The Kray Sisters

There go the twins! geezers would say
when we walked down the frog and toad
in our Savile Row whistle and flutes, tailored
to flatter our thr’penny bits, which were big,
like our East End hearts. No one could tell us apart,
except when one twin wore glasses or shades
over two of our four mince pies. Oh London, London,
London Town, made for a girl and her double
to swagger around; or be driven at speed
in the back of an Austin Princess, black,
up West to a club; to order up bubbly, the best,
in a bucket of ice. Garland singing that night. Nice.

Childhood. When we were God Forbids, we lived
with our grandmother – God Rest Her Soul – a tough suffragette
who’d knocked out a Grand National horse, name of
Ballytown Boy, with one punch, in front of the King,
for the cause. She was known round our manor thereafter
as Cannonball Vi. By the time we were six,
we were sat at her skirts, inhaling the juniper fumes
of her Vera Lynn; hearing the stories of Emmeline’s Army
before and after the ’14 war. Diamond ladies,
they were, those birds who fought for the Vote, salt
of the earth. And maybe this marked us for ever,
because of the loss of our mother, who died giving birth

to the pair of unusual us. Straight up, we knew,
even then, what we wanted to be; had, you could say,
a vocation. We wanted respect for the way
we entered a bar, or handled a car, or shrivelled
a hard-on with simply a menacing look, a threatening word
in a hairy ear, a knee in the orchestra stalls. Belles
of the balls. Queens of the Smoke. We dreamed it all,
trudging for miles, holding the hand of the past, learning
the map of the city under our feet; clocking the boozers,
back alleys, mews, the churches and bridges, the parks,
the Underground stations, the grand hotels where Vita and Violet,
pin-ups of ours, had given it wallop. We stared from Hungerford Bridge

as the lights of London tarted up the old Thames. All right,
we made our mistakes in those early years. We were soft
when we should have been hard; enrolled a few girls
in the firm who were well out of order – two of them
getting Engaged; a third sneaking back up the Mile End Road
every night to be some plonker’s wife. Rule Number One –
A boyfriend’s for Christmas, not just for life.
But we learned – and our twenty-first birthday saw us installed
in the first of our clubs, Ballbreakers, just off
Evering Road. The word got around and about
that any woman in trouble could come to the Krays,
no questions asked, for Protection. We’d soon earned the clout

and the dosh and respect for a move, Piccadilly way,
to a classier gaff – to the club at the heart of our legend,
Prickteasers. We admit, bang to rights, that the fruits
of feminism – fact – made us rich, feared, famous,
friends of the stars. Have a good butcher’s at these –
there we for ever are in glamorous black-and-white,
assertively staring out next to Germaine, Bardot,
Twiggy and Lulu, Dusy and Yoko, Bassey, Babs,
Sandy, Diana Dors. And London was safer then
on account of us. Look at the letters we get –
Dear Twins, them were the Good Old Days when you ruled
the streets. There was none of this mugging old ladies

or touching young girls. We hear what’s being said.
Remember us at our peak, in our prime, dressed to kill
and swaggering in to our club, stroke of twelve,
the evening we’d leaned on Sinatra to sing for free.
There was always a bit of a buzz when we entered, stopping
at favoured tables, giving a nod or a wink, buying someone
a drink, lighting a fag, lending an ear. That particular night
something electric, trembling, blue, crackled the air . Leave us both there,
spotlit, strong, at the top of our world, with Sinatra drawling
And here’s a song for the twins, then opening her beautiful throat to take
it away. These boots are made for walking, and that’s
just what they’ll do. One of these days these boots
are gonna walk all over you. Are you ready, boots? Start walkin’ …