Gypsy Jane - I've Been Shot Four Times and Served Three Prison Terms?This is the Incredible Story of Read Free Page A

of the room and I grabbed it by its tail and shouted, ‘Shell!’ When her and Mum looked round at me, I lifted my head, opened my mouth and, while Shell screamed, ‘No! No!’ I swallowed it down whole in one big gulp. The goldfish went down a lot easier than the incident did with Mum. I got battered by her again but I felt it was worth it. I felt as if I’d got my own back on them both. Don’t get me wrong – I’d never usually hurt an animal and never have since. In fact, I have always felt guilty about it because it was no way to treat a goldfish. I should have done something to Shell instead.
    I was so strong willed that I always got on Mum’s wrong side and Mum was more forceful than Dad. He tried to stop me and Mum from rowing but it was no good because he couldn’t control either of us. She was a mad woman and, come to think of it, maybe mygypsy blood isn’t the only thing that made me the way I am.
    Mum had a babysitter called Rosie and she became my guardian angel and best friend. When she moved into the flats, I no longer had to sleep rough on the stairs. I’d just go straight to hers and she would always welcome me in her house, which became my second home.
    One night, after mum turned on me, something snapped inside me and I fought back against her for the first time in my life. I grabbed her and stopped her from hitting me. I wrestled her to the ground and held her there until she calmed down. She soon stopped trying to hit me and I swore there and then that she’d never hit me again. I was so young and that was the start of living from house to house because I couldn’t be under the same roof as Mum anymore. All this wasn’t doing my schooling much good. I went to Cumberland school in Plaistow but, to be honest, I was never that keen and was absent more often than not. During the days I started hanging around with people who were a few years older than me because everyone my age was still at school. I practically moved in with Rosie but I also stayed with other friends that all knew Mum was boozing and losing the plot. Nobody ever turned me away. I still stayed at home sometimes but never at the weekends because that is when it could get really bad.
    By this time I was growing up fast. I was already learning the street code that my dad had lived by before he went straight. I knew that you didn’t do anybody anywrong unless they had done it to you first and that you didn’t do any wrong to you and yours, and that you didn’t make your family ashamed. I was a kid but I was already what we call old school and I was living by the rules of the East End. You don’t grass anyone up and you don’t do your own.
    Out on the streets I grew up believing that loyalty, morals and honour were the most important things because nobody could take them away from you. You made sure you didn’t give them away. And it was around this same time that what you might call my childhood came to end because I was introduced to the world of gangsters and guns – and I took to it like a duck to water.

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SCHOOLGIRL ARMED ROBBER
    I loved my sawn-off straight away.
    B y 1980 I was 14 and hanging around with a couple of older lads and we got into armed robberies together. How did I go from eating my sister’s goldfish to pointing shotguns at people for money? Well, I’m not too sure myself. What I do know is that money was scarce, I wasn’t attending school and it seemed like a good idea at the time. And you have to understand that the world I had been brought up in meant it wasn’t such a big deal. Everyone was up to a bit of this and a bit of that. When you consider I was barely living at home and was fending for myself, the idea of having a few quid in my pocket was quite appealing. So where was I going to get it from? I didn’t have that many options until the day one of my mates told me to pop round tohis house. He was there with another mate talking about doing an armed robbery to make a lot of money. They were