Читать книгу Street Warrior - The True Story of The Lengendary Malcolm Price, Britain's Hardest Man - Malcolm Price - Страница 5

We used to finish work on the Saturday around 12 o’clock and we’d go to what we had called the McShifters Arms, now the Great Western, in Merthyr. We’d get tanked up on a Saturday afternoon, Price and me. This particular Saturday, he decided he wanted to arm-wrestle me – he did and he won.

I was determined to get one over on him. There was this young girl in the corner, so I said to her, ‘We’re going to have a kissing competition in a minute, Bev, Pricey and me. We’re going to practise on you and you are going to be the judge. Whatever happens, I’m going to be the winner and I’ll buy your beer all afternoon.’

So, the kissing competition started and it lasted quite a while. And, at the end of it, I was judged by Bev to be the winner. Poor old Pricey, the square-jawed blond, he couldn’t believe that he was the loser and I don’t think to this day that he knew that I bought Bev beer all afternoon so I could be the winner! There was no way he was going to win, no matter how good a kisser he was and it dented his manhood somewhat and evened the score for me losing at arm-wrestling.

Although Price lost the kissing competition, he still had his image intact, as he was always surrounded by a bevy of beautiful girls. I remember Price was living with one of his many girlfriends at that time; I went to call for him on a Christmas morning so we could go out for a seasonal drink.

I remember the exact words his girlfriend said, as she said them directly to me: ‘Now I’m warning you, if you don’t get him back here by two o’clock for his Christmas dinner, this goose that he nagged me for, for weeks and weeks, goes in the bin!’

I said, ‘I’ll get him back in time.’

Out we went and Price had two, three, four, five and I’m looking at my watch now and it’s ten minutes to two and I had promised to get Price back by two or his goose would be well and truly cooked, in more ways than one!

I said, ‘Price, we’ve gotta make a move now.’

He was well over the top! He just pushed me out of the way, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’ I could tell he was turning then so I left him.

I went back up to the house to tell his girlfriend that Price wouldn’t be there for Christmas dinner and, with that, she threw the goose straight into the bin like she had promised! A fully cooked goose straight in the bin!

That Christmas day, I last saw him when I left him in the pub just before two o’clock, and that very Christmas night he got locked up. He went from the Express pub to a pub called the Morlais Tavern. Price, tanked up, rolled into the pub at about seven or eight o’clock in the evening and there was this English chap there, sitting on a high stool by the bar. He didn’t know Pricey. When Pricey got to the bar, he fell up against this English bloke who was none the wiser about who Price was.

The bloke told him where to get off; Price whacked him and headbutted him straight away and the landlord called the police. Price, as well as not getting his cooked goose, was locked up on Christmas night!

That wasn’t the end of the story. She, his girlfriend, had had enough and left Price and went to stay with her mother. By the following week, she was still there and wouldn’t go back to Price. Out of anger, he went round to her mother’s house with an airgun and shot all of the windows out! They didn’t get back together after that.

We were in the Express pub one night; we were in there until about three or four in the morning. We came out, and Price jumped straight into the car and he gave three of us a lift. There was no breathalyser back then so no one worried whether they’d had too much to drink. Down the road we went and Price drove straight into a lamppost and knocked the bumper off the car, which was hanging on by a thread and dragging along the road, sending a shower of sparks up into the air.

I said, ‘Price, let’s get out and pull it off and chuck it away.’

‘Oh, bollocks! Fuck it, we’ll keep going,’ Price said.

So there we were going up the High Street with the bumper dragging alongside us, sparks were flying everywhere and there was this copper in the middle of the road waving his lit torch about wanting Price to stop!

Did Pricey stop? Did he hell! Straight around the copper and away he goes with the bumper still dragging along. He got away with that as well.

The amount of stories still going around about Pricey is nobody’s business and they just make it up about him as they go along, but I have worked with him and was a drinking pal of his for many years. A lot of these stories people invent are derogatory, but what I am saying here is true.

As much as stories are going around about Price, it was the same with another Merthyr hard man. This man had an equally colourful reputation as Price, but was around long before Price came along. This man was called Redmond Coleman and he was around in the early 1900s. He was a bare-knuckle fighter and stories were still going around about him well into the 1960s.

As much as Price is a hard man, equally so, he is also an honest man. Price and I have been in all sorts of scrapes together and he and I might have gone into a shop on the way to work somewhere and, perhaps, the owner of the shop had to pop somewhere else and had left the shop unattended, which in certain parts of Wales was common, and I’d say to Price, ‘Look at all the fags there we could have!’ And, you know what? He wouldn’t touch anything that didn’t belong to him – that’s how honest he was. He wouldn’t pinch a pound if it was lying on the floor – he’d rather find out who owned it and hand it to them. If he even suspected that something was stolen then he wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

I don’t know if he had this honest streak bashed into him as a child, but, even though Price was physically bashed about by his old man, if his old man said to Price that he was getting abuse from so-and-so, then Price would go around and sort it out. That’s just the way he was, a very selfless person who would always be giving himself to others. I think that right to the very end Price was still trying to get into his father’s good books. He didn’t disown his father, even though he had a difficult time at his father’s hand.

Price wouldn’t disrespect his father; he’d still call his old man ‘Pops’ right up until the end. All that his father had done to him didn’t seem to dissuade Price from what he did for his father. For him, blood was thicker than water. His father didn’t deserve to have him.

My wife’s cousin lived next door to the Price family and his story was that Price’s father, Les, would kick Malcolm around the room like a football! Nobody dared interfere. Les Price was almost as hard as Malcolm was when he was young.

I worked with Les as well, and everyone at work was afraid because Les was a bully. While Malcolm wasn’t a bully, he was very aggressive. But Les was a bully even when he was sober; he would bully young kids and young men up on the opencast site where we worked, so everybody would be shit-scared of him. Malcolm was never like that, though. He was only aggressive when he was drunk.

There’s no doubt that people used Malcolm for their own gain. I don’t want to name names, but he had lots of hangers on. I think people who had a bit of a feud going on with someone else would sort of drag Price into their company so that they could use him if need be.

We were in the Horse and Groom pub one day – we called that the McShifters Arms as well. Whatever pub us earthmoving boys congregated in, we would christen it the McShifters Arms. We were in there one day and Price’s best friend, Mike Mahoney, was in there. Now Mike was dressed immaculately – he always dressed like that. He always looked like a million dollars. He was already in there well before Price was, and this fellow, who I’ll call Joe Bloggs came in, and he didn’t like Mahoney.

Joe Bloggs said to Mahoney, ‘I never liked you, Michael. I want to fight you.’

The bloke was drunk and Mahoney said to him, ‘Leave it alone, I’m not bothered.’

This chap then pulled a £20 note out of his pocket and put it on the bar top and put his pint glass on top of it. He said to Mahoney, ‘There you are, put your £20 there with it and when I come back from the toilet we’ll fight for the £40.’

So off he went to the toilet. When Joe Bloggs was in the toilet, who should come into the bar but the man himself, Price.

Mahoney said to Price, ‘Look at that £20 note underneath Joe Bloggs’s glass.’

Price said, ‘What’s it there for?’

‘Oh, he wants to fight me for it,’ said Mahoney.

Price picks up the pint glass, puts the £20 in his pocket, winks at Mahoney, goes to the toilets and kicks the door open where Joe Bloggs was sitting having a crap. Joe looks up from where he was sitting and all he saw was a bunch of fives landing right between his eyes. And Price got to keep the £20.

Another time, we’d finished one of the jobs we were on for Christmas and headed back for Merthyr on a Friday and the first stop was the Tydfil Arms, where Price was sweet on the landlady. We had a few pints and a few pints more and a couple off the top shelf as well and Price was chatting the landlady up all the time, but she had to go and serve the other punters.

The landlady went to serve this gypsy and, while she was serving him, he caught hold of one of her hands and started chatting her up. She tried to pull her hand away but he was having none of it. When Price saw this, it was like a red rag to a bull! Price marched up to the gypsy and whacked him. If I went to pull him off then I’d have it as well, mate or no mate. You don’t stop him when he goes. So he gives this gypsy a whack and down he goes and the gypsy starts grabbing at Price so Price starts putting the boot in as well.

I heard, with my own ears, the gypsy say, ‘Allright, Price, I’ve had enough!’

Price looked at him in shock disbelief and said to him, ‘I’ll tell you when you’ve fucking had enough,’ and he gave him another half-dozen boots!

I remember, I went to pick Price up for work one morning, at about five or six o’clock, and he had just come in from his night out on the tiles! I said, ‘What’s the matter with your mouth?’ There was blood all around his mouth, every tooth in his head was loose; they were all shaky and bleeding.

He could hardly speak and he was slurring. He managed to mumble to me that he’d crashed his car. He slurred, ‘I’ve just wrapped the Mercedes around a lamppost.’ He had this huge Mercedes car that was built like a tank.

I said, ‘Where’s the car now?’ So we jumped into my car and went down the road. When we got to where the accident had happened, I couldn’t believe my eyes! No man could have walked away from what I saw, the lamppost was embedded in the car right up to the dashboard and it had carved its way through the bonnet. This wasn’t one of those flimsy modern lampposts either! If it was a small car, then he wouldn’t be here now, his car and his build had saved Price’s life. After that, off we went to work! If that had been me, I would have to have taken the day off, but that’s how Price was.

One morning, after a bellyful of beer, Price comes in to work the worse for wear. When Price was like that, he used to always look for a stream and dip his head into it and he was all right for a bit then.

We had an Irishman working with us called Jimmy Egan. When he saw Price looking to dip his head in the stream, he said, ‘No, no! Don’t dip it there, Price. Come up here, there’s a nice clean pool.’

Price had his head submerged in it and was having a right good session of washing and putting his head under the water when Egan walked across to Price, picked him up and took him up the stream a bit further and there was this rotten sheep lying in the stream! Price had been dousing himself in the very water that was washing past this stinking rotten dead sheep that had been hanging about for months. Egan then let Price go and ran like hell!

Although Price was a feared hard man, he could still take a joke. But I remember this particular day when he was deadly serious after a man said the wrong thing! Price is a very patriotic man, which was proven one day when we went into the McShifters Arms (The Great Western) where there was this Englishman, a big strapping fellow, Benjy Kendrick.

He was from South Yorkshire way, but had been living in Wales a while and having a relationship with a Welsh girl, but he had just had a big barney with her and he was calling Welsh women ‘bastard Welsh women!’

Next thing, Price growls, ‘Hey, don’t you talk like that; my mother’s a Welsh woman!’ And, God, he swung a real haymaker at Benjy and Benjy dodged out of the way and Price’s arm went straight through a plasterboard wall to above his elbow! Price was struggling to get his arm out, which wasn’t easy, due to his jacket catching on the rough edges of the plasterboard. It was a long bar and Benjy started running, hoping he’d get to the door before Price released his trapped arm. Luckily for Benjy, he got out of the door before Pricey got his arm out of the wall!

There were times when Price was so drunk that he couldn’t talk coherently – he’d be slurring and you couldn’t understand him. But, the minute a bit of bother came along, he was at it like it was second nature to him. I never ever saw him in any scrap where he wasn’t pissed up anyway, and yet I never ever saw him lose.

Although he had a tough exterior, he was a man with a soft heart. When Price’s mother died he was at his wits’ end. I took him in the car and we went up to a little place called Hay-on-Wye (the book capital of the world) and we spent the whole day up there and he got well into these bird books and nature books which he’s mad about and all of his troubles seemed to melt away. Had I taken him to the pub then, for certain, trouble would have started.

By now, Price’s reputation was made and stories about him were flying about like confetti. I invited Price to my wedding, but my father found out about it and said that Price wasn’t welcome because it would lower the tone of the celebration. I stood my ground and, come five o’clock on the day of the wedding, my father was singing Price’s praises. My father had been caught up in the hype that was going around about Price, but he soon learned that this was all it was. Unless you gave him trouble he wouldn’t give any to you: he never went looking for it.

This is the sort of man Price is: a very friendly guy who respects people for what they are and his respect for older people is beyond comprehension. But, when he put troublemakers down on the floor, they stayed down until he was finished and not before.

Gareth ‘Jonah’ Jones