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my mother’s horror. She had to see things at that time which weren’t very nice. The Military Police came and carted Chris off. Next thing we knew, he was in Shepton Mallet army prison, which is where he met the Kray twins for the first time. He got a dishonourable discharge from the Army.
    Shortly after this Chris, Leon and I went to see a film called The Blackboard Jungle ; the title music was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley. That was the start of rock’n’roll in England. Nobody had heard of it until they saw The Blackboard Jungle . It was all about kids in America with flick knives, drapes and tight trousers, and I’d never seen anything like it. Suddenly, teddy boys were on the streets andeverybody, everywhere, was saying what a bad influence they were. I’ll never forget the day Chris came home with the drape, the velvet collar and the drainpipe trousers. He paid fifteen quid for the suit, which he bought from Woods the Tailor in the East End. The twins used to use him. They bought all their suits from his shop in Kingsland Road.
    My father didn’t like the image, and he went absolutely potty. He got this suit, he cut it up and he got the big stick out…. The way we were brought up, in typical East End – and Greek – tradition, the old man was head of the household and nobody, including my mother, ever questioned his authority or decisions. Even when we were grown up and married, he still kept the big stick by the dinner table.
    But the teddy boy influence had taken hold of us. Chris used to have rock’n’roll music blaring out round the house. We had a radiogram by this time. A van used to come round and you could buy singles off the van for 2s 6d each.
    By now I was at Queensbridge Road Secondary Modern School, where we all went except for Chris. One day, a schoolmate called Peter Robertson turned up to class wearing the drape and drainpipes. A teacher whom we called Clinker told him to go home and change. His answer was ‘Fuck off’. It was unheard of to say that to a teacher, but it was very much our underlying attitude. School was just a big joke. To me it was a waste of time: there was no future in it. Half the pupils didn’t even know the alphabet. The teachers felt that if they managed to teach you the ‘Three Rs’, if you could read and write when you left, then they’d done their job, but they were up against it.
    We used to play pitch and toss, throwing money up against a wall. The person who threw the nearest coin to the wall would pick up the kitty. We got involved in petty crimes like stealing milk, or bullying kids in the school playground if we thought they had pocket money. We all gambled.
    On Friday afternoons, they used to beat us up. There were three PT teachers: Mr Donnelly, Mr Leary and Mr Eldridge. They’d all have tracksuit bottoms on, and they’d walk round the classrooms, pick you up by the lapels and lay into you. None of us ever complained. We accepted that as part of our life. If I’d gone home and complained, I would have got a right-hander off my father.
    They were schools for crime and I think the teachers accepted that that was how it was going to be. Some ‘better-class’ schools would take their pupils on organised trips to the museums and that. Not us. We were taken out on a sightseeing visit to Wormwood Scrubs, about twenty-nine of us. We walked around the prison, and then the teacher lined us all up and said: ‘This is where you lot are going to wind up.’ We thought it was a big laugh, but it wasn’t so far off the truth. Many of the pupils went on to become well-known villains, Hoxton boys like Tony ‘Tubbsy’ Turner and George Murray, who ended up controlling the local lorry hi-jackings.
    I did do something useful during my schooldays, though. At the age of fourteen, I represented the school as a boxer. My father’s best mate, Eddie Phillips, had fought for the British heavyweight title between 1938 and 1944. He was known as the Aldgate