Daphne Reece

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Lineage

• Carter Rails
  • Daphne Reece

History

A good many people down our end of Ladebroke Grove came from one-parent families. Sometimes I think, looking back on it, I came from a no-parent family.

After all these years I'm still not too sure who my dad is, and certainly Mum never told me. I always went by her name which was Reece, and it was only her family I ever met, so I reckon my dad was no more than a passing moment in her life.

What I remember most about Mum was when I was first at school - down in among the infants I was at the time - she would come and fetch me with this music stuck in her ears. You couldn't hold much of a conversation at home either because she liked her music loud. When I remember talking to Mum, it was all shouting over Duran Duran, at full volume.

I remember the kitchen where we lived on the estate, with plates stacked up by the sink sticking together, and I can remember wondering why there was so much washing-up because we weren't a big family. No Dad, no brothers and sisters - just me. I suppose more got eaten because Mum often had guys she called my uncles around. Most of the time , of course, these uncles weren't uncles at all and then Mum would hustle me off to bed extra early and I'd lie awake listening to her Music for Romantic Evenings tapes played extra loud until they moved to the bedroom and I could get a bit of sleep. Anyways, I stayed with my mum and I put up with Duran Duran and her Romantic Evenings until one of the uncles turned out to be someone called Jack Levenhall, who gave it out that he owned a kebab place on Harrow Road. Much later, it turned out not only that he didn't own it, but that he'd been thrown out of it because of his habits. This Uncle Jack made it horribly plain that he fancied me more than he fancied my mum, so I moved out as quick as I could, and I never lived at her place after that.

Well, my mum knew where I was if she wanted to come after me, which she didn't. First I went to my gran's place in the Bethnal Green area, but she was always on about big heavy villains she had known in her younger years, people like the Krays and Richardsons and just how they could draw with their razors, a perfect semicircle on the faces of those who disagreed with them. Gran seemed to admire this about the heavy men of her younger years, but hearing about it pissed me off, quite honestly, which is why I moved again and went to live with Aunt Dot in the buildings up near Kensal Rise cemetery.

Aunt Dot was the best. She was Mum's aunt, but a lot younger than Gran. She'd always talk to me without the incidental music, and it seemed like she always took an interest in me, and when I got into trouble and had to go away, Aunt Dot always seemed pleased enough to see me back. She had some of my mum's good looks, but in her they seemed softer and more appealing, thats what I thought at least.

Of course, My Aunt Dot was used to people going away for awhile seeing as she was married to my Uncle Arthur. He was good to me also. He was in a business way, out of anything I've ever attempted, robing banks and building societies, threatening cashiers and customers with a shooter which he kept carefully cleaned and never even let me hold.

As you can imagine, this paid Uncle Arthur very well when he was working, and we used to go out to posh restaurants and even holidays riding horses in Spain. The trouble was he went away for a long time when things started going wrong, so we stayed on in the building in the Kensal Rise area, where the rent was reasonable, and Aunt Dot went off to the West End to do bits of cleaning, and thats when I was at school and Uncle Arthur was away from home.

It all started when I was about twelve. Something like that. This may surprise you, but I was quite a bright girl at school. For one thing I got the hang of the isosceles triangle long before anyone in the class understood it. It was at school that I met Tiny McGrath. He wasn't called Tiny because he was especially small but to distinguish him from his very much older stepbrother, known as Chippy not because he was sort of a carpenter but because of his huge appetite, at the time, for chips. He and Tiny had the same father but different mothers.

Chippy was always tall and in spite of what he ate he was quite skinny. He had longish black hair and abs you could bounce quarters off of. He had that bad boy allure that so many girls loose their hearts to.

He also was a natural leader; he had the gift of getting people to work for him. He used to ask Tiny and me and some of our friends round to his place in Formosa Street and give us sweets or cigarettes, or a bit of money, to do little jobs for him. Such jobs, to be honest, usually consisted of stealing things, like pinching bottles of whiskey and that from the off-license while he kept the woman in charge amused with requests for chips and sweets and other things she wasn't ment to sell, and she was busy explaining that we weren't entitled to be there anyways. All this led to us, but not Chippy, havening to appear before the desk sergeant at the Paddington Nick, where he told us that a life of crime would lead to misery and unhappiness. Looking back on it now, I'm still not sure that he was telling us the truth.

We graduated from there to car radios and the opening of car doors with a wire coat hanger. It was when I got caught at this that the friendly warnings stopped and I got seriously reprimanded by members of the metropolitan Police with time on their hands. After that I went inside for the first time as a Youth Offender.

It was after I left the Youth Offenders that Chippy and I got together seriously - and not just romantically. We took to watching the smart houses in the Holland Park area, and noting when the milk and papers were stopped because of the owners being away on holiday. We got skilled in the way of breaking and entering, and Chippy's cousin Ozzy Desmond had made a study of disconnecting burglar alarms. As I say, we did well enough, and I was about to give my Aunt Dot some of life's little luxuries when I got caught. I got four years from a judge who'd decided from the word go that I was a menace to society. Chippy, by the way, was in the getaway car near the house we got caught in, and he just drove off and left us to face the consequences - and that was it for me an Chippy.

So, it was then, when I was in real prison, that I decided I wouldn't get into no more trouble at all, and wouldn't get into fights. I kept myself to myself all those years. I'd get my meals and take them back to the cell and eat them on the table, which was, lets face it, the lid of the toilet.

I stayed in my cell about twenty-three hours a day and I got used to it. I got so I didn't really want to be with other people. The time near the end of my sentence, when I was allowed days out with close relatives, I went out with my Aunt Dot, who told me Uncle Arthur had gone away again for 10 years. She was always nice to me, My Aunt Dot, but I couldn't wait to get away from her. I wasn't listening to her hardly at all. All I could think of was how nice it would be to get to my cell for a bit of peace and quiet. So I asked her to take me back to prison early.

Of course, being alone so much, keeping out of everyone's way, I had time to read a lot of books. Most of them were a load of rubbish, crime stories, so called, by people who didn't know the first thing about crime.

Then I got a prison visitor called Simon who gave me a crime book by some Russian who suffered with epileptic fits. It was about murder and, of course, I never did a murder. In fact there is no violence in my record whatsoever. But I got stuck into this book and I found it interesting. Then I kept on getting called away for education classes, which taught me that three and three make six, a fact I already knew, and I lost the thread of the Russian book from time to time. But it got me thinking about what happens when we die, so between watching further rubbish on TV during those dangerous moments of association with other inmates, I found books that went beyond the bible, new age spiritualism, Hindo, Buddist that kinda thing. Simon got arrested for downloading pornographic material or some such affair, so for all I know he's somewhere inside the prison system, and I never saw him again.

Anyways, I was alright reading in my cell. I mean, I was quite all right but I wouldn't have minded getting back into the fresh air, and by then I was able to work the system. So when I was released back into society they were a bit slow at the office that morning. They gave me the clothes back I was wearing when I got arrested. The sweater I had was moth-eaten but they said they could do nothing about it. I got 46.75 pounds and a travel warrant and then they opened the gate and I was out in the rain.

I had already decided, once I got out, not to have much more to do with probation officers and councilors. Being out of prison means that you're free, doesn't it? At least thats what it looked like at the time. So I took my travel warrant and bought a rain poncho an a backpack, a couple of twinkies and a egg sandwich an started to make my way to Stonehenge. I'd got the hankering to see it from all those new-age books I'd read.

Now I wasn't really prepared for the size of the thing, or that little zingy feeling in my stomic when I finally got there. My feet tired and achy, I fell in with a bunch of American new-age pagans, and I learned a bunch about their religion. I was never big into church so I converted. Working with them I learned how to meditate and do the usual spells, and tarot card readings. So, when my coven had to go back to the US, they invited me to go with them, I thought what the hell, and getting a fake American ID off I went with them to Atlanta.

Got myself a job in a new-age bookstore and sold crystals and love spells, and live in the small apartment above a laundrymart. I still nick things now an then for the fun of it, and know the local color, but generally I try to keep my nose clean.

At least, thats before Carter Rails, now I nick things from the people I feed from to keep paying rent.