Hell Is Round the Corner Read online

  Maxine wrote this big letter to the family, to try and stop Martin from carrying on with me. They all knew that Martin was a very rough guy. Everybody in St Paul’s used to be afraid of him, so that’s why she wrote that letter, and said to tell him that Roy didn’t have anything to do with it, and he should leave him alone. I gave Marlow the letter, and if Maxine hadn’t written it, they would have blamed me and probably I wouldn’t be alive today.

  Still, Martin made it known he was looking for me, saying he was gonna hurt me. I heard that he was going to get me, so I had to keep away, from Martin and from my kids. Maybe he didn’t see the letter Maxine wrote to them. I didn’t want anything to happen to me or to anyone. I never moved far away, and I never left Bristol. I didn’t know nowhere else except Bristol. I just moved from Hartcliffe and got a place down in St Paul’s.

  After that, I kept working to take care of my home. Sometimes I think I worked too many hours, and I should’ve given up the bakery job. All of my kids will tell you the truth: Adrian and Leanna were the only kids I didn’t give nothing to. With the rest of my kids, I tried my best with what I had – I gave to them. In the end, Adrian phoned me and we would have a chat, and sometimes he came to see me, and I’m pleased about that. I always thought, ‘When they come big, they’ll know where to find me.’ And it worked out that way. My life never separated from Adrian’s. He’s family. And I can never forget Maxine.

  TRICKY: didn’t start seeing my dad until I was about twelve years old. For some reason around that time I’d taken to sitting on the stairs in my auntie Marlow’s house, going through the phonebook. One time I found my last name, and I go, ‘Who is this?’ And she replies, ‘That’s your dad –give him a call!’

  So I called, and his wife Christine answered.

  ‘Hello, is Roy there?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he’s not in at the moment,’ said Christine. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s his son,’ I simply replied.

  ‘I’ll tell him you called.’

  After that, I started seeing him again. The first time, I went to his house without my uncle Martin knowing about it. I realise now, looking back, that my dad is quite a violent man, too. I must have been about twelve or thirteen when one day he took me to Eastville market. While he was parking the car there, he had an argument about a parking space. Voices were getting raised, and Dad pulled a flick knife out on the guy. He was going, ‘You want me to cut you?’ all in this Jamaican twang, and the other guy backed down. If he hadn’t, the guy would have got cut, no doubt about it.

  His manner seems gentle, but it’s not when he loses his temper. He wasn’t like my great-uncle Martin, but he would definitely cut you back then. Over the years, as he’s got older, he has told me things every now and then, probably because Martin isn’t around now – at least, he ain’t like he used to be.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE GODFREYS

  Even though I lost my mum so young, I was brought up by women – Maga, Violet, my auntie Marlow and my cousin Michelle, all very strong women. There were men around – like Martin, when he wasn’t in prison, and Tony, who would come down from Manchester to visit – but the main man who was around was Marlow’s husband Ken. After Maga passed away, I lived mostly at Marlow and Ken’s house in Hartcliffe. That was another busy house, with Marlow, Ken, me, their children Mark and Michelle, who were both a few years older than me, and another kid called Trevor Beckford, who wasn’t related, but was like family – so that was six of us. It sounds like there was a lot of us, but when you’re family, it doesn’t feel crowded.

  Ken worked as a hospital chef – he made the food in the Bristol Royal Infirmary – and he never got into trouble or any of that stuff. He used to spoil me, Ken, and he listened to music all the time. He was a white guy, but well into black music. He loved Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, and the first time I ever saw a music film was with him – The Jazz Singer, with Neil Diamond. In fairness, I was too young to think of it as anything more than just music.

  Marlow worked too, in a restaurant, so we didn’t feel poor. We always had food and clean clothes, and I would walk to and from school in Knowle West. When I was eight, my nana Violet moved from Knowle West to a top-floor flat in Totterdown, which was doing well, coming from Knowle West – it’s a nicer neighbourhood, the next one up going north towards the city centre – and she demanded that I come to live with her.

  With all these comings and goings, I didn’t really go to school much. To begin with, I didn’t even have to bunk off as such. Education wasn’t important to my nan, so she didn’t think it was important for me. She was just from a different generation. She was totally cool. If it was raining too much, she would come into my bedroom and say, ‘Oh, do you really want to go to school? It’s raining!’ or ‘It’s really cold today, innit?’ I think she was really just keeping me home for company, because she would otherwise be alone all day.

  My senior school, Merrywood Boys School, wasn’t great but it wasn’t grim or rough-looking. All the rooms were nice, and warm. It was just a bad school because of area problems. I didn’t mind going there from that perspective. I just didn’t go because I had the choice not to go. Most kids go because they have to go, whereas if I didn’t want to, I didn’t. I had the worst attendance. One of my class teachers used to make fun of me. You know when they call your name out on the register, and you say ‘Yes, sir’? He would pretend to faint, like, ‘You’re in – wow!’

  The only things I was good at were English and sports. I could miss six weeks of school, then finally turn up and come top in an English exam, no problem! The one book I always remember reading was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling. I used to love that story, about the mongoose. Apart from that, I didn’t know much about books. I like reading now in later life, but there weren’t any books around when I was younger. I didn’t know anybody who read.

  Words, however, were a big thing for me, before music. I was all about words. From five years of age, I would apparently sit on my great-grandmother’s concrete floor, writing poems – page after page, all afternoon – but unfortunately none of it has survived so we’ll never know what was going through my head back then.

  The only time I went to school was to see my mates, and it was a right laugh. My best friend, Danny Shepherd, was like Dennis the Menace. That kid, he used to do stuff. One time, he ripped some guy’s box jacket from the back, almost tore it off him. Another time, he made like he was throwing a chisel at a teacher from behind, but threw it so it just hit the cupboards nearby. Danny must’ve been the worst, worst, worst kid in Merrywood Boys – if not the whole of Knowle West, which is saying something. I went all through school with him, and this other guy called Dean Reid – both white kids – right from the age of five at junior school. When you’ve got mischievous mates like that, and you bother to go in, school is funny.

  Much later, in the 1990s, Merrywood got closed down and demolished, because it had such bad results. When I was there, I thought it had some really bloody good teachers, so I don’t know if it got worse. One of them taught me really good handwriting – old-school, with fountain pens, in old English lettering.

  The main problem was that everyone knew that you couldn’t go anywhere from there. One really honest teacher told us once, ‘If you fill out a job application, lie about coming from here – put a different postcode, because when people see you’re from Knowle West, you won’t get the job.’ He was a cool teacher, telling us the truth, letting us know that coming from Knowle West, you’ve either got to work a bit harder, or lie. So that was good reality, more important than cramming something or being book smart – what education should be about. That served me well, all through my life.

  As you got a bit older, you realised there were no prospects of getting out of Knowle West. There was just the Woodbine tobacco factory, where my grandmother worked, and Cadbury’s, where a couple of my other family members worked. Those were the jobs that were available, but then the tobacco factory closed in the mi
d-80s, and all those jobs went – it’s luxury apartments now. I think Cadbury’s got shut down as well, so there wasn’t a lot of work. If you wanted a legal job, it would have been construction or scaffolding.

  There aren’t many people who got well known out of Knowle West, apart from me and Julian Dicks. He was a footballer, who went on to play for West Ham United and Liverpool, known as The Terminator. I actually played with him at school – we were in the school team together. From the age of eight through to about fifteen, I was in the school team most of the time, but I didn’t take it as serious as many kids do – like, it might be their route out of a hard situation. In my teens, it got to a place where I didn’t want to use my Saturdays doing that. I just wanted to hang out.

  I never went to football matches. I’ve only been to two in my whole life – one in Italy and one in Bristol. The only sport I watch is boxing, probably because I’ve done quite a bit of it myself, and I like to watch what they’re doing technically. I grew up around it, and like football it’s a very English working-class thing. As a kid, it might be your way out of a council flat. Most boxers come from very poor environments, and they get into it so they can change their lives. I can remember staying up really late to watch the Muhammad Ali fights on TV when I was just a little kid.

  All the Knowle West white kids could fight, but I didn’t feel it was particularly violent growing up, because I was just one of the kids. We used to run around, loads of us, all around the streets. I’m more aware of it now when I go back, because I’m not from there any more, so I can feel the atmosphere. If I go into a pub and it’s all Knowle Westers, you can feel the vibe.

  I never felt there was that much racial tension, although when I was a teenager I had police shouting ‘black bastard’ at me, or following me while I was driving along in a car, or someone shouting out ‘nigger’ from afar, which I can remember happening to me once in Hartcliffe. But I see all that more as a street thing. It’s just how things were, and it never bothered me. You know: these policemen don’t like me, and I don’t like them – fuck ’em! But then I’ve seen white friends in Knowle West getting beaten up by police and locked up, so in my opinion it’s more to do with the streets than the colour of your skin.

  Back then, you were just aware that there were certain Knowle Westers who were dangerous people, like Wayne Lomas. He was a great guy, and a friend of my uncles. One time I was in the Robins pub, and Wayney had just shot some guy in the neck. I was sat at the bar, and my cousin was playing pool or something, and Wayne came in. I’ve known him all my life, and he goes, ‘Do you want a drink?’ So I goes, ‘Yeah, alright, Wayne,’ then he made the guy next to me buy me the drink. He goes, ‘Aw, leave it out, Wayne!’ and he put his fingers in the guy’s neck like they were a pistol.

  He was a bit crazy, Wayne. He went missing in 1988. Someone had killed him, and they eventually found his body five years later, chopped up into pieces and embedded in a concrete floor in a terraced house in Southville.

  A handful of my uncles and cousins could have met a similar fate. In fact, one of them did, and when I really stop to think about it, so could I.

  You know how it’s hard to understand what makes someone tick sometimes? My great-uncle Martin told me once that when he was in his late teens, he was in this home for naughty youth and he’d started boxing. He won some kind of Avon and Somerset competition, so he was through to the national finals in London. He’d qualified and everything, but the head of this place wouldn’t let him go to fight in London. You can imagine, at that age it was such a big thing for him: he had already won at the regional level, and this was going national. After that, everyone in the family blamed the way he turned out on that guy who told him he couldn’t go to London.

  When he was telling me about it, I definitely got that vibe, too. I think that’s what made him violent. He loved his boxing, and at that point it could’ve led anywhere for him, so this guy was killing his dream. Later on, when someone did something to him, and he was hurting them, it was almost like he was also hurting that guy. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s what I felt.

  You can Google my uncle Martin, and you’ll find stuff about him. He was on the front of the Bristol Evening Post when he was twenty-something – this old article where they’re looking for him because he’s kidnapped someone or carved someone up. It says something like, ‘THIS EVIL MAN’ and there’s a picture of him in a leather jacket, with the collar up.

  If you want to understand me, and where I come from, you need to hear some of my uncles’ stories.

  MARTIN GODFREY: I was born in 1934, and grew up in Knowle West. It was such a poor neighbourhood, we had hardly any food – I remember my brother having to saw a loaf of bread in half because it was so stale.

  Originally my father worked on a farm on the outskirts of town, and he used to come gathering pigswill from houses all around Knowle West and Bedminster – all the leftovers, for the pigs – until eventually he and Maga set up home there.

  We lived at 13 Padstow Road, a normal, simply decorated council house with five rooms: downstairs had a kitchen and a living room, while upstairs there was one bedroom for Mum and Dad, one for my sisters – Olive, Violet and Maureen – and one for me and my brother, Arthur. It was a busy house, women cooking every night.

  Knowle West was terrible during the war – I was five when it started. We got bombed a lot, because there were aerodromes, and lots of Americans stationed there. The house behind ours got bombed. Round the corner, there was blood splattered all over the gate where another house got bombed.

  It was a violent place, anyway. It wasn’t easy being a mixed-race family – my mother was half-black, and I’m quarter-black – and my dad had a lot of fights over it. My left eye is milky because, when I was about ten, some kid threw stones at me and hit me there; ever since, I’ve only been able to see out of the other one.

  I saw a couple of Americans – two servicemen – getting beaten, and one of them died. I was playing down by the local pub, the Venture Inn, and I saw this Yank come out, and they all chased him, so I chased behind them, and he came to a little shelter on the corner, and they all piled on him – then they all went away, and an ambulance came, and I heard them say he was dead.

  My mother, Margaret, used to take in these black squaddies and cook meals for them. She was very kind like that, but the neighbours didn’t like it. They’d come and throw stones at the house. There was a big riot after that American got killed, and they came smashing our house up.

  I was going to school one day, and the bombs fell and hit the school, so we had to run and get in shelters. Sometimes we’d be in there overnight, sometimes two nights, twenty of us or even fifty of us, women and children, all huddled in there like sardines. Loads got bombed, and because it was a poor part of town, it didn’t get built up again for a long time after. People always looked down on Knowle West, but we were proud of it.

  We had the rabbits, see, rabbits and hares, plenty of them, and that was how we beat the rations. We used to supply the whole neighbourhood with rabbits. Farmer used to take us rabbiting – long-netting at night, or ferreting with the dogs in the day. We used to sell the rabbits for five shillings each, and sometimes we’d catch twenty or thirty in a night. It put food on our table as well. I loved doing it, but it was dangerous – if you got caught, you went to court, and there’d be gamekeepers around with shotguns. We were at it almost every night, like the family business, and we’d go out miles on our pushbikes to do it.

  They knew us well enough. One farmer called Hazel had a farm out Whitchurch way, and we used to go up there poaching. He caught me ferreting once and took the ferret off me, so Farmer went up to him and told him that he wanted my ferret back, but Hazel said he couldn’t have it, so my dad punched him, knocked him down, took the ferret, and we came home. After that, there was always trouble with him. He’d put traps out, and had his sons out looking for us.

  When I was about twenty, I followed my sister Maureen up
to Manchester, and ended up living there for six or seven years. My niece Maxine came up there as well. She was a very nice young lady, very bright. She used to write poems and was very good in school, read Shakespeare. She dressed well, and liked bright colours. Then she met this … she met Adrian’s father, and then things went wrong. She moved back to Bristol, had the two kids, and then committed suicide. I don’t know anything about him at all, but I don’t think good things about him. She was epileptic, but I don’t think that was anything to do with it – she’d had it since she was a kid. He was going with other women, and that played on her mind.

  I was in prison, and I got a letter saying she’d taken her own life. I was shocked. I never thought she would do that. It was such a shame, terrible – all over her fella. So I wrote this letter back, making my feelings known. I just said I felt sorry for her, and how she was treated, that I wanted to run him out of town. I suppose I had a reputation at that time. A lot of people were scared of me.

  The stuff I did, it was only little skirmishes around the pubs. Violence was what everyone was doing, and I was just the best at it. I got in a lot of trouble. For me, the violence was mostly for the excitement. It wasn’t like I went around looking for it, but when you’ve got a reputation, they come looking for you, and you can’t back down. It mattered to me at the time, but it was all stupid really, a load of rubbish. I regret it now.

  We were a bit of a double act, me and my brother Arthur, and I got quite a reputation. To start with I’d just fight with my fists, but one time I was fighting a fella in a dancehall and he stabbed me on the head with a penknife, so that started it going where I carried a knife. I never saw that guy again.