Hell Is Round the Corner Read online

  Tony’s father, Theodore Guest, was an American soldier, and he was also a decent person. In all fairness to him, he wanted Violet and Tony to start a new life over in America with him. She had tickets for the two of them to go there, but then all the family said, ‘You won’t have no family there, and what if it goes wrong; where are you going to run?’ So she didn’t go, and she never kept in touch with him after that, but I think Tony got some photos of his father. His father was very accepting of him, but he was in America, so that was the end of that.

  I didn’t go to Manchester with all the others. I did nothing with them. Maureen and Violet went up, and Olive was there for a little while. Maxine, who was really my half-sister, rather than my niece, as I’d thought, was only thirteen when they were going up there. She was at school and everything here, in Bristol, but she went up there eventually. When she came back, I took her in, and she lived with me. I was nine years older than her, so I was quite grown up, and I mothered her – and she treated me like a mother. At school, they said they’d never met anyone like her for writing, and that she should be a journalist.

  By the time I’d had Michelle, and she’d had Adrian, we’d moved to another council house, and Maxine and Adrian would practically live with us. Sometimes the Godfreys would come and stay, and there was nothing I could do about it. They just dominated my life. And if I went against it, then they would get on the phone and say, ‘You are obligated to my mother, she brought you up – you and your fancy effing carpets!’

  I rowed with every one of them. I had worked all my life, where they didn’t. I wasn’t trying to prove anything. When I was young, I always thought, ‘When I have children, they’re never gonna get hurt like I’ve been.’ I didn’t have a clue about being a mother; all I knew was, if I do the opposite to what I had all my life, it’ll be okay for them.

  I brought up Michelle and Mark saying to them, ‘Don’t you ever tell people you know that there’s a Godfrey in your family!’ And they’ve grown up beautiful, haven’t they?

  Adrian was the sweetest little boy, too. When he came to live with me, I can’t tell you anything wrong about him, except that when Maxine was alive and then just after she died, he used to have terrible screaming tantrums, and you never knew why. After Maxine died, because of his health, I had to give him medicine, and he wasn’t going to have it. I thought, ‘What am I gonna do?’ I picked him up, took him upstairs, put him in the bedroom, and I said, ‘Now you stay here until you say sorry!’ I went in the other room, and I was trembling. ‘Please God!’ I didn’t think I could cope, I didn’t think I was going to do it right.

  I wouldn’t let him call me Mum. He’d had a mum, and he had to know that he’d had one – even if it was a vision that he didn’t fully remember. So, no, he only ever called me Auntie Marlow. He was always writing on the floor. He never sat in a chair. That’s how I know him – sat on the floor, leg out, scribbling away or watching telly, never in a chair.

  Ken loved Adrian, but he used to say something naughty to him. He would say, ‘Adrian Thaws, got no—’, but he never completed the rhyme. One day the vicar came to the house for money, and Adrian came out and said, ‘I’m Adrian Thaws, and I’ve got no balls!’

  If he had stayed with me – who knows? But when he was nearly eight, Violet wanted him, so I went to Social Services or whatever it was at the time, and I was gonna adopt them both, Adrian and Leanna, and Roy came with me to say that’s what he wanted, too. In those days it was so different.

  They said, ‘You’ve already got two children, we can’t let your children be deprived.’ We didn’t earn great money then, so it didn’t happen. But everything was okay, I fought them hard and I kept Adrian, and I thought that was always going to be the way.

  Then Violet took him. It was like losing my own son, but they didn’t see it like that. I said to them, ‘You’re too old, don’t be cruel! He thinks of Michelle and Mark as a brother and sister – you can’t do that!’ Look how close he is still with Michelle now. I went to a barrister in Bristol, to see if there was any chance I could get him back, and he said, ‘You would lose straight away because she is his full grandmother, and you are only a half-auntie.’ I had no chance, so that was him back in Knowle West with Violet and her new husband, Winston Monteith, a horrible man.

  TRICKY: I hated my step-grandad. I would’ve killed him if I could. I would’ve really liked to have poisoned him, if it wasn’t for my nan, because he was the only company she had. Otherwise, I would have quite happily killed the bloke.

  I was young when they got together, and what’s really weird is, at that point, when I was four or five, he seemed alright. Then, when I was maybe fourteen, he started beating me up. He’d smack me around, so he was never grandad to me. He ain’t my real grandad, know what I mean?

  It was always Michelle who would drive down and pick me up. If she heard he’d been smacking me around, she would be down there within fifteen minutes in the car, and I’d go and stay with her and her family for a while.

  No one liked Winston – my uncle Tony, no one. He would buy a bottle of lemonade, and he would mark it, so I couldn’t drink it – he was one of them. Then, when I was sixteen, he started to pressure my nan to get me to move out. One day, I got up for breakfast and there was a paper on the table open at a page with adverts circled for bedsits. Like, ‘Alright, it’s time to go.’ I knew that was him; my grandmother would never do that. It was him doing it, because he didn’t like me, and I didn’t like him.

  I wasn’t bothered and, by that age, you want to get out anyway. My auntie Marlow tried to intervene, and my nan broke her arm. They had a fight outside the house, and my nan grabbed her arm, and shut the door on her arm and broke it. They had fistfights.

  If I’d have told my uncles, they’d have sorted him out, but I didn’t think like that. If I had a problem with him I would just have a go back at him, but now I know I could’ve got one of my uncles to have a go back at him, and do something to him. He was an older guy as well, so maybe my uncles weren’t gonna smash him up. Then it was for my nan’s sake, too. I didn’t want to cause too many problems for her, because then she would have to take his moaning. He was just a horrible cunt. He’s dead now.

  That physical abuse from him must have had an effect, because I didn’t even remember that he used to beat me up until about five years ago, when Michelle told me about it, when I was talking to her on the phone. I genuinely couldn’t remember it, so I must’ve shut it out, and it must’ve affected me.

  I saw so much violence as a kid. My uncle Michael was generally a very quiet man. One day I was down at his house with his wife, my auntie Sandy. After, Michael was taking me back to my nan’s house, so we got in a taxi. I was about ten years of age, and we were driving from Montpelier, where he lived, going to Totterdown. He was quiet anyway, but he was especially quiet all the way.

  When we got to Oxford Street, where my nan lived, he said to the driver, ‘Pull over here,’ and I thought, ‘My nan’s house ain’t here, it’s about five or six doors up. He knows where my nan lives – it’s his mum!’ But I didn’t say anything.

  He got out of the car and I stayed in the back. He said to the driver of the taxi, ‘You took me the long way round, do you think I’m stupid? You’re taking the piss.’ He dragged him out of the car and battered him. I was watching from the back as he beat him up – he’d got him on the bonnet, punching him in the head, smashing him up.

  After he’d knocked the guy senseless, he opened the door, got me out, walked up the street, then turned to me and said, ‘Don’t tell your nan!’ And that was it, we never spoke about it again.

  I don’t like violence to this day. Maybe that’s just my reaction to my violent family. I’m uncomfortable around violence.

  I’ve got friends from Knowle West who are not worried at all about it, so it must have affected me if I particularly shut it out. I was never a fighter. My uncles and their nephews and my grandad Farmer could all fight, and even my mum, my aunties
and my nan could fight, so really, I should be a fighter, too. I should be a well-respected guy that people are scared of, but I never had that, which is unusual coming from a family like mine. It’s kind of strange what happened to me.

  I’ve done plenty of boxing training, but I never competed, whereas my uncle Tony is not a big guy, but there’s no man on earth he wouldn’t fight. In his day, there’s no man on earth my Uncle Martin wouldn’t fight. He looked at it as, alright, if I can’t put you down, this knife will put you down. But I never had that mentality. It wasn’t at all that I was scared. I would be around violent places, but I didn’t have a dark mind like my uncles. If some doorman came and told me to get out of the club, I would get out of the club. But my uncle Martin and my uncle Tony? Nah, that ain’t gonna happen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FOUNDING FATHERS

  In my teens, all the signs pointed towards me leading a life of crime. I was hardly ever in school. I would just be going out, smoking weed, getting into trouble, getting harassed by the police. Just kids’ stuff, you know – thieving and hustling. Very occasionally we’d do a bit of shoplifting – put on a long leather coat and run out with stuff – but we weren’t really into that so much as robbing houses, breaking into offices and selling weed.

  If I’d stayed in Knowle West, all that kind of activity could have become a bigger part of my life. But it wasn’t like I had some master plan to become an artist and get the fuck out of there, because that was something that just didn’t happen to people like me.

  Still, I knew I couldn’t become a gangster, not the way my uncles were, because I was a lot softer than them. I knew it wasn’t in me, just from knowing how they operated. They were tough, tough, tough men. So I did illegal stuff, but not the same kind of stuff as them.

  I was always tiny as a kid, and you know how council flats have those really small bathroom windows? Well, one of my cousins used to put me through those so I could open the door and he could rob the flats. How it would happen was, I would go and visit this cousin at his house, just to hang out, then he would persuade me to come out with him, we’d stop outside a house or flat, and he’d end up putting me through the bathroom window. Just because I was small.

  So, I’d already been breaking the law from a young age when I fell in with a guy called Nicky Tippett. He was different, Nicky. He was a total rebel, and a bit of a legend in my area. I was about sixteen, and he must have been about fourteen, but he was simultaneously younger and more street than any of the people around him. It was almost like Nicky was born street, and a proper Knowle Wester, though he was mixed-race.

  I started doing naughty stuff because of him, so it was a younger guy getting an older guy into trouble. It’s supposed to be the other way around. He was as naughty as fuck. It was just robbing everything that moved, stealing cars, breaking into places.

  I had such good times with him. I was having a total laugh, but for Nicky it wasn’t about thrill-seeking. He wasn’t the sort of guy to just throw a stone through a window or knock on a door and run away. The most he might have done for fun was steal a car to joyride. When I knew him, from when he was about fourteen, it was all about money. Business, at fourteen years of age! I’ve never seen him act like a child, ever. I can’t ever remember playing football with him or doing anything fun with him, unless it was to do with money.

  One time, I’m walking past a house with him, completely oblivious, and he suddenly stops dead.

  ‘Listen!’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘It’s just a phone ringing.’

  ‘Yes, but no one’s answered it,’ he replies, smiling, and he’s straight over the garden fence.

  We used to call him Nickodemus. He was the only person I knew who drove when we were young. He must’ve been driving a car when he was fifteen, all without a licence. Me and him went halves on a beautiful Ford Cortina – I think we paid £250 each for it – but Nicky knew how to steal a car, too.

  It was me and Nicky mostly, and sometimes our mutual friend Whitley Allen would join us. Nicky’s no longer with us, unfortunately – he died a couple of years ago – but Whitley remembers those times better than I do.

  WHITLEY ALLEN: I first met Adrian because he was seeing this girl who was friends with my girlfriend. He was living at his nan’s in Totterdown at the time, and I’d been hanging around there because of this girlfriend, so our paths finally crossed. We quickly found out we’d each grown up in a slightly different part of Knowle West, both black, but we’d been going around with the same people, all from the same group.

  Once we finally met, we just sort of clicked. It was just one of those connections – weird. We found out we had the same sort of interests, and we started always being together. Even when we were in a group, it would always be me and him. We very rarely talked about doing things together, we just did them. We weren’t followers, we led. He had my back, and I had his. I would walk through fire for him, and vice versa.

  One time, we were walking in Easton, and his dad pulled up to the kerb. He goes, ‘What are you doing here?’ And my dad is in the passenger seat. We were both like, Are you for real?’ Then they just drove off – they didn’t even give us a lift! That was like, ‘Oh my God,’ – we obviously had so much in common without realising. I suppose that was why we were hanging out together. We were linked.

  We’ve done a lot of things, but he used this term – we were curious. We were getting up to all sorts, including with women. We got into – no, I should really say, he got into a lot of situations, where I’d be like, ‘Oh dear!’

  For instance, my sister hated him with a passion. Every time he would come in the house and Grace was there, she would get up and walk out. I’ve got to give it him, mind, because one day, he said, ‘I’m not having this, Grace, what have I done to you?’ And she was like, ‘You know what?’ and they were cool after that. But that’s him. Just like, wow, no messing.

  We got up to a lot of naughty stuff with Nicky Tippett. Again, I knew Nicky’s mum and family, and he knew Nicky separately, then we all met up altogether. Nicky was mixed-race, but he was a real Knowle Wester, and the original straight-out criminal – a cat burglar. He lived and breathed crime. One time, Adrian was supposed to be there with Nicky, and he didn’t turn up, so I went instead – and it was a profitable job, as it turned out!

  Nicky’s older brothers were more into fighting, because if you were mixed-race up there in Knowle West, you had to make your mark, otherwise you got walked over. There was Lloyd, Michael, Stephen, Ivan, and then Nicky was the youngest, so he didn’t really have to do anything physically, because he had all that family behind him. He was less violent, just more criminalised. He was shrewd and cunning, but a wicked, lovely guy, so we both spent a lot of time with him.

  He thought about housebreaking every minute of the day. It was always, ‘Let’s do a job!’ Once, we were doing a job, and we were in the house, and I was like, ‘Right, we’re good to go,’ and he was like, ‘Nah, there’s more stuff in here!’ I was getting jittery – come on, Nick! He would spend all day in there, till he’d gone through every drawer and cupboard. This dude is different. I’m not on that tip – I’m more, get in, get out. Whereas he didn’t panic, just carried on …

  We weren’t earning loads from it. For us two, it was just to continue survival, because we were sixteen, seventeen, and we weren’t working. It was, ‘How are we going to go out on the weekend? Right – let’s go hustle!’

  We didn’t rob houses in Knowle West. You didn’t shit on your own doorstep, so we would branch out to the more middle-class and wealthier areas. To begin with we were on foot, though, so we couldn’t go too far, and that’s where Nicky’s plan for a car came in.

  Nicky had his eye on this car – a gorgeous red Cortina E with a wooden dash. He was like, ‘I want that car!’ because it was up for sale, but he didn’t have the money then, so he set us up to do a burglary, and our payme
nt was, we’ll get the car and so much cash. We made some good money, but then we were mobile.

  Nicky was too young to drive, but he drove anyway. I think I was the only one who didn’t drive it, but it was like, ‘Right, now we can go anywhere,’ so we ended up moving out to Southmead and all over. For Nicky, it was all a means to that end. He was a fourteen-year-old kid on that level. Most fourteen-year-olds ain’t thinking that way.

  There were other people we had in common, like Dean Reid, who he went to school with. Dean’s family were from Southmead originally, then they moved to Brislington. A funny fella, tiny like Adrian, all the family were, and there were loads of brothers, all fighters.

  Adrian will probably say that Dean was the first black guy who used to wear eyeliner. He used to have the wet-look hair, with eyeliner, and they’d go to Reeves – this club in a white middle-class area, but they ran it, always fighting. The club was adjoined to a hotel, and one time we were in the hotel, and this taxi driver started looking for trouble – and the problem with that is, they always pick on the smallest one and it would either be Adrian or Dean’s brother Junior – I was bigger so I always got a bye. Junior had a bag in his hand, and the dude was getting lairy, so he dropped the bag, swivelled round and just banged him. The bloke hit the floor, then Junior was just – normal, like nothing happened.

  Then there was Gripper, which was this guy Chrissie Morgan’s street name. Another wayward soul, also mixed-race. His grandad used to beat him hard – an old Jamaican-style grandad, mad as hell. There were three brothers, and he controlled them all. The two girls, I wouldn’t mess with them either. The oldest one was Melita, I wouldn’t touch her, and the other was Maria. I go over to their house one time, and Maria’s beating up Gripper in the street. They’d had an argument in the house, both fighting, then he walked away, just like not having it, and she wouldn’t stop hitting him. Rough!