Hell Is Round the Corner Read online

  These were just gang fights. It didn’t feel like a gang as such, just a few of us used to get together, and we would go out and get in a lot of trouble together, just fighting. I went to prison a few times – always for stabbing with knives, once for two years, once for four years, another for seven years.

  The first time, I got into a fight, and I cut a fellow with a knife in a pub. He survived alright. I went to court and I got two years at Horfield prison in Bristol, but after six months they transferred me to Wormwood Scrubs – supposedly I was their youngest ever inmate. I was alright in there; you just had to look after yourself. While I was in, I got beat up by the screws, and this MP, Peter Baker, who was doing a stretch for fraud at the time, saw it, and wrote about it in a book called Time Out of Life, saying it was the worst beating he’d ever seen.

  It was a very good feeling coming out again, but not long after there was this bloke who kept telling stories about me and causing me a lot of problems, so I went for him this night and carved him up – got him on the floor and carved ‘RAT’ on his chest. I got four years for that.

  Another time, I had a fight in a pub, and we both had broken glasses, and I cut him with the glass, and I got seven years. It was always different prisons. I was in Strangeways, Wandsworth, Gloucester. I can’t say any of them stopped me reoffending – it didn’t work like that for me.

  I lost family along the way. Years ago, Arthur had a heart attack and died, and my nephew Michael was only in his late twenties when he got stabbed to death. This was in the early-80s: he was going into a blues called Ajax and they tried to charge him money to go in. He wouldn’t pay, and the fella on the door stabbed him in the heart.

  I got done over a couple of times, once on St Paul’s Road, when a nurse found me bleeding to death. People come picking on you, and then they come down with more of them against one of you. I packed it all in eventually, and I do feel lucky to be alive. I kept on scrap dealing out in the country for a bit, around Wells and Glastonbury. Then a few years ago, I came back to Bristol, still doing scrap, then I retired.

  When Adrian came to live with us at Padstow Road, he’d come rabbiting with us sometimes, but he didn’t like the sitting around, the cold and the walking. He was just into music and dancing. He used to do that breakdancing on the street, then he would be out at night, every night, he wouldn’t stay in. But he was a good little kid. He didn’t get into much trouble.

  TRICKY: While Martin was in Manchester, my mum’s brother Tony was up there too, and he got quite a reputation as well, which all started from his bare-knuckle boxing. Martin used to fight him out like a dog. Martin had this club in Manchester, and all these gangsters used to go in boasting about their fighters, and he’d say to them, ‘Listen, your boy won’t beat my nephew!’ Tony was only sixteen or so, and he would fight them and beat them. Sometimes he’d knock these hard guys out with one punch. That’s how he became one of the top guys in Manchester.

  TONY GUEST: I was a war baby, born in 1944. My dad was a black American soldier called Ted Guest, but he was never married to my mum, Violet Godfrey, Adrian’s nan. I never had much to do with my dad because he went back to America, and I stayed here. Mum also had Michael and Maxine (Adrian’s mum) by different men.

  I grew up in 13 Padstow Road until I was eight, then I went to Manchester with a whole load of the family, so I was only in Knowle West when I went to Connaught Road school in the late ’40s and early ’50s. It was bad at school, because me and another lad were the only two black people there. My grandfather Farmer was white, and my grandmother Maga was a quarter black, and because he’d married a black girl people were always smashing our windows.

  That was why you had to fight, if you were me, if you can understand that. You had to fight or run away, and I was a fighter. I wouldn’t let no one take liberties. That was why I liked Manchester, because once I went there, you never got any of that – there were blacks, Indians, Asians, everything, whereas Bristol just seemed to be one thing: just Bristolians.

  Maxine and Michael came with us to Manchester, and we lived in Chorlton-on-Medlock, near All Saints. I liked Manchester. I went to school and I had friends. I went to Webster Street School on Moss Side, then, at eleven, Cavendish in All Saints, and that’s where I started boxing. I wasn’t interested in any of the rest of the classes. The PT teacher worked it all out: he said, ‘You know how you can do something good? You can do boxing,’ so that’s how I started. Before long I did bare-knuckle on the side. You got a few bruises but it was okay if you were good.

  In our teens, Maxine always said I was too disciplined, being the elder brother. She went out with anyone, and I would say, ‘Oh, he’s no good.’ I had to look after her. She was up in Manchester until she was about fifteen. She was a wild character, but the whole fucking family was wild characters, now I come to think of it! I think she met Roy when she was back visiting Bristol, so she moved down again, and it wasn’t long before Adrian and Leanna were born.

  We’ve been through a lot. I’ve lost my sister and my brother, and it wasn’t in nice ways – Maxine committed suicide, and our Michael got stabbed to death – murdered. I got a phone call out of the blue about Maxine, just like I did about Michael. You never forget that stuff.

  After us, my uncle Martin moved up as well – the mad one. I was close with him, and we went around a lot together. He was like a wildcat, man! He had a name and a reputation for fighting, and I got one too. How it happened: I was out in Manchester, right near Christmas, and I was going to the Wishing Well, which was a café that was open all the time, and then on to the club Martin was running. As I was going past the Wishing Well, they were all singing Christmas songs, so I go inside to join in and this Scottish guy came up and said, ‘Hey, what are you fucking doing?’ and he headbutted me, so I gave him a combination and punched him to the floor. His missus started at me with a high-heeled shoe to get me off him. I had no idea he was Danny Fieldings, one of the hardest men in town.

  After that my name flew around town. That’s how it happens. I was only sixteen, seventeen, and fit as a fiddle. I wasn’t trying to be top man, it just happened after that. I kept up the boxing, but by the time I was twenty-five, I was on the door at clubs all around town. I was at the Bierkeller for eight years, Roosters, the Portland Lodge, and I worked at the pubs sometimes. There were a few places we were running.

  The guy I did a lot of that with, Dave Ward, was close to the family of Shaun Ryder from the Happy Mondays, or so I later discovered. Dave was a moor man, like a gypsy. He ran Manchester for a long time, and I was his partner: I took care of the central clubs, and he looked after the south side.

  Martin was dead smart back then. He had a club called the Edinburgh – not licensed, like a shebeen. I was security, always the one that made sure it was okay. It only started at night, and all the night birds would come out – black people and white people. There was good music and drinking all night and morning.

  While he was up here, Martin stabbed a guy over on Moss Side. Me and Michael was in another shebeen, and at one point our Mike stood up and this waiter’s tray went over. The waiter went mad: ‘You’ve gotta pay for all this!’ At that moment, Martin walked in, and because he was a handsome guy back then – they used to say he looked like a cross between Dean Martin and Tony Curtis – he had two birds with him, and they’d just been out on the town. We were close family, and they thought we were all brothers, so they went to our Martin, and said, ‘Listen, you’ve gotta pay for all this!’ Our Martin told them to eff off, so a fight started, and this waiter was a big guy.

  Our Martin very slowly took his white mac off, put it over his arm, and then a fucking great big knife came out, and he stabbed the guy. God Almighty! It was chaos, they were jumping out of the windows to get out! It was a bad one – he got three years, Martin, and he said to the judge, ‘Thank you very much, because in Bristol I would have got about ten for that!’

  People said Martin should’ve been born in Apache days, because he
had a right name. Bloody hell, in Bristol he got hold of this fellow at a party who was a grass. This guy was the king of the Teddy Boys, name of Webber. Webber’s gang had got one of Martin’s friends in a shopping centre and beat him up, and Martin went for revenge. He waited for him – he was like that, a dangerous man. He climbed up the drainpipe while they were having a party, broke in and cut ‘RAT’ on this bloke’s chest with a knife. Branded him!

  He was in prison a lot, Martin. I was with him the time he burnt down someone else’s club. That night he came back from town to the Edinburgh, and he looked disappointed.

  ‘Tone, where are all the people?’

  ‘They’re probably at the Birdland, at the bottom of the road,’ I replied.

  ‘Are they now,’ he muttered. He called up two of the Scotch mob – Jimmy Boyle from Glasgow, he was on the wanted list, and they made a film about him later called A Sense of Freedom – and the four of us went down to the Birdland, via the petrol station, for two cans of petrol. The three of them went in, and it was packed in there, and they went sprinkling petrol from the cans all over the place, until they got to this open fire they had. Apparently the guy from the club started laughing – he thought they were helping with the cleaning up – and Martin goes, ‘Yeah, I am!’ and he throws the petrol can in the fire and the whole place goes up!

  He had one of those long trench-coats on, and he was running off up the road with his coat on fire! You wouldn’t believe it, man. They took me in, but I was only with him, I didn’t do any of it, so I got off. He went to Strangeways for that.

  As well as running security, I was also doing some minding, looking after a guy to make sure there was no messing about, no mithering. He was Dickie Ewing, from London, who used to do mock auctions. It was all legal, but if you ask me it was all a con. I got a shilling [5p] in the pound on what he sold, sometimes 10p in the pound. Those were good days. I did a lot of protection work for him, too. That was the dirtier side of it.

  Dickie used to have a Rolls-Royce, and one time we went to Bristol in it. Adrian was only about twelve then and, as we pulled up, he was in the middle of the road shouting, ‘Aaaaaww, Uncle Tony!’ Bloody hell, there wasn’t much of that in Knowle West.

  The Manchester clubs got rougher when the guns arrived in the ’90s. They used to have little White Tony going into the Haçienda – he was only small, but he used a gun – and he got shot dead himself in the end. That was all about controlling the drugs that went in there, and all these different firms wanted to get in on it and run it. There was the Cheetham Hill Gang, the Salford Gang … That wasn’t our scene but, Jesus Christ, you had to be able to look after yourself.

  There was this guy with a big reputation – Paul Massey, his name was. I was in the Italian Stallion, and he comes down to the door, ten or eleven of them all wearing shell suits, and he goes, ‘Alright?’ I said, ‘Yes, you’re alright, Paul, but the rest have gotta pay!’ And do you know what they did? They put their hands in their shell suit pockets, just like they’ve all got a gun. I said, ‘Oh, do me a favour – for five quid you’re gonna shoot someone? Go and do a bank!’ It was okay then, you know? Unbelievable. But he was shot dead in 2015 outside his front door. They got the hitman that did it – he got life.

  It wasn’t long before I got involved with the music world myself, through Adrian.

  TRICKY: Not all my family are gangsters. Uncle Tony’s sister, Marlow, got married very young, almost because she wanted to change her name so she wouldn’t be associated with the Godfreys anymore. Her daughter, my cousin Michelle, is like a sister and a mother to me. She has always looked after me, and her dad, Ken Porter – he’s not actually my blood relation – always looked after me like a dad. I was like his favourite, and I think that, because he doted on me and she really loved her dad, she has always doted on me as well.

  To look at her, people would think she’s white, but she’s actually a bit less than a quarter black. People didn’t believe we were first cousins when they saw us hanging out together. They just couldn’t get their heads around it.

  There are a lot of dark secrets in her side of the family, too …

  MARLOW PORTER: I grew up in Knowle West with the Godfrey family, with Martin and all of them, and I hated it. Oh my God, I just couldn’t wait to get away from there. And then once I had, I thought, I’m never going back there – even if they offered me a house, two houses, five houses! It was horrific.

  I grew up thinking that Margaret Godfrey, who everyone called ‘Maga’, was my mother. I was nine years older than Maxine, so I looked after her as an auntie would, but then one day, when I was fourteen, I was bickering with Maureen, who I’d always thought was my sister, and she suddenly looked up and said, ‘Anyway, you are a bastard!’ Maga, who I’d always called ‘Mum’, looked at me and said, ‘Yes, you are, and Violet is your mother, but I fed you from my own breast!’

  I went up into our bedroom to work it all out, and I thought, ‘Well, my brothers Martin and Arthur are now my uncles, and my sister Violet is now my mother! How could they?’ And they never ever spoke about it again. They didn’t explain to me, nothing at all – not even in later life. When I went to see Violet on her death bed at eighty-eight years of age, I thought she would get it off her chest and say sorry, but she never said a word more about it after that day when I was fourteen.

  The thing is, before that day, I sort of knew it, but I didn’t understand. I used to go upstairs and look for things and read them, which a child shouldn’t have done. One time when I was ten, I found this tin, and there was a baptism card inside that said ‘Margaret Rose Godfrey’ – my name –and then underneath, ‘Mother: Violet’. There was nothing about a dad. I thought at that time, ‘How can she be my mother?’ That made me more withdrawn: I couldn’t ask anybody, there was nobody I could go to and relay it to, so I kept it inside.

  When Maureen finally told me in the most horrible way possible, I had one over on them all because I could say, ‘I already know!’ They didn’t know how I knew, but I’d already known since I was ten. I ran upstairs and tried to rip up the card, and I stayed up there for two days. When I came back down, Maga said to me, ‘Maureen has been really upset because of you staying upstairs.’ She never asked me how I felt!

  I couldn’t wait to get out of that family, and out of Knowle West; a few years later, I married young to my husband Ken, but to start with, we couldn’t find a proper place. Eventually we got a two-bedroom council flat in Hartcliffe, which was actually a house, one up one down, and we were overjoyed to have something of our own. We had this most amazing three-piece suite, and all this lovely furniture, and I loved cleaning! Give it a bit more polish! It was like my dolls’ house, because I’d never had anything before. Ken had been in the merchant navy, so he taught me a lot of things about organising, because I had no knowledge of anything.

  Of course, now Martin and Arthur were my uncles. Every girl worshipped Martin because he looked so handsome – he could have anyone. They would befriend me just so they could knock on the door and hope that he answered it. He was very smart, but it was fighting, fighting, fighting. I knew all about their violence.

  By the time I’d had my two kids, Mark and Michelle, I went back to work and saved all this money to buy Ken a suit. In those days, there was no buying suits off a rack – everybody had their suits made, even though they lived in poverty. You went to Hepworth’s or Burton’s – they were the only two. You would go in, pick out what cloth you wanted, and they made the suit. I picked out a dog-tooth check for him, so he looked smart.

  Not long after I’d had it made, Ken went out one night with my family and didn’t come home all night. Imagine how worried I was. When he finally came home, the suit was thick with blood – I’m talking thick. Somebody broke a glass and slashed Arthur across the face, and the blood was from Ken trying to help. After that, Arthur had this massive scar right across his face: the scar burst because he was a haemophiliac, and it couldn’t be neatly stitched back together,
so it became more like an open scar. It made him look like what he was.

  When Martin lived in Manchester, he used to do a lot of fighting with the Irish gypsies. He had something in him where he didn’t feel pain. These guys broke both his arms, and he still went at them – he still acted tough, like nothing was wrong. He retaliated and he stabbed this fella several times, so then he went to prison, down on Dartmoor.

  Maga made me and Ken go on a train to Tavistock to visit Martin. When we came out, it was misty, and we didn’t know whether to go left or right, so we sat in the pub and they said, ‘Oh, there won’t be a bus for several hours.’

  I said to Ken, ‘Let’s walk.’ We kept walking until we came to a cross-roads, but we ended up having to walk back and sit in the pub. Maga was the Mafia mother, and that’s what she made me do, every time they got put away. They all used to control me.

  I never knew my dad, but Maxine’s dad was a really nice person. We called him Quaye. I don’t think we ever knew his Christian name, that’s just what everybody used to call him. He was from Africa. He came over with the merchant navy and ended up staying here in England. He was very quiet, but there was something about him that made me think he was good. I can get feelings like that.

  They used to call me ‘the white witch’. I would say, ‘Michelle, if you stay with that person, I bet you, blah blah blah.’ And ‘blah blah blah’ would happen! You go by gut feelings, don’t you?

  Quaye was very tall, and he had a cataract on one eye, so it was milky. But he was very smart. He and Violet were together in Cardiff, that’s where they met, probably because he was stationed there, and she had Maxine and Michael down there. Then she and Quaye decided to go to Manchester, so I didn’t see so much of him after that, because they split up there and, like everything else in our family, he never got talked about again. Another skeleton in the cupboard.