually, it didn’t bother me. I was thinking I’d rather be there instead of being in the house with her.

There wasn’t much Dad could do at the time about Mum’s behaviour. Dad didn’t know the half of what was going on with me and Mum. He would have killed her if he had known she was throwing me out in the night. But I couldn’t tell him and cause more rows. She wouldn’t do it until everyone was in bed. She would be sitting in the kitchen drinking until she wasn’t herself anymore. Then some nasty violent person in a drunken rage took over. She would come for me. Sometimes I was awake and made out I was asleep, hoping she would leave me alone, but the drink just wouldn’t let her.

Since Shell was her favourite and John was just John, all her bad temper and violence, was directed at me. But Mum couldn’t handle me and, boy, did I bring the nutty side out in her. I didn’t get on with my sister either. Shell was Miss prim and proper and didn’t have a hair out of place. Unlike me, she was always immaculate and I suppose she was embarrassed about the way I was. My rough-and-tumble behaviour got too much for her and she didn’t want me in her room. This was when I was eight, long before I ended up sleeping outdoors. Mum told me I had to move downstairs and sleep on the sofa. Mum said Shell needed her own room.

I didn’t like sleeping downstairs as I was afraid of the dark and, being downstairs, I felt I was all on my own. I would put my head under the covers and wait for morning. I was too afraid to even peek my head back out. I was scared to death, to be honest. I started to resent Shell and Mum. So one day, when Mum was taking a nap while her hair was in rollers, I got the scissors and I cut every roller off her head. She had a big night out with Dad planned and, when she woke up, I got the beating of my life. I denied everything, obviously, but being the only other person in the house at the time – and the only one nutty enough to do it in the first place – there was no way out. But that was one beating I took on the chin. It was worth it. Mum was a bit of a dolly bird and she had to wear a wig for three months after that. And she cried like a baby. It was a sign of just how far I was prepared to go. I didn’t have any limits and next on my list was Shell.

She had won a goldfish at the fair. She only had it a couple of days and I wasn’t even allowed to look at it because we weren’t getting on. So I waited until Mum and Shell were at the other end of the room and I grabbed it by its tail and shouted, ‘Shell!’ When her and Mum looked round at me, I lifted my head, opened my mouth and, while Shell screamed, ‘No! No!’ I swallowed it down whole in one big gulp. The goldfish went down a lot easier than the incident did with Mum. I got battered by her again but I felt it was worth it. I felt as if I’d got my own back on them both. Don’t get me wrong – I’d never usually hurt an animal and never have since. In fact, I have always felt guilty about it because it was no way to treat a goldfish. I should have done something to Shell instead.

I was so strong willed that I always got on Mum’s wrong side and Mum was more forceful than Dad. He tried to stop me and Mum from rowing but it was no good because he couldn’t control either of us. She was a mad woman and, come to think of it, maybe my gypsy blood isn’t the only thing that made me the way I am.

Mum had a babysitter called Rosie and she became my guardian angel and best friend. When she moved into the flats, I no longer had to sleep rough on the stairs. I’d just go straight to hers and she would always welcome me in her house, which became my second home.

One night, after mum turned on me, something snapped inside me and I fought back against her for the first time in my life. I grabbed her and stopped her from hitting me. I wrestled her to the ground and held her there until she calmed down. She soon stopped trying to hit me and I swore there and then that she’d never hit me again. I was so young and that was the start of living from house to house because I couldn’t be under the same roof as Mum anymore. All this wasn’t doing my schooling much good. I went to Cumberland school in Plaistow but, to be honest, I was never that keen and was absent more often than not. During the days I started hanging around with people who were a few years older than me because everyone my age was still at school. I practically moved in with Rosie but I also stayed with other friends that all knew Mum was boozing and losing the plot. Nobody ever turned me away. I still stayed at home sometimes but never at the weekends because that is when it could get really bad.

By this time I was growing up fast. I was already learning the street code that my dad had lived by before he went straight. I knew that you didn’t do anybody any wrong unless they had done it to you first and that you didn’t do any wrong to you and yours, and that you didn’t make your family ashamed. I was a kid but I was already what we call old school and I was living by the rules of the East End. You don’t grass anyone up and you don’t do your own.

Out on the streets I grew up believing that loyalty, morals and honour were the most important things because nobody could take them away from you. You made sure you didn’t give them away. And it was around this same time that what you might call my childhood came to end because I was introduced to the world of gangsters and guns – and I took to it like a duck to water.