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a bet wanted to know the results, and we’d do two gross a night if we were lucky.
    Another few bob I used to make came from Bert The Horseman, who had stables at Lea Bridge Road by the canal, under the railway arches. We used to take horses from there to the Elephant and Castle to be sold, most of them to the knacker’s yard. The journey would take us about two hours, stopping at the horse troughs to water them along the way, and we used to be paid 5s an hour, half a crown for half an hour and 3d for fifteen minutes. Any horse going down there was worth at least £15. One day a mate and I took two ponies and a foal to the Elephant. We sold all of them, got thereceipt and kept £15 of Bert’s money; we told him some story about losing it. Then there was the Saturday morning he sent me to fetch his tea at a café by Regents Canal. He gave me a fiver. That was a lot of money at the time, and a shop wouldn’t accept it unless it was signed for. I got Bert to sign it and rode to the tea room on a pony called Nelson. I bought his tea, a sandwich and ten weights. I then drank his tea, ate his sandwich and smoked his fags, and had it away on my toes – ran off home. I left the pony in a field. I couldn’t resist the money.
    People were so short then that very few ever had a holiday, but if they could afford it they’d go picking hops in the fields of Kent, a very East End thing to do. Our family never had a holiday together, and the first one I ever had I went on my own. I was taken to Eastbourne at the age of eleven by a family called the Hopkinsons, who lived above us in Belford House. There was Flo and Dan and their children, Danny, Terry, Rita, Maureen and Jean. We went away in his lorry, all eight of us, and slept in hammocks inside it. I had no new clothes to take with me. I was wearing Leon’s, washed out. My mother scraped together £2 for me to spend, which for a kid then was quite a lot of money. The Hopkinsons were always considered to be ‘better-class’ East Enders, with that little bit more money to spend on enjoying themselves. They moved out several years later and they’re all in America to this day, doing well.
     
    It was around this time that the police called again on the Lambrianou family. One Sunday night when Chris was fifteen, he went out and broke into a newspaper factory in Hoxton.
    I was at home with my mother, Leon and my two younger brothers when there was a knock on the door at eight o’clock. Two plain-clothes police officers came into the house with Chris and a package of paper. They had arrested him for breaking into the factory and stealing the newspaper.
    I remember my mother in tears, saying, ‘Why are you taking him over a package of waste paper?’
    He ended up before the London Sessions and was sentenced to three years at Borstal in Hollesley Bay in Suffolk. He escaped from there a couple of times: once he was caught in Ipswich, the second time in Woodbridge. While he was there, he represented the Borstal at boxing. He fought at the US Air Force base in Woodbridge and he was the middleweight champion of the county throughout those three years. It didn’t take him long to build up a reputation as a ‘daddy’ – the top man. And on his monthly visits home he was inviting characters that he’d met there, all the East End wide boys, who were a big influence on me. His attitude was becoming more aggressive – an ‘I’m gonna beat ’em up’ type of thing. That was Chris all over.
    I was fourteen when he was released. And as soon as he came out, they stuck him in the Army. They put him in the Pioneer Corps, which meant that he was considered to be an uneducated no-good, only fit for dogsbody jobs. It was the dustbin of the British Army, for all the dregs they didn’t really want there. He joined on a Thursday, and on the Saturday night there was a knock at the door. It was Chris, in his uniform. He sat at home with a hammer, breaking his toes, to get him out of the Army – to