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CHAPTER 6

THE CAGE, SPITALFIELDS MARKET

My new primary school in Enfield was called Raglan, and as I may already have mentioned – probably three or four times – I didn’t like it much there at first. Things only began to look up once I got into the school football team. We were a pretty good little side and managed to get to a regional cup semi-final. We lost 2–1 in that but my mate Colin Bailey scored.

Even as young as nine or ten, I was already looking for any excuse to get back to East London. So when my dad asked me if I fancied getting up early and going down to Spitalfields Market with him before school, I jumped at the chance. It wasn’t really to work at that age, it was more just to meet his mates – they’d all bring their boys down to see how life was and show them there’s a great big world out there. This was at the time when he had the shop in Bush Hill Parade, so we’d be back for Dad to open it and for me to get to school. The other kids would be at home having their Ready Brek and I’d be down the market, drinking in the local colour – a commodity of which there was not a shortage, in fact ‘colourful’ is the politest word you’d use.

Spitalfields Market was as formative an educational experience as any boy could hope for. I used to shadow-box down there with a real gentleman called Sammy McCarthy, who had boxed as a pro and will turn up in the story again later on in somewhat less happy circumstances. There were a lot of old fighters around who my dad had known as kids, and I’d have a spar with them all. My dad’s pal Archie Joyce’s older brother Teddy would throw a few imaginary right hands for me to fend off, and that’s when the ‘Little Sugar’ nickname really started to stick.

Another thing I loved down there was the special market coinage which you could only spend in A. Mays, the big shop on the corner. It came in triangles and 50p shapes, but before the 50p had even come out – I suppose they were tokens more than anything – and I saved loads of them when I was little. Until recently I still had thousands of them in boxes and tins in the garage that I was going to polish up and get framed, but then when I was having some work done at home the fucking geezer threw them on the fire and they all melted. I could’ve killed him.

The breakfast you’d have on that market early in the morning would taste better than you could get anywhere else on earth. To this day I still love a bacon roll – a good crusty white one with brown sauce in it – and the place we’d get them was the Blue Café. It’s not there any more, but it was just up from Gun Street, along the south side of the market, and it was owned by Vic Andretti’s dad Victor – we called him Uncle Victor. His son, who was a mate of my dad’s, won a European boxing title, and gave me the gloves he wore, which still had the claret on ’em.

By coincidence it was outside Uncle Victor’s café that I saw the longest street-fight I’ve ever seen in my life. Two fellas had what we used to call a ‘straightener’, which is like a formal stand-up bare-knuckle fight where someone’s got a grievance and everyone backs off to let them sort it out. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating – and I probably am a bit, because I was only a kid – but I swear this fight went on for twenty minutes. Now, that might not seem like a long time to you if you don’t know anything about boxing, but if you think that even a fit professional fighter will be blowing after a three-minute round, then you can imagine that twenty minutes without a break feels like a lifetime.

Not that they didn’t have the odd pause for breath, because when one of them knocked the other down, he’d stand and wait for his adversary to get back up. Every time someone got knocked over it was almost like the end of the round. There was no kicking anyone in the head or anything like that – it was all very courteous and old-fashioned. All the guys were standing round watching, and I was there with them, a small boy with a bacon roll.

By the time those two were done it didn’t even seem to matter who won any more. At the end they both shook hands and went in the café to have a nice cup of tea, and everyone was clapping them and saying, ‘Blinding fight.’ Obviously this is a very romantic notion of what violence should be like, but that only made it more impressive to see it actually happen. In a strange way it was a beautiful thing to watch – two men just being men – but it was also pretty scary. I wasn’t much more than ten years old at the time, and they were really going at it: I mean, this was a severe tear-up, but it was still some way short of being the most unnerving thing I saw happen in that market.

Across the way from the Blue Café was a place called ‘the Cage’, which was where all the big lorries pulled up to load in and load out. That was also where the methers – the tramps – used to burn the bushel boxes to keep warm. They’d all be sleeping around the fire in the winter with big old coats on. You don’t see meths drinkers so much now – it’s like it’s gone out of fashion. I suppose they’d be crystal methers now. Maybe the news has finally broken that drinking methylated spirits is bad for you – I think the clue was in the way they coloured it blue and purple.

The meths drinkers used to have their own hierarchy, with different pitches and guv’nors who sometimes used to fall out among themselves and have a ruck. I don’t know if it’s still like that among the homeless today, but you’re going to get that kind of thing going on wherever people are under pressure, and I don’t suppose changing the intoxicant of choice will have ushered in a new era of peace and harmony.

My dad used to bring them in old coats and shoes sometimes, but you could guarantee that the next week they wouldn’t have them any more, because they’d have sold them to buy meths. He wasn’t the only one on the market who used to do this, either. Other people would bring them out a bacon sandwich or an egg roll. The methers did get looked after, they just didn’t look after themselves.

I remember standing by the Cage once with my dad and Billy and Johnny Cambridge. They were two of his mates from over the water – not the Irish Sea, the Thames – and they used to have a painted cab with horseshoes on it. Quite a few of the South London greengrocers were a bit gypsy-ish, and the Cambridges were wealthy fellas and grafters with it. I remember Billy having a row with a one-armed mether once – the geezer pointed to the stump where his arm used to be and said, ‘If I still had that, boy, I’d put it on ya!’

Anyway, Billy and Johnny were nice guys, from a really good family. And we were just standing there having a fag (well, the men were – I’m not sure I’d’ve been allowed one at that age) when an articulated lorry drove into the Cage without looking carefully enough and ran straight over one of the tramp’s legs in his sleeping bag. The worst part of it was, this old boy was so cold and rotten with meths that he never even woke up. Hopefully that meant he didn’t feel the impact, but it was a horrible thing to see – never mind hear. He was still alive when they took him away in the ambulance, but he was in for a nasty surprise when he eventually woke up. I’ve had some pretty serious hangovers in my time, but nothing on quite that level.

Spitalfields in the late sixties and early seventies was a rough, noisy old place, but it was definitely alive. When I first started going there I was only a kid, so I wasn’t really old enough to understand the politics of it all. Everyone would make a fuss of you, but sometimes you’d get a sense that there was a bit of an edge to it when someone from a different firm came over.

I was walking down the market with my dad one day when a fella went to doff his cap to us. Bosh! My dad knocked him out. My jaw was on the floor – just like the other geezer’s was, but for different reasons. I was thinking, ‘What’s he done that for?’ But it turned out a lot of the lorry drivers from up North used to carry a razor blade in their cap, and if you crossed ’em they’d whip it out and cut you with it. Obviously something had gone on between them before and my dad needed to get his retaliation in first.

Apparently they used to hide razors in their lapels as well, so if you grabbed their jacket and went to nut them, the blade would cut your hands to pieces. I think it’s an old Teddy Boy thing, but the lorry drivers used to do it too. All sorts of nasty things could happen if you got on the wrong side of the wrong people in that market. I never saw this done myself but I heard about people getting their legs held down across the kerb and broken the wrong way, or someone getting a pencil through their eardrum. It wasn’t like there was any reason for that to be happening to me, but the fact that some real tough guys worked on that market was definitely a big part of the character of the place.

If you go to Spitalfields now, the atmosphere could hardly be more different. There are new shops, which certainly don’t take triangular tokens, where A. Mays and the Cage used to be, and while there’s still a market, it now sells clothes to tourists on one day and antiques or artworks on another. The basic layout of the whole covered section is pretty much unchanged, but it’s all been tidied up so much that it’s hard to believe it’s the same place. It’s kind of recognisable and unrecognisable at the same time – like a big crab shell that a smaller sea creature has moved into after the former resident has departed.