Free The Profession of Violence by John Pearson Page B

followed their father’s example and, feeling safer in that foreign country that lay ‘across the water’, they crossed the Thames and spent the next few weeks in Peckham. Among the drearier late-Victorian London suburbs, Peckham was hardly Kray country, but it served its purpose. The police weren’t looking for them here and they picked up one more item of practical information now that produced dividends in the years to come. For want of anywhere to go they spent several evenings in a snooker hall and grew quite enthusiastic about the game. Not as players. It was the economics of the game that interested them, and how the hall proprietors protected themselves against trouble. Billiard-table cloths were vulnerable to wilful damage. They would rip quite easily.
    The snow came early that year, and it proved their undoing. They had nowhere warm to go except back to Vallance Road. But Sergeant Silvers from Bethnal Green Police Station spotted them at once. He was round with a squad car before breakfast and had a job waking the twins before taking them back to the station.
    Another period in the guardroom. Another lecture from an officer on the lines of ‘I hope you’ve learned yourlesson’ – which they had, of course, except that it wasn’t the one the army wanted and the twins escaped again in time for Christmas.
    They drifted back to Mile End and on Christmas Eve were sitting in the Red Caff at about nine o’clock in the evening. Normally they would have been more careful, but a thick fog had come up from the river and no one was likely to be out on such a night. No one, except the police who were beginning to take an interest in the will-o’-the-wisp lives of the Kray twins, and in from the fog came Police Constable Fisher who had arrested them six months earlier.
    It was all quite amiable. The twins asked if he’d like a cup of tea, but he refused politely. Then Ronnie said that seeing it was Christmas and he was an understanding chap couldn’t he forget he’d seen them and let them have Christmas Day at home with their old mother if they gave their word to give themselves up on Boxing Day. Police Constable Fisher was sorry but Christmas was one thing – duty another.
    They promised to come quietly, but there was just one thing Reggie would like to tell Police Constable Fisher if he’d come outside. The constable agreed, and as Reggie stood talking to him Ronnie shoved him from behind and sent him sprawling across the pavement. By the time he was back on his feet the twins were away into the fog.
    The twins missed their Christmas dinner back at Vallance Road, and were caught a few weeks later. They were tried for assaulting the police.
    Constable Fisher was commended by the magistrate and received the princely sum of seven shillings and sixpence, though whether as reward for zeal or compensation for discomfort was never made clear. And the twins received a month apiece in Wormwood Scrubs, along with their picture in the
East London Advertiser
and the headline. ‘Kray Brothers beat up PC.’ It was fame of a sort, a testimonial to their rising status, and the newspaper cutting and thephotograph duly found their way into the cuttings book at Vallance Road, along with their boxing photographs and the reports of earlier misdemeanours. Boxing or crime, it scarcely mattered. They were on their way, their name was getting known. From nobodies they were emerging into somebodies.
    As the twins were the first to admit, they had been lucky over their month’s sentence; and after life on the run, it was certainly no hardship. They were together on the same landing and saw each other during the day at exercise and in the prison workshops. Equally important, they were accepted as
ex officio
members of the small coterie of veteran professional criminals who form the top layer of the unofficial gaol élite – the men the warders are wary of and tend to leave