The Profession of Violence Read Online Free PDF Page A

have these rucks to let off steam. They loved each other really, but sometimes I thought they’d kill themselves.’
    Violet had always longed to move from Hoxton back to Bethnal Green. Now on the eve of war one of the houses on the corner of Vallance Road fell vacant. Charles agreed to move. Violet and the twins went home at last and Lee Street reunited.
    178 Vallance Road was tiny, the second in a row of four Victorian terraced cottages. There was no bathroom, the lavatory was in the yard and day and night the house shook as the Liverpool Street trains roared past the bedroom windows. For Violet none of this mattered. Herparents were just around the corner; so was her sister, Rose, the wild one with the gipsy looks. Her other sister. May, was next door but one, and her brother, John Lee, kept the caff across the street.
    When war came it was in this stretch of Vallance Road, under the shadow of the soot-stained viaducts, that Violet Kray and her family built a protective colony of three generations; it became known as ‘Deserters’ Corner’.
    This would remain the centre of the children’s world, the hideout of their cockney clan: those front doors always open, letting them scuttle through the warren of small houses, the hot little kitchens at the back, thick with the smell of stew and washing, where Aunt May or Grandmother Lee would always find them cake and a cup of tea; special treats from wild Aunt Rose who never let a week go by without buying them a toy or a bag of sweets from the housekeeping; and old Grandfather Lee, who was to cycle to Southend and back to celebrate his seventieth birthday, and who still kept his famous left hook in trim, punching a mattress hung up in the yard. He would sit with the twins for hours in his armchair by the fire, talking about the perils of drink and the East End of the past and how he broke Mike Thompson’s nose when he had set on him with a brick one night in an alleyway in Wapping, half a century before. Sometimes he would recite his poems. Sometimes he told them of the great boxers he had known: Jimmy Wilde of Stepney, ‘who had his strength in both hands where I had it only in my left’; Kid Lewis who grew up just around the corner to become champion of the world at three separate weights, ‘a good clean-living man and one of the gamest fighters ever to enter a ring’. And sometimes the old man would talk about the other heroes of the old East End – its criminals: Spud Murphy of Hoxton who killed two men in a spieler in Whitechapel and shouted to the police that he’d bring a machine-gun and finish everyone off before he was caught; Martin and Baker, from Bethnal Green, who took the nine o’clockwalk after shooting three policemen at Carlisle. And for the old man, Jack the Ripper’s murders were almost local happenings; the house in Hanbury Street where he had killed Annie Chapman was just round the corner.
    As the twins were growing up, their father had a strange place in their lives. The ‘Gold Rush’ had started as the price of gold was rising and he was doing well, touring the country in a beaten-up old Chrysler, and leaving Violet back at Vallance Road. ‘Mr Kray used to be off for weeks at a time, gold buying and wardrobe dealing. So we was never short of money, but everything to do with the twins fell on to me. If they was ill or in trouble I was the one who had to deal with it.’ Most of the control they got came from Violet too. This soon became a source of friction between their parents. When he materialized at the weekends, Charles found the twins lacking in respect. The answer was clearly a good belting, but Violet would not hear of it. Her own life taught her what happened when parents were too strict with their children: she was not losing her twins like that. And so the arguments would start, and the twins would listen, bright-eyed and missing nothing.
    Had Charles got his way, their life