The Kray Madness: The shocking truth about Reg and Ron from the East End gangster they almost destroyed

Illustrations

PROLOGUE

One warm summer’s day, three years ago, I was walking around the East End with a Hollywood film director, who was planning a movie about the Kray twins. His name was Brian Helgeland and he wanted to get a feel for the world that Ronnie and Reggie supposedly held in such terror.

I took Brian to Pellicci’s, the cafe in Bethnal Green where the twins and their so-called ‘Firm’ of heavies went for breakfast every morning.

I took him to The Blind Beggar pub, in Whitechapel, where Ronnie shot George Cornell dead, one Wednesday evening, in March 1966.

I showed him the house in Stoke Newington, where, one October night, the following year, my younger brother, Tony, and I had taken Jack (The Hat) McVitie, oblivious to the unimaginable horror that would unfold there.

And I showed him the route Tony took, in the silent early hours of a Sunday morning, when he drove Jack’s butchered body through the empty streets, to South London, dumping it outside a church, among confetti thrown at the previous day’s weddings.

Everything I showed Brian Helgeland that summer’s day, everything I told him about the East End of the sixties, had a profound effect and, when I dropped him at his Hyde Park hotel, he was quiet and sombre. He needed to go for a long walk on his own, he said, to ponder on all he had seen and heard.

Those nostalgic hours affected me, too, and I drove home to Oxford, disturbed at waking all the ghosts I’d buried deep in the darkest recesses of my mind.

I’d taken Brian to the key locations he needed to see, but there was one spot I didn’t show him – a place hugely significant to me, but not one I thought would interest an Oscar-winning film man, looking only at the wider, bigger picture.

It was a bus stop, a mile or so away, on Cambridge Heath Road, where I’d been waiting, one rainy February night in 1967, when Ronnie Bender drove by and offered me a lift, to my dad’s flat, a couple of miles away.

It was a moment that changed the course of my life.

If my bus had come a few seconds earlier, or if Bender hadn’t spotted me, I would never have been persuaded to meet Ronnie and Reggie; would never have got caught up in their madness and mayhem.

As it was, I did accept Bender’s offer of a lift. And my goose, as they say, was cooked.

Fate would lead me from that bus stop to a blood-soaked suburban flat, and a senseless slaughter that would cost me fifteen years of freedom, and bring shame on the one person I adored above all others – my father.

CHAPTER ONE

I was a little cheeky kid in short, grey trousers, and I was standing outside the hotel, in Regent’s Park, in the early evening sunshine, watching the guests arrive.

I was wearing a green cap with gold stripes, green round-neck jumper and yellow scarf, with a leather toggle – the traditional uniform of the Wolf Cubs. I was holding a round tin box I’d found on a bombsite and, as another guest walked up to the hotel entrance, I rattled it and smiled. ‘Buy a raffle ticket for the Cubs, mister?’ I said, chirpily.

The man stopped. ‘How much are they, sonny?’

‘Sixpence.’

The man smiled and felt in his trouser pocket. He took out a sixpence and dropped it into the tin box. ‘And when is the raffle, young man?’

‘Very shortly, sir.’ I pointed back towards the Marylebone Road entrance to the park. ‘At the church.’ I put the box on the ground and handed the man a small numbered ticket. Then I went up to the hotel door and opened it. The man was still smiling as he walked through.

Watching him disappear into the hotel lobby, I felt pleased with myself. I jiggled the tin in my hand, feeling its weight: I had not been counting, but it felt like my best evening ever.

I looked at the clock behind the reception desk: 5.15 p.m. I had been rattling my tin for nearly two hours since coming home from school; now it was time to get back before my mum and dad started to worry.

I went out of the park, crossed Marylebone Road, then ran down Great Portland Street to a bombsite in Cleveland Street. I crept into a wartime shelter and emptied my tin on the ground, then hid it under some rubble, for use the next afternoon.

I put the sixpences in piles of ten, each pile representing five shillings, and was thrilled when I made five piles. I was right: twenty-five shillings was the best evening I’d had since starting collecting ten days before. I wrapped the coins in a handkerchief, stuffed it in my trouser pocket, then hurried down Fitzroy Street, into Howland Street, where I lived with my three brothers, in a two-bedroomed flat at the top of a four-storey house.

A bit breathless, I crept up the stairs and let myself into a toilet on the landing below our flat: in there was a loose floorboard where I hid the money. As I was taking the handkerchief out of my pocket, however, I heard my father’s broken English, and it made me jump.

‘Chris,’ he called out from the other side of the door, ‘what are you doing?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Come out, boy,’ he ordered.

I stuffed the handkerchief down the front of my trousers and opened the door.

‘Where have you been?’

‘With my friends,’ I said, looking down.

‘In your Cub uniform?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ve been doing odd jobs.’

Dad gave me a strange look. ‘Come upstairs,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

As my dad followed me up to our flat, the handkerchief dropped out of my trousers and fell with an incriminating thud on the stairs. My dad said nothing, just kept walking without breaking step.

‘Why have you been wearing your Cub uniform for the last week, Chris?’ he said.

I didn’t like lying, but I was too frightened to tell the truth. ‘I’ve been doing odd jobs for the Cubs.’

‘Don’t lie to me, Chris. A little bird saw you buying sweets and toys. He came and sat on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear. Where did you get the money?’

My dad held up my knotted handkerchief. ‘What’s this? Where did you get it?’

‘I found it,’ I said, looking down at the floor. My dad lifted my chin with his finger, forcing me to look at him.

‘Where?’ he said, softly.

I didn’t know what to say. I felt so guilty.

‘Is there any more of this in the house?’ my dad asked, loosening the handkerchief, so that the sixpences fell on the threadbare carpet.

‘Yes.’

‘Fetch them.’

I left the room and went downstairs to the toilet. I lifted the loose floorboard and pulled out a rag containing thirty-five sixpences, and went back, looking sheepish and near to tears.

‘Was there more?’ my dad asked.

‘I spent it on sweets and toys.’

My dad looked at me for several seconds, puzzled. ‘Chris. Where on earth did you get this money?’

I could not look at him or Mum. I didn’t want to see the hurt in their eyes. So I looked at the floor as I told them the full story: that there was no raffle; that I’d invented it and dressed in my Cubs uniform because that was the surest way to trick rich people at the hotel into giving me money.

And that I’d only done it so I could get a fishing rod.

My mum and dad didn’t say a word until I’d finished. Then Dad said, ‘Look at me and Mum, Chris.’

When I did, I didn’t see anger in their eyes, just pain and sorrow.

‘How can you do this to us?’ he said. ‘Your mother and me, we love you. We are decent citizens. We do our best for you and try to bring you up decent. Why do you do this and put yourself in danger? Do you want to go away from us into a prison? Do you want to work for the King for nothing?’

I just stared at the floor, ashamed, praying my dad would not belt me.

For a few moments, he didn’t speak. There was total silence; my dad was wondering what to do. Finally, he said, ‘Go to your bedroom.’

A few moments later, he changed his mind. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

‘Can I get changed?’ I asked, wanting the Cubs uniform I’d dishonoured off my back.

But my dad said, ‘No, leave it on.’ It was as if he felt the dishonour more than me.

He walked out of the room and down the stairs, without saying a word. He hurried up Cleveland Street as though he wasn’t with me, and I had to run to keep up with him. At first, I had no idea where we were going, but when we reached the sports shop at the corner of Great Portland Street, I knew. Dad was taking me back to the White House Hotel.

I was filled with dread, and thought of running away. But I had nowhere to go.

We reached the hotel. My dad asked for the manager. As we waited in the foyer, several people recognized me and said hello, or smiled. Finally, the manager came and my dad talked to him out of my earshot. We were invited into a side office, where my dad explained everything.

The manager listened with undisguised admiration; for someone so young, he said, I’d shown incredible ingenuity and entrepreneurial flair. My dad said he did not see it that way. ‘I’m a decent citizen,’ he said, proudly. ‘I want my children to be decent citizens. It makes me very unhappy that my son is a thief.’

‘What do you want to do?’ the manager asked.

‘We want to give the money back,’ my dad replied.

‘That will be difficult. I have no way of knowing which of my guests gave sixpence to your boy.’

My dad got up to leave. ‘Then we will leave the money here,’ he said. ‘It is not ours. We never earned it. We have no use for it. It is covered in shame.’

On the way home my dad kept saying, ‘I don’t want you to grow up no good, a crook, Chris. I want you to be a decent, law-abiding citizen. I want to be proud of you.’

When we got home, he said, ‘Go to your bedroom. Take off your uniform and bring it to me.’

I took off my shirt, jumper, yellow scarf and my grey socks, with the green flags in the garters. I folded them all neatly, feeling I was saying goodbye to an old friend I had let down. I went into the sitting room and handed the uniform to my dad.

He went to a drawer and took out a huge pair of scissors. Then, slowly and very deliberately, he cut the uniform to pieces.

‘You will never go to Cubs again,’ he said, his voice filled with pain. ‘We are so ashamed of you.’

I was just nine years old that awful summer’s day, when I first brought shame to my family. All my father wanted was for me to be a law-abiding human being, a decent citizen like him. And discovering his eldest son was a common thief shocked and hurt him deeply.

Sadly, I did not learn the lesson he tried so desperately to teach me. It went in, all right, but I hated the poverty we were living in and I wanted to be as far away from it as possible. I saw crime as a way out. I went from bad to worse, conditioned by my environment, the poverty, and the constant moves, the prejudice. I embarked on a ruthless career of villainy – an insane existence that would lead to the dock of Number 1 Court at the Old Bailey and break my beloved father’s heart.

CHAPTER TWO

He was Greek, my dad. He came from Lefkara, a tiny village high in the chalk mountains of southern Cyprus, famous for its lace and silverware. But England always had a fascination for him. To a poor boy, who travelled the island with his father, selling lace from a battered suitcase, England was a land of sophistication and good breeding, and the people polite and caring and courteous. It was a land of opportunity, too, where hard work could bring high rewards.

My dad thrived on hard work. He had learned to fend for himself early on, after his father collapsed and died on their way to Vavatsinia. My dad buried him in the mountains and loaded the lace on a donkey and went into Vavatsinia alone. He was about seventeen. The experience scarred him for life, but it made him grow up quickly and want to make the best of himself. My dad adored Cyprus, but he wanted a better life, so, in 1920, shortly before his twenty-first birthday, he packed what few belongings he had and travelled around Albania and Russia selling lace, before going to Egypt where he worked in a consulate. When he was about twenty-five he sailed for England and got a job as a chef, in London’s West End.

He worked long hours, but what time he did get off he loved to spend at the cinema. And that’s where he developed a sort of hero-worship for Ronald Colman, a British romantic actor, whose good looks and polished manner thrilled audiences for nearly thirty years, starting with the silent films of the early 1920s.

Ronald Colman was the epitome of the English gentleman: a well-dressed, well-bred, jolly good sport who never let down his friends; a likeable, law-abiding chap who always did the proper thing; a decent citizen.

After seeing Colman play Bulldog Drummond, the stiff-upper-lipped amateur James Bond, in 1929, my dad started modelling himself on him. He grew a pencil-thin moustache, started wearing a brown trilby, and spent hours copying the actor’s mannerisms and gentle, polite way of speaking. Colman symbolized everything he liked in a man, everything he wanted to be himself. And Christos Lambrianou wanted desperately to be like him.

My mother, Lilian, was one of seven children, and her parents brought the family to England from southern Ireland, during the potato famine there, in the early 1900s. They settled in Consett, a mining town in County Durham, but my mother quickly saw its limitations. Like my dad, she wanted to better herself, and she was prepared to work hard to do so. In 1930, when she was eighteen, she packed her bags and travelled to London, determined to get a job as a waitress. She was taken on at the Lyons Corner House near Piccadilly Circus, where my dad was working.

The two met and liked each other: Lilian was attracted by the gentle foreigner with the strange accent and old-fashioned British manners; and Christos fell for the teenage waitress’s natural, down-to-earth charm and zest for life. When Christos invited Lilian to go to the pictures one night, Lilian accepted immediately. They went to the London Pavilion, in Piccadilly, to see the hit film All Quiet on the Western Front, and that was that: they fell in love and, after a long courtship, decided to marry.

Mum ran into a storm when she took Dad north to meet the family. ‘How can you possibly marry that man, Lily?’ her mother fumed. ‘He doesn’t even come from this country. He’s a foreigner. And he’s black.’

Mum’s sisters were even more insulting. ‘He’s like a monkey,’ they giggled.

All the family were strict Roman Catholics and went to church every day. But they did not have a clue what being a Christian was all about. Happily, their prejudice and contempt cut no ice with my mum, and she married Dad at Camden Town on 24 June 1935.

I was born on Christmas Day, in 1938, the first child of a happy couple, who loved each other to bits.

We were living in a flat in Mornington Crescent, in northwest London, when war broke out the following September. But early in 1941, after my brother, Leon, was born, we were evacuated to the Midlands where my dad was employed, repairing Spitfires, Hurricanes, and other planes shot down by the Germans.

He worked in a massive hangar, on an airfield just outside Ibstock, in Leicestershire, and the rest of the family lived in the town centre, in a corner shop, converted into living accommodation for evacuees from the south. At weekends, my dad would take me to the airfield and I would stare up at the huge, high planes, the wonderful, pungent smell of glue filling my nostrils, imagining myself as a pilot. Sometimes, my dad would lift me into the cockpit and I’d be off into another world, my three-year-old mind filled with all the heroic feats he told me those brave wartime pilots were performing day after day, night after night. No wonder, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d say immediately: ‘A pilot!’

My dad spoke English well, but he had a heavy Greek accent, and, late one night, it led to him being arrested. He missed the last bus from the airfield and was walking home when two air-raid wardens asked him who he was and where he was going. Hearing his broken English, one of them said to his mate, ‘I think we’ve got ourselves a German spy.’ One of them pulled out a gun and they escorted Dad to Ibstock Police Station, feeling pleased with themselves. When they took Dad before the inspector, however, they felt rather foolish.

‘That’s no spy,’ he scoffed. ‘That’s Mr Lambrianou. He works up at the airfield.’

The inspector apologized charmingly to my dad for the embarrassment and inconvenience, and asked if there was anything he wanted. Dad said he would love a cigarette, and the inspector gave him a whole pack, and a lift home.

It was in Ibstock I first felt afraid of death: of course, those daring pilots faced it every time they took off, but my young mind could not come to terms with that; closer to home, and far more frightening, was the local baker, who had died of natural causes.

The word ‘died’ played on my mind, and when my mum asked me to go to the baker’s for some bread, I refused: I was only four and felt, in a weird way I could not comprehend, that death filled the shop and was actually touching the bread. My mum reassured me there was nothing to worry about, but I felt so uncomfortable I would not go there. I’d run errands to every other shop, but not that one!

It was in that pleasant, slow-paced Midlands town, towards the end of the war, that I was lured into crime. Some older kids found out that hundreds of packets of cigarettes and cigars were stored in a train in the sidings at Ibstock railway station, and one afternoon we busted open a carriage door and helped ourselves. I can’t remember what we did with them; probably the older boys went to the American airbase nearby and made a few quid out of the GIs. What I do recall is being persuaded to have a puff, not only of a cigarette, but of a cigar, too. I was around five at the time and the nauseating experience should have put me off smoking for life. Sadly, it did not.

I was spending a lot of time with older boys, because by then I had another brother, Tony, and Mum was too busy to give me the attention she wanted; I had to find my own amusement.

It was a situation that led to an experience so evil and frightening that it scarred me for life, and destroyed the trust in people my loving parents had instilled.

It also robbed me, at just six, of my innocence.

One Saturday morning one of the engineers at the airfield gave me a most beautifully crafted plywood replica of one of the Spitfires I loved to stare at and touch. Later that day, back home, I wandered off to the park, happy to play with the plane on my own.

I hadn’t been there ten minutes when an older boy, of around fourteen, called me over to show him what I was playing with. He enthused over my beautiful plane, but said he had a much better one, and wanted to show it to me.

Innocently, I followed him into some nearby bushes, where another three boys, all about the same age, were waiting. One of them pushed me over and I fell to the ground. Before I knew what was happening, he and the others held me down, and the first boy stood over me, undoing his trousers. I was wriggling and kicking, trying to get to my feet, but the boys were too strong.

Then one of the boys grabbed my head and held it still as the first boy took out his penis and forced it into my mouth. I was spitting and gagging, not knowing what was happening to me, but there was nothing I could do.

Finally, after God knows how many terrifying minutes, they let me go, and I ran home, tears streaming down my face, and told my dad.

He said he would do something. I prayed it was something dreadful; I wanted him to kill them. I needed to believe that they would suffer for what they had done, and, lying in the massive bedroom with my two baby brothers, I kept thinking: If he doesn’t kill them, he doesn’t love me, and then I’ll stop loving him.

But no one came to take him away and I would lie in the darkness, my childish mind wondering over and over: Why? For years it would puzzle me why he didn’t do anything. The Greeks have a strong tradition of avenging wrongs done to the family, and I took my dad’s failure to act as a sign of weakness.

Dad and I never talked about that terrible day again, but it played on my mind. I didn’t want to go to the airfield and look at the planes any more, and I didn’t trust anybody.

When we returned to London, soon after, I knew I would have to be more on my guard, and stronger and more violent than anyone else, if I didn’t want to be a victim again.

And, even then, I felt I never wanted to be part of a gang.

My dad’s head was filled with dreams of making his fortune in business. England, after all, was the land of opportunity. So, when we were settled back in London, towards the end of the war, he invested what money he had saved, or won from gambling in the capital’s casinos, in a restaurant in Charlotte Street, in the West End. He soon discovered, however, that not everyone shared his high principles. There were workshy chancers, who saw those troubled wartime years as the perfect opportunity to get rich quick; ruthless black-market racketeers, who preyed on legitimate businesses and did not like ‘no’ for an answer. An unsavoury little firm tried to sell my dad some bent gear for his restaurant. When he refused to buy, they tried to insist. When he told them to get lost, they burned his restaurant down.

It was a terrible blow that shattered my dad’s deep affection for the English way of life. But his spirit was unbroken and, shortly after the war, he teamed up with a Greek pal and opened another restaurant, in Windmill Street, which not surprisingly they called The Windmill. Sadly, this too was doomed, but for different reasons.

One day, a rat suddenly sprang out from the kitchen area onto the counter, a few inches from my mother, who was serving tea from a huge urn. Hearing her screams, my dad killed the rat by throwing boiling water over it. He acted instinctively, to protect his wife, but an RSPCA official was in the restaurant at the time and reported Dad to the police for causing an animal unnecessary suffering. Dad could not believe it. And when he was later charged, he hired a lawyer to fight the case. Why should he be penalized, my dad argued, for killing an animal officially classified as vermin? He lost and was fined £75. But, as well as being a decent, law-abiding citizen, Dad was a stickler for principles and he refused to pay the fine because he genuinely believed the law had got it wrong. That particular principle cost Dad a month in Brixton Prison. And the price of fighting the case, together with his partner’s gambling losses, cost him the restaurant. He went back to working as a chef for someone else.

We were living in a flat off Tottenham Court Road then, in Howland Street under the Post Office Tower. Despite the long hours my mum and dad worked, they had found time to have two more children, Jimmy and Nicky, and, as big brother to four little ones, I began to feel a lot of family responsibility. With Leon, the second oldest, particularly, I would have the most awful screaming rows. He would want to do what he wanted, and I would argue because, being older, I knew better.

With Tony, however, it was different. From the moment he was born, Mum made it clear he was my baby, and after school and at weekends it became second nature to me to look after him while she got on with chores around the flat.

One Saturday afternoon, when Tony was coming up to three, Mum asked me to take him out in his pushchair, and something happened that taught me a lesson I would never forget. I was pushing Tony along a cobblestone alleyway, near the flat, when six boys barred my way and tried to take the pushchair away from me. I was scared out of my wits, not only of being hurt, but of what Mum would say if I went back without Tony.

I was only seven and the kids in the gang were a couple of years older. I begged them to leave us alone, but the more I pleaded, the more they tormented us. I didn’t know what to do for the best: I could not wade into all six of them, and I couldn’t leave Tony and run for help. Finally, I did the only thing I could: I looked around for a weapon and saw half a brick on the cobblestones. I picked it up and hurled it at the biggest boy, the one with the loudest mouth. It caught him on the side of the head and he fell down, crying in pain. Instinctively, I ran towards the others, fists clenched, and they ran away. The biggest kid must have sensed he had taken on too much, because he also got up and fled. I was proud of myself that I had stood up to them, not only for myself, but for Tony, too. It would not be the last time I put his safety before my own. Nor the last time I would use violence to make my point.

Our flat was surrounded on all sides, it seemed, by lively, enterprising people of all colours and creeds: Italians and Indians and Germans and Maltese and Chinese, all living in harmony, all accepted by everyone else for who and what they were, and all allowed to get on with their lives. All these exotic folk seemed cheerful; there was an air of optimism after the war, with everyone looking forward and seeking something better. That West End area, a mile north of Soho, was like a village, and Christos and Lilian Lambrianou, and their five sons, fitted in neatly. We were a mixture of Greek Cypriot and Irish, but no one gave a damn: we were just another family doing the best we could to put the horror of the past five years behind us and get on with our lives. To me, at seven, that small, bustling area of cosmopolitan activity was exciting; every day I’d wake up feeling I was on the verge of a new adventure. More important, I felt accepted and liked by everyone I met.

There was no one more colourful, more exotic, than the tall, broad-shouldered black man, with gold in his teeth, whom everyone knew as Prince Monolulu. We never saw him in a suit; he always paraded around in bright pink, blue or green pantaloons made of some synthetic fabric, a crisply starched white shirt and a huge feathered headdress. He was a legend, not only to us kids who stared in wonder at his outrageous get-up, but to the nation generally. He was pure show business – a flamboyant publicity machine, who became a national celebrity every June when he paraded around Epsom racecourse, claiming he knew who was going to win the Derby. ‘I’ve gotta horse . . . I’ve gotta horse,’ he would shout, and, of course, all the popular newspapers and radio commentators loved him.

Me and my pals were not interested in Monolulu’s racing tips, but we certainly looked up to him. He was like a ray of sunshine on a gloomy day, always smiling, always with a kind word for everyone he met, and he loved kids. When he stepped out of his flat in Cleveland Street he was on – and would play the part for all he was worth. ‘Come here, boy,’ he would call out, his big black face beaming. ‘I’m Prince Monolulu. Do you want me to tell you what you’re going to be?’ And we’d all crowd round him, desperate to know what lay in store for us. To me, he said, ‘You’re going to be the best boxer in the world.’ I remember walking away, convinced that was what I was going to be – after all, it wasn’t any old toerag who had told me; it was the famous Prince Monolulu.

To millions, that spectacular, stylish exhibitionist was probably a con man. But to me, and to all the other kids, he was a genuinely nice man. And a hero.

Less exotic, but equally memorable, was a friendly bloke who lived in one of the stables at the end of a cobbled mews, a short walk from our flat. He wore an old flat cap, an even older overcoat, with a piece of string for a belt, a knotted scarf and a pair of Wellington boots. He looked like a tramp, but he was a hard-working man, who rode round the streets in a cart, pulled by a lovely, old, grey horse, scouring the bomb sites for anything that might be worth a few bob.

I spent a lot of time down by those stables, watching the huge, muscular blacksmiths at work in a farrier’s shed, and one day I saw this man’s grey horse pull his cart into the stable.

‘What’s yer ’orse’s name, mister?’ I called out.

He probably did not understand my cockney, because he replied, ‘My name’s Yorkie. And don’t you forget it.’

‘And what’s yer ’orse’s name?’ I said again.

‘I calls her Galloperlightly,’ he said. ‘She’s like a woman. Don’t push her, don’t shove her – Gallop Her Lightly.’

I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. But I took an instant liking to him, and went back to that stable the next evening and stood watching him strip copper from old dynamos and chuck it into a big tin bath. I went there day after day and he would brew a pot of rich brown tea, often from rainwater, and hand me a cup, saying, in a broad northern accent, ‘There you are, lad – have a nice cuppa.’ And then he would be off, telling me, with some pride and not a little nostalgia, about Yorkshire and its famous moors. He came from up there, he said; that’s why he was called Yorkie.

Sometimes, during the school holidays, I would join him on his travels and he would teach me what to look for on the bombed areas around Euston and Mornington Crescent. ‘Go on lad,’ he’d say, stopping at a likely looking site. ‘Go and see what you can find.’ And I’d jump down and rummage around among the debris, returning, triumphantly, to the cart with an iron bar or some other metal I thought Yorkie might want. I spent many hours with Yorkie during that summer of 1946, but then, one day, just before I was due to change schools, he told me he was not able to take me out.

‘Why?’ I asked, disappointed.

‘Galloperlightly died,’ he said.

I didn’t know what to say. I felt sad for both of them.

‘I don’t know if I can get another horse,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably have to let the cart go.’

I was really worried for him. ‘What