head—but doesn’t actually kill it. Trouble is, you have to be up close and personal with the cow to use the bolt gun, and if you get an animal that’s pissed off, you won’t be able to knock it out the first time. But there’s no escape for either of you. I can’t tell you how many man-on-cow death matches I had in the Digbeth slaughterhouse. I had to shoot one bull five or six times before it went down. Fuck me, he was pissed off. At one point I thought I’d be the one who’d end up in a bun, covered in ketchup.
Once you’ve knocked out the cow you shackle its legs and attach them to a kind of moving rail, which pulls the animal upside down and carries it down the processing line. Then someone cuts its throat and the blood drains out into a chute underneath. So, eventually, the animal dies through loss of blood. One time, this cow was still conscious when I shackled it to the rail, but I didn’t know it. Just as it was swinging upside down it fucking hoofed me in the arse and I went flying head first down the blood chute. When they got me out, I looked like fucking afterbirth. My clothes were soaked in blood, my shoes were full of blood, and my hair was matted with blood. I even got a mouthful of the stuff. And it’s not just blood in the chute.
There are all kinds of other unmentionable substances in that fucking thing. No one would sit next to me on the bus for weeks, I reeked so bad.
I had lots of different jobs at Digbeth. I specialised in tripe for a while: cutting out the cow’s stomach, putting it in this big wheelbarrow, then letting it soak overnight. I also had a job as a heel-puller—in other words, getting the hoofs off the cows. Tripe’s one thing, but I don’t know who the fuck would ever eat a fucking hoof. I also had a stint killing pigs. They say that the only thing wasted on a pig is the squeal, and it’s true. Every single part of those things gets turned into some kind of product, one way or another. My job was to get tongs with sponges on the end of them, dip them in water, put them on the pig’s head, press a button on the handle, and make sure the pig zonked out. Again, it didn’t always work first time, but no one gave a shit. The guys would fuck around with the pigs sometimes, commit all sorts of atrocities. In was like Auschwitz in that place on a bad day, the evil that went on. Sometimes the pigs would get dropped into a vat of boiling water before they’d even been knocked out. Or they’d still be awake when they were put through a furnace that burned all the hair off their backs. I regret a lot of that stuff now. Killing a pig for a good old fry-up is one thing. But there’s no excuse for being cruel, even if you’re a bored teenage kid.
You get a different perspective on meat after you’ve worked in a slaughterhouse for a while. I remember going camping once after Digbeth, and I was cooking these steaks on a barbecue. Some cows from the next field came over to me, sniffing around, like they knew something was up. I started to feel really weird about the steaks. ‘I’m sure it’s no relation,’ I said to them, but they still didn’t fuck off. They ruined the fucking meal in the end. It doesn’t feel right, eating beef when you’re in the company of a cow.
I loved my job at Digbeth, though. The guys I worked with were fucking crazy and always up for a laugh. And once your kills were done you were free to go home. So, if you started early, you could be out by nine or ten o’clock in the morning. I remember we used to get paid on Thursdays and go straight to the pub. Which was always an excuse to practise my favourite practical joke—dropping cows’ eyeballs into people’s drinks. I’d sneak them out of the slaughterhouse by the dozen for the very purpose. The best thing was to find a young sensitive-looking chick, and when she went to the bog, put an eyeball on top of her can of Coke.
They would go crazy when they saw that shit. One time, the landlord threw me out for making someone vomit all over his swirly carpet. So I got another eyeball, stood outside the doorway, and popped it open with a knife. That made another two or three people come out in sympathy, which for some reason I thought was fucking brilliant.
Another great thing about Digbeth was the all-night club across the street called the Midnight City. They played soul music in there, so after staggering out of the pub at closing time I could dance until five in the morning, speeding my balls off on Dexedrine. Then I’d go straight back to the slaughterhouse and kill more cows. I’d keep that up all through the weekend until Sunday night, when I went back to 14 Lodge Road.
It was magic.
I lasted about eighteen months at the slaughterhouse. Having been a puke remover and a cow killer and a tripe hanger and a hoof puller and pig stunner, my final job was fat collector.
An animal has what’s known as caul fat around its stomach—kind of like a beer belly—and my job was to cut it out, stretch it and hang it up on these poles overnight to dry it out, so you could bag it when you came in the next morning. Most of it was used in girls’ make-up. But before you hung it up to dry, you had to clean it. They had this big tank of boiling-hot water, and the trick was to clean the fat using the steam, then wash it off, put it on a rack, and hang it over the poles.
But the guys in the slaughterhouse would fuck around with each other, like they always did. They’d cut the strings on your butcher’s apron as you were leaning over the tank, so you’d get this spray of blood and shit and fuck-knows-what-else all down your clothes. I got sick of them doing that to me, and I got a bee up my arse about one guy in particular. So, I’m leaning over the tank and this guy sneaks up behind me and cuts my apron strings. Without thinking, I just turn around and whack him over the head with one of the fat poles. I just lost my cool, man. It was quite a heavy scene. I whacked him a few times, and there was blood spurting out of his face. They had to send him to hospital in the end.
That was the end of the slaughterhouse for me.
‘Fuck off and don’t come back,’ said the boss.
That’s why I became John the Burglar. I just couldn’t face another factory job. The thought of Harry and his gold watch and the two-quid-a-week wage was too much to handle.
But I soon learned my lesson when they sent me to Winson Green. An hour is a long time in that fucking place, never mind three months. The first thing I did was ask someone what the guards had meant about my long flowing hair and the showers. Then I spent the rest of the week begging for a pair of scissors so I could look less like a girl. Every morning during wash-time I’d have my hand over my balls and my back pressed to the wall, I was so fucking scared. If I dropped the soap, it stayed on the fucking floor.
I wasn’t going to be doing any bending over.
But I was worried about more than a rogering. People got killed in that place if they pissed off the wrong guy. There were fights every day, and I was shit at fighting. So I did exactly what I’d done at Birchfield Road with the bullies: I found the biggest, baddest fuckers in the exercise yard and I made ’em laugh by doing crazy things.
That was my protection.
The inside of the prison was just how I’d imagined it would be, with clanging doors and rattling keys, and different levels for different categories of prisoners, each with its own balcony overlooking the central area. I was locked up in the ‘YP Wing’, which stood for Young Offenders, and on the level above us were adult prisoners who were on remand waiting for trial or sentencing. Murderers, rapists, bank robbers—every kind of undesirable you could imagine was up there. The stuff they could smuggle in was amazing. They had beer, cigarettes, all kinds of shit—although any type of tobacco was very highly prized. Smoking helped kill the boredom, which was your worst enemy on the inside. Even soggy old cigarette butts were worth a fucking fortune in there.
Getting tattoos done was another way to make the time pass more quickly. One of the guys showed me how to do it without a proper needle or any Indian ink. He drew a picture of The Saint on my arm with a ballpoint pen— I’d been a fan of the show since it started in 1962—and then he used a sewing pin he’d nicked from the workroom and some melted grate polish to poke in the tattoo over the top.
I started tattooing myself all over the place after I came out of Winson Green. I even put a smiley face on each of my knees to cheer myself up when I was sitting on the bog in the morning. Another thing I learned inside was how to split matches. They were a scarce commodity, so the guys had worked out a way to make four out of one by splitting them with a pin.
I remember thinking, If they’re clever enough to do that, how come these people aren’t all fucking millionaires?
My most vivid memory of Winson Green is the time when Bradley came in. He was a notorious child molester, and he’d been given a cell on the level above the YP Wing. They put this big sign outside his door which said, ‘RULE 43’. That meant he had to have a twenty-four-hour-a-day guard, to protect him from the other inmates. They’d have strung him up from a light fixture, given half the chance. But the guards hated Bradley as much as the cons did—he was on remand for seventeen offences of sexually abusing kids, including his own—and they did their best to make sure his life was hell on earth. One time I saw this fucking huge guy with a tattoo of a snake on his face beat the shit of Bradley, and the guards just looked the other way, didn’t even say anything. The first punch
