​FRIDAY INSIGHT

6.xi.2026

Graham Turkell, Bill Daly, Willy Prepp, these were the hard cases. The streets in which they lived took on a taint and you passed through them circumspectly, because you didn’t need to have said or done anything against these little Caesars, you only needed to be spotted by them when they were in the mood and you could be left with the jitters and maybe a painful wound.

 

Of course, they had their moments of finer feeling. One night  I was stopped by Turkell near the fish shop. With his arm around my shoulder he offered a cigarette. He held it close to my lips even though I told him no thanks, I didn’t smoke. When after some time he didn’t take it away I decided that yes, I was a confirmed smoker all right, just like him. He supplied a light and I began puffing away.

 

‘Do you know any Americans?’ he asked.

 

‘No.’

 

‘Are you agin ’em?’

 

No, I assured him, after all I was a keen follower of the tales of the Golden West.

 

‘Well that’s good,’ he replied, ‘because I  stick up for the Yanks. I’ve got a pair of boots my sister’s boyfriend brought me from Texas.’

 

He showed me his fist.

 

‘I’ve got this for anyone who disagree.’

 

Taken all in all, his statements were reasonable enough. If you accepted his view of the right and wrong of things, he was a reasonable man.

 

Another case was Bill Daly, who thought I didn’t show enough fear of him. Of course, I felt it, as everybody did, and was amazed that it wasn’t showing.

 

‘You think just because you live opposite my stepmum you’re safe,’ he said.

 

I managed to extricate myself from his presence without any more chat. The thing was though, I hadn’t known that he even had a stepmum.