In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Britain was still immersed in the poverty brought on by the Second World War. Where America thrived, England struggled to put dinner on the table. Food rationing did not end until 1954, nine years after the last bullet left the barrel. We sold most of our clean coal to America while keeping the lower grade stuff for our power plants - the fumes of which literally killed people in the streets. The black market was a way of life for many, rather than a means for just a few. The wounds brought on by the Luftwaffe bombs could still be seen across the city. And like Chicago in the 1930s, during and after the depression, it was the underworld that came out to feed on the body politic.

Eventually dominated by a couple of brothers, Ronald and Reggie Kray, the gang world was a vague copy of a copy of what the Americans had created before (the first copy being the noir films we imported and flocked to on a Saturday night), though of course we added our own unique character. Our world was far more visceral. We like the blood on our hands. We like to know where it comes from. We didn’t have the resources to buy Tommy guns. We used knives or swords or teeth or whatever was to hand. And strangely, it suited the British temperament. You want to know how a small island of no apparent means can run the biggest empire in the history of the world? Look to the psychopaths and the civil servants. It is our moral character to be pedants and monsters. It suits us down to the bones. Even the Garden of Eden was near the East End of London. It’s no surprise to us that Cain had to kill Abel. He probably supported the wrong fucking football team.

And remember, Cain did it with his hands. So, obviously a Londoner.

You still meet people who were there. I was sitting on a park bench one lunch break in 1998 when a drunk sat down next to me. In one hand he had a cigarette he never seemed to smoke. In the other a can of lager he never drank from. It has happened to all of us. The unwelcome attention. The stranger at that apogee of misery with an uncontrollable urge to confess. What do you do? You get up. You walk away. You hope they don’t follow. For fuck’s sake leave me alone. I’m limping enough from my own misery, I don’t need yours as well.

But for some reason I had the thought: why not stay? Just this once. So, I didn’t make excuses and leave. Maybe it was the day. The weather. The mood. He looked like Gary Oldman after 30 years of drinking and a hundred broken bones. He was terrifying.

And he told me one of the great stories I had ever heard. About being a street fighter at first, then a professional. About his brother borrowing money from people who weren’t so understanding. About a gun, and a bridge, and a bullet through the head as the only reasonable recourse to the alternative.

This is not his story, but it is not so very different. Mick, the central character in the play, is not the man who sat next to me. But I think if Mick could survive the time when we meet him, perhaps in thirty years he would end up on a bench not so very different to the one I found myself on.  Some people just survive. It’s all they can do. Others don’t. That’s all there is.

copyright,  © 2006 Moby Pomerance

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