Bringing Down the Krays Read Online Free PDF

and banged until eventually David was forced to open the door on its thick metal chain. Peering through the gap, one of them said to him: ‘D’you know who I’ve got here with me? It’s the Colonel.’
    ‘I don’t care who it is,’ David replied. ‘My mum said you can’t come in so that’s it. We’re finished, we’re closed.’ And he shut the door again.
    Just at that moment Alfie came downstairs to ask what was going on, and hearing the Colonel’s name, he said very quietly to David, ‘Oh God! You’d better open the door – it’s Ronnie Kray.’
    Poor David had to let them in and went and sat in the kitchen at the back, feeling very embarrassed. He didn’t even know who Ronnie Kray was. Alfie quickly filled him in. The man who’d done the talking was Dickie Morgan, a friend of Ronnie’s since his misdemeanour-filled National Service days. David had never heard of him either.
    David was still the kid brother, really. Alfie was the grown-up. I had gone off to seek my fortune at sea and had now disappeared off to some island. David was barely seventeen years old and didn’t know much. He knew so little he didn’t know how much he didn’t know.
    Like me and Alfie, David had never really been to school. He went once or twice and hated it, mainly because he just couldn’t understand what he was being taught. At the time he just assumed that he must be stupid. Certainly, that’s what everyone told him.
    Also like me, David had been sent to an approved school, after being caught selling stolen cigarettes. Joining the boxing club was his one release, but I know he had a hard time there, just like I did.
    In the end he spent just over two years there. He got back to Liverpool Street station with his few possessions in a smallbag, and made his way home to Theberton Street near the Angel, where our family then lived. No one made much fuss of him when he got back, apart from Alfie and Mum, who both looked up with a sort of ‘Oh, it’s you’ expression when he walked in. David was fifteen when he came back, and had changed from being a child to a young man while he’d been away.
    When he was about sixteen, David got a job as a waiter on a ship that took emigrants to Australia. When that ended, he came back to London and started working the door at our mum’s club. And now he had just tried to turn away Ronnie Kray. Alfie did not hesitate to explain to our younger brother what a major mistake he had just made.
    David got over his embarrassment and went back into the main room of the club, where he saw a man in a flash suit laughing and joking, sitting up at the bar.
    ‘Come over here and sit with me,’ he said. ‘I do like it here. It’s lovely and private.’ Nervously, David perched on a bar stool next to Ron.
    ‘Well done, son, you’re a good boy,’ Ronnie continued. ‘You look after your mother, and if your mother says don’t let anyone in, you don’t. I need someone like you in our clubs.’
    That was it. Ron stayed until about four in the morning, drinking brown ales one after another. After that he started coming up the 66 Club night after night, bringing people to meet my brothers. It was that way David and Alfie got to meet the rest of the Firm. It was that way they got to understand how he was the undisputed commander of this little army. They allcalled Ronnie ‘the Colonel’. He loved it. Soon I’d be calling him that too.
    He kept insisting that David come and see one of his clubs, but although David didn’t know at first that Ronnie was gay, he was instinctively wary of his interest. His own sexual inclinations certainly didn’t lie that way – in fact, he was already seeing a girl at the time. But Ronnie was like a stalker. He would lay siege to someone or something until he got it.
    By now Ronnie was coming to our mum’s club at least four times a week. At first it was all very friendly up the 66. Ronnie especially loved our old man and he was very fond of our mother too. He’d