The Profession of Violence Read Online Free PDF

might have been different. Later he blamed himself for not asserting himself more and moving the whole family out of the East End. ‘I should have bought a house in Gidea Park and been firmer with the lot of them.’ As it was he never stayed long enough in Vallance Road to enforce his authority; he merely taught the twins to hate it. And even in those days they were usually a match for him. They could always dodge to someone’s house and hide. And Monday morning he would be off again in the old Chrysler leaving his family in peace.
    The twins were nearly six when war began. Charles was ordered to the Tower of London for military service but he had never been a fighting man. So he changed his name and returned to the wardrobe business on his own. For the next twelve years the twins’ father remained ‘on the trot’ as a deserter. They had their home and their mother to themselves at last. From time to time Charles would appear but never for long, slipping into the house at dusk looking out for the police, and clambering over the yard wall next morning. He never complained about this fugitive life. He made a living and enough to pay for his drink and Violet’s housekeeping. They caught him once, near Croydon, and took him to Woolwich Barracks under escort, but he soon escaped and rented a room in Southwark from an Australian pickpocket called Bob Rolfe. Occasionally the twins were sent there with messages from Violet.
    This was how the twins first glimpsed the East End underworld their father knew. Since the eighteenth century the East End had been famous for its boxers and its criminals, both of them bred on poverty. Most East End crime was thieving, violence and gang fights, ghetto crime to which men turn when they have little to lose. In the poorer parts of London crime was regarded as a fairly normal way of life and the police recognized certain ‘criminal areas’: King’s Cross for thieves, Hackney for cat burglars, Stepney for small-time con-men, and Bethnal Green and Whitechapel for their villains.
    The ‘villain’ is a fighter who lives on his reputation for not caring what he does or what happens to him. He makes a living any way he can, chiefly from lesser criminals. His weapon is intimidation. His virtues, such as they are, are ‘gameness’ and an unconcern for money once he has it. The East End villain, according to one elderly ex-thief from Bethnal Green, ‘generally died young and never made any money. He lived like an animal and died like one.’ Bill Sykes was his prototype. Despite this, the old villains of the East End did possess a sort of glamour. Their lives were generally ‘nasty, brutish and short’, but they stood out from the grey world around them. Everybody talked aboutthem and Charles knew them all – Jimmy Spinks, Timmy Hayes, old Dodger Mullins: none of them admirable men, but they were recognized for what they were and did what many better men would like to have done. They never worked. They’d scare money out of bookmakers, publicans and successful shopkeepers. ‘Dodger would work his own protection racket round all the small-time bookmakers, calling each Monday morning for his “pension”. Shopkeepers paid him something too; sort of insurance to keep the lesser tappers away.’ Even their brutality was memorable. ‘Jimmy Spinks ordered some fish and chips, and when they cut up rough because he wouldn’t pay, he threw the fish-shop cat in the frier.’ ‘Old Wassle Newman used to throw bricks up in the air and punch ’em as they came down to toughen his hands.’
    They were resolutely male. Drunken and idle, they were against home life and treated their women appallingly. ‘Dodger got fed up with one bird he lived with an’ threw her out of the window. The police issued a warrant for his arrest an’ caught him at Epsom Races. To teach him a lesson, one of the coppers, a