Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

this shit."
    Everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood. The old rhyme commemorates the unchanging character of the place: "Sutton for mutton, Kirkby for beef, South Darne for gingerbread, Dartford for a thief." Dartford's big money used to come from sticking up the stagecoach from Dover to London along the old Roman road, Watling Street. East Hill is very steep. Then suddenly you're in the valley over the River Darent. It's only a minor stream, but then you've got the short High Street and you've got to go up West Hill, where the horses would drag. Whichever way you're coming, it's the perfect ambush point. The drivers didn't stop and argue--part of the fare would be the Dartford fine, to keep the journey going smoothly. They'd just toss out a bag of coins. Because if you didn't pay going down East Hill, they'd signal ahead. One gunshot--he didn't pay --and they'd stop you at West Hill. So it's a double stickup. You can't get out of it. That notion had pretty much stopped when trains and cars took over, so probably by the middle of the nineteenth century they're looking for something else to do, some way of carrying on the tradition. And Dartford has developed an incredible criminal network--you could ask some members of my extended family. It goes with life. There's always something fallen off the back of a lorry. You don't ask. If somebody's just got a nice pair of diamond somethings, you never ask, "Where did they come from?"
    For over a year, when I was nine or ten, I was waylaid, Dartford-style, almost every day on my way home from school. I know what it is like to be a coward. I will never go back there. As easy as it is to turn tail, I took the beatings. I told my mum that I had fallen off my bike again. To which she replied, "Stay off your bike, son." Sooner or later we all get beaten. Rather sooner. One half are losers, the other half bullies. It had a powerful effect on me and taught me some lessons for when I grew big enough to use them. Mostly to know how to employ that thing little fuckers have, which is called speed. Which is usually "run away." But you get sick of running away. It was the old Dartford stickup. They have the Dartford tunnel now with tollbooths, which is where all the traffic from Dover to London still has to go. It's legal to take the money and the bullies have uniforms. You pay, one way or another.
    My backyard was the Dartford marshes, a no-man's-land that stretches three miles on either side along the Thames. A frightening place and fascinating at the same time, but desolate. When I was growing up, as kids we'd go down to the riverbank, a good half an hour ride on a bike. Essex County was on the other side of the river, the northern shore, and it might as well have been France. You could see the smoke of Dagenham, the Ford plant, and on our side the Gravesend cement plant. They didn't call it Gravesend for nothing. Everything unwanted by anyone else had been dumped in Dartford since the late nineteenth century --isolation and smallpox hospitals, leper colonies, gunpowder factories, lunatic asylums--a nice mixture. Dartford was the main place for smallpox treatment for all of England from the time of the epidemic of the 1880s. The river hospitals overflowed into ships anchored at Long Reach--a grim sight in the photographs, or if you were sailing up the estuary into London. But the lunatic asylums were what Dartford and its environs were famous for--the various projects run by the dreaded Metropolitan Asylums Board for the mentally unprepared people, or whatever they call it these days. The deficient in brain. The asylums drew a belt around the area, as if somebody had decided, "Right. This is where we're going to put the loonies." There was a massive one, very grim, called Darenth Park, which was a kind of labor camp for backward children until quite recent times. There was Stone House Hospital, whose name had been changed to something more genteel than the City of London Lunatic