Bringing Down the Krays Read Online Free

kids running from the local coppers any more (and look how far that had got us).
    After staying in London for a few days it was back off to Shanklin, to start fixing up the boats and deckchairs for the next season. I loved the winter and the deserted beaches and esplanade almost as much as the summer. There was one special boat that I spent a lot of time restoring. The old salt I boughtit from told me it had been one of those that brought the British Army back from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. I renamed her The African Queen .
    Did I want to watch the sunset, strolling on the beach through the surf? Or did I want bright lights, big city? I didn’t know myself. But I did know that, even if the Isle of Wight was seemingly stuck forever in some pre-war time warp, London was changing fast. It was happening on the streets. Most of all, it was happening in clubs, the sort of places my brothers were going to.
    Apart from nicking bicycles and going to reform school, I didn’t know too much about big-time crime. But I was streetwise enough to have picked up the whispers. Our Dad used to tell stories about the old-time villains, the old West End firms run by men like Jack ‘Spot’ Comer, Billy Hill, Albert Dimes, the Sabini brothers. Their time was passing. In their place I heard there were a couple of new faces round Bethnal Green way, known as ‘the twins’. They were supposed to be as hard as nails and had a reputation for extreme violence that had even managed to reach as far as the leafy squares of Holborn – even if it wasn’t quite terrifying the Isle of Wight yet.
    Mum and Dad came down to Shanklin for a day out now and then. I could see Mum could use a nice holiday so I told her that she, Dad, and the children should stay in a guest-house for two weeks and I would pay. Alfie and David came down too, full of stories about wild times in London and their smart and glamorous new friends. These included the infamous twins I was starting to hear so much about.
    They were called the Krays. Reggie and Ronnie Kray. Because Ronnie commanded a little army of admirers, he was known as ‘the Colonel’. Alfie was full of them.
    ‘We’ve met some fellers from over in the East End,’ he would boast. ‘Big villains they are, the governors, you know what I’m saying? The real thing, they are, pretty much running all of London now. And we’re their friends! We go round to their house, we know their mum and dad, the lot. Like family we are, already.’
    I couldn’t help but feel jealous. I tried to act uninterested but Alfie kept telling me more. ‘Honest, Bobby,’ he would say. ‘If you go out with Ronnie and Reggie to a club or anything, everyone just gets out of the way and clears the best table for you. It’s brilliant.’
    The more I heard about it, the more I wanted to be part of it. I had so many questions. What are they like? How did you meet them? When am I going to?
    I naturally looked up to Alfie. He’d been in trouble with the law like me; he’d grown up pretty fast and had been going down to clubs in Soho from his early teens. Mum worried, like she worried about all of us, but it was best she didn’t know too much.
    While I’d been putting out deckchairs, Alfie had already had the encounter that was going to change all our lives. It had happened in the summer of 1959. He had been having a drink in Soho, down in Jack Murray’s bar, opposite the Freight Train in Berwick Street. It was about eight o’clock and absolutely dead when who should walk in but ‘Mad’ Teddy Smith.
    Teddy was a face round the West End who Alfie knew only slightly. He had a reputation as a bit of a tearaway, especially when drunk, which was often. He was a sensitive soul the rest of the time and liked to think of himself as a writer. There were quite of few of those round Soho in those days.
    Teddy suggested going to a club in the East End owned by some friends of his he thought Alfie would like. ‘What’s it called, this