My night with Ronnie Kray

It was the sixties. I had a holiday job in a children’s home. It was live-in but I managed to wangle a couple of days off over Easter and I hitched to London to join the CND march that began each year in Aldermaston and proceeded over three days to Trafalgar Square where the likes of Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot would address the crowd.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a big deal back then in the sixties and my parents had been active in it since it formed in the fifties. The War was still real, London was peppered with bomb sites, havens of fascination for us scavenging children who had been born too late to experience the bombs and the shelters. The interior walls of houses, complete with their wall-paper and fireplaces, had now become exterior, and collections of stained glass could be made from the rubble of bombed churches.

Nowhere was the War more real than in Japan which had suffered the effects of two nuclear bombs and had made bold pledges not to engage in any way with such weapons. But for the rest of the world the munitions industry continued apace and nuclear arms were at the forefront of their arsenal.

In Europe Ban the Bomb was a lot more than just a slogan and even in America where the peace movement was maligned as part of a communist plot and attacked in the name of McCarthyism, it still gained a huge number of followers and merged into the civil rights movement, its catch-all songs, ‘If I had a Hammer’ and ‘We Shall Overcome’, opening the way for many more, like ‘Give Peace a Chance’, and ‘Blowing in the Wind’.

The Vietnam war was at its height when I went to London to meet Mike for the final day of the Aldermaston march. I don’t know how it was that Jim came too. Mike and I had been doing some nice things together. The Vietnam war may have been at its height but so was resistance to it. We went to the Aldwych and saw the play US (directed by Peter Brooke before he moved to Paris), at the cinema we watched Dr Strangelove (with Peter Sellars in an extraordinary, manic performance), we ate curry in India House (Indian restaurants were still non-existent), we borrowed his mother’s mini and he taught me to drive in it (at least until I drove it into a ditch).

Mike could have become a proper boyfriend but there was an impediment. Jim.

Nowadays Jim would be called a stalker. He followed me everywhere, he got to know all my friends, he waited for me outside the school gates and when I left school and started my course at art school, he walked right into the building, making it impossible for me to develop friendships and spying on everything I did. No-one told him to leave. and when he assaulted me, which he did often, no-one told him to stop.

Whenever I told Jim I didn’t want to see him, his response was to beat me up. Since he was always around, people assumed he was my boyfriend and I had no choice but to go along with this pretence.

In fact, though, he was a stalker but it would be decades before that word could be used and understood.

I knew nothing of emotional blackmail or control. I didn’t even know my emotions were being played on. And it would be sixty more years before the phrase, ‘coercive control’ entered the vocabulary.

So it wasn’t only Mike I met in London, it was also Jim.

***

Once the speeches were over and the crowds were dispersing into the night we found ourselves milling along with hundreds of people in Soho wondering where we were going to find a bite to eat and where we were going to sleep. The questions were suddenly answered when from out of the crowd a young man emerged and said, ‘Would you like to spend the night in the Hilton Hotel?’ We laughed but he continued,

‘There is a bed for you in the penthouse suite. All you have to do is go to the foyer and ask for the Colonel’.

The Hilton Hotel was the new feature in London. It was the height of glamour and luxury, a status symbol if ever there was one. How could we, who had been wondering which doorway to sleep in, resist?

In the foyer, nods and winks, smiles and smirks passed between the staff. We were ushered into a lift and a porter took us up to the top floor. There he showed us to a door, knocked and then disappeared.

The door opened to reveal two pink and flabby naked men. Before we could turn to go back to the lift, they had pulled us inside and poured us large drinks. The room was at the back of the hotel, its massive windows showing a huge vista of black sky dotted with the stars which in those days of more subdued light pollution, you could still glimpse from central London. Two enormous beds had been pushed together, their bedding tangled into a heap.

It is hard to believe how naive we were but we were tired, we needed to sleep, the alcohol without any food was having an effect and, more than anything, we, unilateral nuclear disarmers, trusted people, even naked pink men whom we knew nothing about and who had us trapped in a penthouse suite.

I don’t remember any kind of conversation, words did not seem to be currency in this strange environment, but I do recall the grunts that went on all night while images of rutting pink pigs floated through my dreams.

Of the five people in the room, I was the only one who slept. Mike and Jim told me they had spent the night fending off attacks while I had been left chastely alone on the edge of the enormous beds.

I had slept but I had woken very early. A conversation was happening. For the first time words were being spoken. It sounded important and it sounded potentially dangerous. I opened my eyes a crack but did not move. The Colonel was at the desk on the phone. I listened intently. He was talking to someone in the Middle East. He seemed to be making an arms deal.

I already had the journalistic urge to know and to report and had written a couple of articles for the local paper. I made a mental note of everything he said. The thought occurred that I should report him and this conversation to someone in the Government but the conversation seemed to suggest that the Government already not only knew about this deal, it was involved in it. Later that day I wrote down all I could remember from that conversation and kept the record for years. But I never did anything with it and in time it got chucked out.

I continued to lie very still and pretended to be asleep. We were, thankfully, as nothing to the Colonel and his friend, just fodder for their sexual urges, so we avoided being buried in cement in the new M40 flyover and left in the morning to more winks and nods between the staff in the foyer.

Over the years I wondered who those two men were but it was not until he died in 1995 that I learned that one was the notoriously violent criminal Ronnie Kray, one of the Kray Twins. He was, the BBC obituary said, known as ‘the Colonel’.

Back at the children’s home, the house father was livid when he learned I had been on the Aldermaston march, shouting his rage across the children hunched in silence at long tables in the dining room.

‘An eye for an eye,’ he yelled, ‘and a tooth for a tooth.’

It took his wife to calm him down, reminding him that their boss was my father and that he was a Quaker. It was an uncomfortable position to be the daughter of the boss and to hold my employers’ livelihoods in my hands.