The Profession of Violence Read Free Page B

was livelier. It ran eastwards from the old boundaries of the City at Bishopsgate, with Whitechapel and Whitechapel High Street to the south and Hackney and the Bethnal Green Road to the north. Unlike most parts of the East End, the green of Bethnal Green remained a narrow patch of grass fringed with eighteenth-century houses and although Bethnal Green had some of the worst poverty and vilest slums in the country its people kept a certain local pride.
    The main employment for the men was casual labour in the London markets or the docks and in the thirties after the Depression, Bethnal Green saw brutal poverty again. In 1932 a government report estimated 60 per cent of the children of Bethnal Green suffered from malnutritionand 85 per cent of the housing was unsatisfactory. But this part of the East End was used to poverty. This was where the ‘Rookeries’ of Dickens’s time had been. In Bethnal Green before the war, the most lavish events were still the funerals, day-long wakes with black, plumed horses pulling the hearse and more spent burying a man than he could earn in a year alive.
    Death was a commonplace affair in Bethnal Green; most men survived by toughness or drunkenness or both, and the family was the one firm unit of defence. This was the basis of the famous East End matriarchy, with the woman of the family keeping life going against all the odds. Without the woman and the family no one in Bethnal Green had much of a chance. Violet had learned this from experience.
    â€˜Before I ran away to marry Mr Kray we was devoted as a family. Us three sisters, Rosie, May and me, and my brother who kept a caff across the road. My dad worked in the market, but everybody used to know us. They called our bit of Vallance Road “Lee Street”. Though times was hard I’d say that we was well looked after. My mum would see to that. We always lived close as a family and helped each other every way we could.
    â€˜The only trouble was my dad was terrible strict. Us girls had to be indoors by nine of a night. I used to like life. Always have, and I was the one who never could get home on time. That must be why I married at seventeen. That’s what I put it down to, me bein’ young and silly and him being so strict, I thought I’d do anything to get away. Then when I married Mr Kray, my dad disowned me. No proper wedding and he wouldn’t even come to the register office in the Kingsland Road.’
    Violet’s father, John ‘Cannonball’ Lee, stuck by what he said, and Violet remained outlawed from her family during the earliest years of marriage. But gradually she was accepted back. ‘My mum had kept an eye on me to see Iwas all right. Often be poppin’ round with half a pound of cheese or a bit of meat for us.’ The birth of Charles David brought something of a reconciliation with her family. Her father started speaking to her again. But it was the twins who really brought the wayward daughter home to the family in Vallance Road. And she returned in style, double pram and all. ‘My dad adored the twins, thought they was wonderful. Everyone who saw ’em seemed to love ’em.’ And everybody spoiled them. ‘Somehow with the twins you couldn’t help it.’ ‘I always dressed the twins the same. They was such pretty babies. I made ’em both white angora woolly hats and coats and they was real lovely, the two of them. Just like two little bunny rabbits.’
    Some of the old East Enders like Charles Kray lived on their wits. Others, like Violet’s father, old John Lee ‘the Southpaw Cannonball’, lived by sheer force of personality. Boxer, juggler, street performer, impromptu poet, market man, he was a famous local character. His mother’s family was Irish and his father’s Jewish. His father had been a butcher.
    â€˜He weren’t a bad man, except that he took to alcohol, and it ruined him as it’s ruined many a