The Criminal Alphabet Read Free

London slang I was exposed to as a child could
     sometimes be confusing. For example, the Irish call a cupboard a ‘press’, and they
     call dishes and cups ‘delft’ (only, with the Dublin accent, the ‘t’ in ‘delft’ is
     silent). So when my mother told me to ‘wash the delft and put it in the press’ I
     knew what she was talking about, though my English pals wouldn’t have a clue. In
     Irish slang, a number of anything is a ‘rake’ (‘a rake of delft to wash’). Also,
     anything you can’t remember the name of is a ‘yoke’, as in ‘Where’s that yoke that
     fits on the end of the carpet sweeper?’. So, from a young age, I had to learn to
     translate in my own head what was being said both inside and outside of the home.
     Pretty typical for the child of immigrants in what was, to them, basically a foreign
     country, but this may have been where my love for words and language was first
     ignited. Iremember once I told the teacher that I was going home
     for a ‘coddle’ that evening and she tried to correct me – ‘No, Noel, it’s pronounced
     “cuddle”,’ she said, emphasizing the ‘u’. I was actually talking about an Irish stew
     made from sausage, bacon and potatoes. Dublin coddle was, in my young mind at least,
     world famous.
    Very early on I learned to adapt my
     language to the situation. Those were the days when it wasn’t uncommon to hear kids
     in London exclaiming ‘Gor blimey!’ or ‘Gertcha!’ (today, the only time you hear
     these expressions is in old black-and-white films or in Chas and Dave songs): we
     really did talk like this. Of course, we didn’t know that the phrase ‘Gor blimey!’
     was a corruption of the ancient exclamation ‘God blind me!’, an exhortation to God
     to take away the power of sight when you are faced with something terrible or
     horrifying. And ‘Gertcha!’ was a shortened version of ‘Get the fuck away from me,
     you!’, usually growled and with the added emphasis of a raised hand. When we were
     scrumping apples from local gardens, running round the stalls in Angel Market or
     just generally acting like kids, there was always some old geezer who would raise a
     hand and shout ‘Gertcha!’ in our direction. And we copied what we heard.
    When I was nine my family got their
     first real home, a council flat in Balham, South London, and off we went to the
     badlands of ‘sarf’, as North Londoners would say. Living in South London meant
     learning a whole new set of words and phrases. For example, in North London playing
     truant from school was known as ‘hopping the wag’, but in South London it was called
     ‘bunking it’. In Dublin it was called ‘mitching’. So when my mum asked if I’d been
     ‘mitching school’ I could honestly reply that I hadn’t, because in my mind I was
     ‘bunking it’. It’s no wonder I was a confused kid!
    South London slang differs from the
     slang used in other parts of London, and indeed in the country as a whole.Bermondsey, in particular, used to have its own language, which
     even people in other parts of South London found hard to decipher. A ‘stone ginger’
     was a certainty, as was the word ‘million’, as in ‘Yeah, he’s a million for parole
     since he’s behaved himself’. Once I became a teenager and involved in a life of
     crime, my language expanded further. The language of borstal and juvenile jails is
     littered with slang, some of it dating back to Victorian times. For example, in borstal there was a tradition for boys in the last fortnight of
     their sentence to count down the days like this – ‘14 and a brek … 13 and a brek … 12 and a brek’ and so on –‘brek’ being short for
     ‘breakfast’, because on the morning you leave custody you’re not released until the
     institution has served breakfast. In the last ten days of the sentence the tradition
     was to cough into your hands and then show via your fingers how many days and a brek
     you had