Face and Justice: Dream Team Adventures, #1

By Brian George and Byron George

Barry's life was tough, raised in London's rugged East End in the 60s and 70s, until he made it in business. When a Banker screwed his business, he had to leave the country for work in Saudi Arabia. Along with two beautiful "business ladies" he met in Dubai he cons the bank in a revenge scam. After the Banker hunts down and cruelly abuses one of the team, their loyalty to one of their own knows no bounds.

To save their wealth and 'Face' amongst their friends, they fight back with equal spite. Who are the rogues here in this tale of rough justice?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian George
• Release date: Dec 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393600596

Brian George

Brian George is the author of the Dream Team series of which Face and Justice is the first, followed by Face and Honour, & Face, Fire & Morality? Then New Blood, New Targets. He also writes Romances under the name Byron George. He spent many years working internationally and weaves many of his personal experiences and observations into his novels.  

Book preview

Face and Justice

A Novel

Brian George

1

Junkie’s Rules

BARRY PARKER IS WHAT, in east end of London parlance, is known as an ‘erbert. A slang term, short for Herbert that could be applied to many young male baby boomers of that period, it doesn’t mean he’s a bad person, more of a likeable rogue. I’ll let Barry describe his early life as he dictated it when he had more time on his hands and money in the bank.

I’m Barry Parker. I grew up on the edge of the East End of London into a culture that has been passed down through the centuries, of survival against the system of officialdom and class that permeates the United Kingdom, a misnomer for a country that is certainly not united. Like most of us, our lives were shaped early on by our local environment, and it was in the very last year of primary school that the first defining moment – or downer, depending on various points of view – happened, although I later embraced it as character building. It was the early sixties, while I was playing East End boys’ basketball in the school playground, but on a girls’ netball court. I jumped to knock the ball out of a young giant’s hand when he drew his arm back to aim a shot at the basket and smashed me hard in the right eye. It was a shame it was this giant, one of those kids that outgrew his age, brains, and strength, a nice kid who later grew larger but whose brain didn’t. Anyhow, I ended up with what passed for a school nurse treating me for a cut under the eye but leaving me with a few red blood vessels on show for a week or two. I thought nothing more of it and just got on with what was a nice, fun, relaxed, youthful life. I was always picked out and praised as being a great reader, and I was asked to read stories out to the rest of the class. And having a great soprano voice, I sang in front of the school, a memorable version of Jerusalem being my triumph.

In Barking in those years, the state schools were full of us baby boomers, but although a half-reasonable education and services were available, the local council had started to cut back financially to cope with the huge increase in numbers from the relatively new social estates springing up and surrounding the more middle-class private housing in the area in the post-war era. When I first went there, we even had a school dentist on the premises and a regular visit from the Nit Nurse. These were soon discarded, although as far as the torturer that passed for our dentist was concerned – drilling and filling everything he could as if he was paid by the tooth – we were probably glad he went. The dentist’s professional name was Doctor Pearl, an obvious play on pearly teeth but known between us local boys as the Pearly Gates, because we were convinced that we would never come around after the jaw-bruising injections given for the smallest filling.

Our secondary educational years were determined by whether you passed the eleven-plus exam. It was an all-encompassing general knowledge test that decided your future at the tender age of eleven.  A pass in this exam decided whether you were either technically or academically gifted. If academic you could advance to a Grammar school, if technical you could advance to a school designed to train you for a trade. However, if you failed you would be designated a failure, a thicko to be tossed into what was titled a Secondary Modern School. Those that failed the eleven-plus exams in England at that time were treated as being fit only as factory fodder or as a lowly manual worker. Any individual promise would soon be knocked out of you by a never-ending stream of sadists passing as teachers. Like any State institution, if you showed any individualism, you were deemed to be a rebel and that was to be literally beaten out of you.

I’m not sure to this day whether I was lucky or unlucky to be what was called a borderline entry into Fair Bridge Modern, a secondary modern school with pretensions that it was above the other state secondary schools in that area. I have no idea where the name came from, as nothing there was fair and there wasn’t a bridge for miles. If you were Borderline in that test you had come close to a pass mark, but not quite made it. Therefore, you might be able to gain a spare place at General Charles Grammar school in Poplar, a good hour’s bus ride away and farther into the East End of London proper; those of us who were borderline had to retake another general knowledge mini eleven-plus examination in our first quarter at Fair Bridge. Of course, we had just settled in and would not have wanted to leave our new pals and get up an hour earlier every day to enter a grammar school in a rougher area than ours, one that was pretty low down on the scale against most of the other grammars, so we might as well stay in a crap local secondary modern. Needless to say, no real effort was made to pass that particular test. Anything for an easy life was our thinking there.

After all the eleven-plus fiascos, I was selected to enter what Fair Bridge called, The G Stream. The G stood for GCE, or General Certificate of Education, and meant that we were destined for greatness, the top of a bunch of failures anyhow.

My very first day at Fair Bridge is vividly etched into my mind, even now, many years later, for brutality compared to the gentleness of the primary school that we had just left. Like all new students we had been half scared out of our wits by stories about ritual rites of passage, such as having our heads dunked in the school bogs (toilets) by elder students, but this paled into insignificance when queuing outside a form room for our very first history lesson. Whilst waiting for the former occupants to leave we watched aghast (and scared shitless), at three boys being screamed at by Mr Alditi. This tyrant was a particularly small teacher, about the same height as us first year students. The three boys were hit by him with a large flat piece of board, rather like a small paddle, and pulled by their hair from their seats to a standing position. One of them was brutally grabbed by his school blazer lapels and thrown brutally over his wooden desk and landed in a heap on the floor. Before they were allowed to leave the classroom, these boys were then made to bend over the teacher’s head table so their backsides could be hit with a large oval shaped wooden clothes brush – the wood side, not the bristle – how many times I lost count, and then they were made to stand up by this little bully, having their sideburns nearly tugged out of their faces before being unceremoniously dumped out in the outside quadrangle, tears visible in their eyes, all the while being screamed at by Alditi as if he were an army sergeant major. There we were, all in our nice new school uniforms of short grey trousers, maroon blazers with grey piping, resplendent with the school badge, showing the entrance to the Barking Abbey complete with portcullis and an axe, now quaking with fear and subsequently not taking anything in at that particular lesson, other than not to say anything out of place for fear of the same recriminations meted out to the former inhabitants of that classroom.

We lived in a small two-bedroom council flat about a mile and a half from the school, situated two floors over a parade of shops and opposite a huge bus garage on the edge of town. It was about six months after starting at Fair Bridge school and while relaxing at home during a half-term holiday with a Just William children’s novel by author Richmal Crompton, that I came out with an immortal quote: Mum, when I put one hand over my left eye, am I supposed to be able to see out of the right eye? Well, you should have seen Mum’s face drain and her jaw drop. The very next moment, I had my best overcoat on and was marched into old Dr MacDougan’s surgery, and in an hour I had an ambulance pick me up and whisk me up to London’s City Road and into Moorfields, the state eye hospital, the premier teaching hospital in the country for ophthalmology. I was diagnosed with a detached retina and put in an adult ward immediately. I don’t know to this day why I was placed in an adult ward, whether it was because of my surgeon consultant’s influence, the particular eye problem being unusual in someone my age, or what, but it was great from day one, as I was spoilt rotten, being only twelve years old and thinking of myself as an almost adult teenager by then.

I was given one of those backless gowns only hospitals dream up, showing my bare arse, made to lie flat on my back with no pillows, had cotton lint pad dressings placed over both eyes to keep out all light, and fed only minced food in beaker cups with spouts like a baby for the two weeks before and the two weeks after my operation.

The operation was carried out, or so I was told, by them dropping the eyeball out onto the cheek and using conventional sewing, as in normal wounds, to reattach the retina. I guess it was a lot finer than ordinary sutures, but the principle was the same. After two more weeks in darkness – well, I did have the occasional peep with my good eye – the eyeball was dropped back out and the stitches removed, with a horrible tearing sensation that made me shiver. I was dutifully released back home and made to wear dark glasses, which had black sticky paper over both lenses and a tiny eighth-inch slit cut in each, to keep the eyes focussed straight ahead. The only other memorable thing about the operation was how violently sick I was on waking from surgery, and nurses panicking like mad that all that lying flat and eating minced food had gone to waste, as I had chucked up everywhere in a six-foot radius and dislodged the stitches.

Being in an adult ward had its moments. There was the night I was woken up by a nurse screaming, What the fuck did you do that for? before running to press the emergency buzzer. The buzzer was hmmming in and out loudly, and doctors and nurses seemed to be running from everywhere. I peeked out under my eye pads and saw the old boy in the bed opposite propped up with blood oozing out of his neck and all over the front of his light blue flannel striped pyjamas, before the curtains were pulled around him and an emergency operation was carried out there and then. It was just like you see in crime dramas – thick red, wow. I think I hid under the covers after that. The next day a doctor came to him and yelled at him. I think it must have been his general practitioner, as he certainly was not a psychiatrist, and apparently the old man had cut his own neck with a cut throat razor to end it all, the reasoning being that he was scared about having his eye operated on! Blimey, I thought, that’s a bit extreme. I mean, I didn’t want to be there either, but I don’t think I could have done that!

I liked that adult ward, though, as I was given a couple of bottles of Guinness on a Sunday with the big lunch to put iron into my body. Plus, the older guys in there treated me like a superstar, calling me brave and all. I wasn’t brave at all. I just had to put up with it, as I had no choice.

Another time a young guy the others called Dodger was brought in with shotgun pellets in his whole body, but the eye took precedence over them, so he had to have that treated first. The police came and interviewed him, and he said that he had dropped a 12-bore shotgun while out shooting rabbits with his pals, and it had gone off. All the other blokes in the ward whispered that this was extremely unlikely, since if he had dropped a shotgun that close to him, it would have blown a big hole in him somewhere. He must have been shot by someone else from a distance. He wasn’t saying anything more, as he would have been a grass! That was probably the first time I had heard the word grass in that context, and its meaning being to snitch to the law, and how people from where we lived never grassed to the Old Bill (police) especially. All these were early examples of the rules we had to follow to survive in the East End of London.

After about another month I went back to the hospital for a check-up and was told that the operation had not been a success and that I would have to re-enter the ward, going through all that laying-flat, padded-over malarkey again before having some pioneering new laser surgery. This was at last deemed a success, and I was allowed to leave again, with the ubiquitous dark glasses with slits in black sticky paper. You can imagine what that did for any teenage street credibility I had in those days. The piss-taking from all my local pals was constant, but I put up with it, as I was at least allowed to play outside with them by my mum.

I must have been off school for about six months. The surgeon said it was too risky for me, as only the slightest knock might detach the retina again. This was at a vital stage in my secondary – or in my opinion, second-class – education, and I was told not even to read, as that could put strain on the eye. That was a killer for a boy like me, who always had his nose in a novel of some description. I was just getting into Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe, Mickey Spillane, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond books at that time.

One day there was a ring at the doorbell of the flat, and I answered it. A big guy in a heavy coat and with a clipboard, looking official, asked for my mum. He kept asking me direct questions, like why wasn’t I at school?

Cos my doctor said so. I dunno why.

What doctor?

Mr Bow, the one at the eye hospital.

I called my mum again, as this bloke was trying to get inside the flat. My mum finally came and got all shirty with him, so he wrote something down on his clipboard before leaving, Mum slamming the door behind him. I can remember her fury, saying not to let anyone like that in again and that he was the school board man come to check up on why I hadn’t been to school for six months. Bloody cheek, she said, thinking that we would deliberately keep you off school. I was so shocked, as Mum never swore. Only Dad was allowed to swear. Mum was quite posh in some ways, having come from a big private housing complex over in the posher Ilford side of the Longbridge Road, before marrying Dad and getting the council flat. Mum blurted out, They all think that because you are from a council flat you are riff raff. I thought about that comment often after that, especially when teachers, police, or any authority figure lectured us. Mine and the area’s natural rebellious nature was maturing rapidly into my psyche.

The hospital gave me the all clear about two months later, but I was still partially blind in the right eye, a result of scar tissue from the first operation, they said. It stayed the same throughout my life, even though with modern technology I might be able to get fixed. The eye wanders a little if I am tired, or tired and emotional in the old George Brown sense. George Brown was the deputy prime minister back then, said to be better drunk than his boss was sober. The phrase now seems to be used for anybody who has had a few, another accepted East Ender’s euphemism. Anyhow, I went back to Fair Bridge Modern after eight months off sick to resume my education. The powers that be thought about making me go down a year to start my first year again but decided that might be too traumatic. I was placed back in the G stream, even though I hadn’t done a jot of study for the past eight months apart from reading anything I could with my good eye, and it was almost a whole school year since I had first gone to hospital. After about three weeks back at school, the long summer holidays were on us before entering my second year at Fair Bridge Modern. I was also banned from playing rugby by the docs, which at the time didn’t really bother me, as our primary school, Moor Lane Juniors and Infants, was a football school, like most of the others in the area. Many famous football stars came from Barking, people like Alf Ramsey and Bobby Moore, later to become England’s World Cup winning manager and captain respectively, and many others since. Fair Bridge Modern, though, was different, in that they had a decree from an earlier headmaster, a Mr Etherbury, that the school become a Rugby Union school, so we began another education altogether, of the game with the odd-shaped ball. One thing different about rugby which we soon learned was that if you were rubbish at sport, football in particular, there was always a position for you somewhere on a schoolboy rugby pitch – little quick, fancy guys as halfbacks, short, fat blokes and giants as front-five forwards, fast blokes as wingers, and anyone else as centres. It was another way of toughening us up and educating us in the local etiquette.

Nothing much happened at school after that, except for the usual high jinks and teacher brutality. My form teacher was known as Spud – why, I don’t know, but it wasn’t an affectionate nickname. He was a mean old git, really, not too brutal, but he still loved grabbing your sideburn hair or pinching your ears and lifting you out of your chair if you had been up to even mild mischief. He tried to be a bit cleverer than the other teachers and more subtle. His main subject was Geography, so we had a lot of interesting lessons with old black and white flickering movies about the planet, sponsored by BP or Shell. Because I lived above a post office, he made me film monitor, fetching and carrying these old film reels as they were delivered or sent. This duty didn’t stop him humiliating me in front of the class, although he probably didn’t even realise it, as class prejudice against us council kids was accepted as perfectly normal. We had been given a project whereby we had to write about certain parts of Europe, and I got nominated to do a piece on Corsica. Doing as we were told; we dutifully went to the local reference library in the town and researched or copied anything relevant from reference books. I asked my mum and dad for a file to put all this stuff in, and my dad, who worked for a printer but was in hospital a lot at that time, gave me a plain card buff folder, saying that was all we could afford, as he didn’t get sick pay. He was on nights when he was at work, so I couldn’t really ask his advice too much anyway. Old Spud, though, when we handed these works in held my buff folder up against a shiny blue modern plastic ring binder done by my pal John and proceeded to laugh at it, comparing it to the nicely presented one. His belittling of our poverty was so out of order. I hated him from then on. All the class laughed at me and I wanted to hide. I built up a desire for revenge against his injustice. Another time he caught me chatting in class to one of the other boys and made me write garrulous two hundred times, and my mate Cowshit had to write pugilism for punching me from behind when I was caught. It was then that we both decided to get our own back on him, and not very subtly either.

There was a big slate globe hanging from the ceiling that he used to chalk on in Geography lessons. It hung from the high ceiling on a system of brass pulleys to a wire rope that went through the globe and was fixed to a brass bolt under the globe. Every day when he came in, he would walk under this bolt and duck his head about an inch, just enough for it to miss his bald head by a whisker. One morning, before school started, Cowshit and I got into the form room early and climbed on top of his cupboard, giving each other a leg up and precariously standing on a chair on top. We managed to stretch and lower the rope from the pulley by about two inches. When the dastardly deed was done, we got down cleared up and went out to the playground as if nothing had happened.

When old Spud came in he did his usual duck under the bolt, but instead of just missing his head, it gouged a glorious tram line along the top of his head, leaving a very pleasing blood red scratch about 6 inches long. The class went into rapturous laughter, which didn’t subside for minutes. Well, the old bastard stood there looking around the class and holding one finger from one hand on the now nasty looking sore, then went to his desk and picked up a straight edge ruler, one of those old really heavy ones with a metal strip down one face. He walked straight over to me, took his finger from his head, placed it on mine, and said,