alone must have broken Bradley’s nose. There was all this blood and snot and cartilage running down into his mouth and he was fucking howling with pain.
My job in prison was to dole out the food. The inmates would come in with these trays that had little compartments moulded into them, and I’d spoon out the sloppy tripe and peas or whatever disgusting fucking shit they were cooking that day. Whenever Bradley came in, the guard on duty would go to me, ‘Osbourne, don’t give ’im anything worth a shit.’ So I’d give him almost nothing. Bradley would have to be escorted into the canteen by himself to make sure nothing happened to him, but it didn’t always work. I remember one time, when he’d been given hardly any food for weeks, he said to the guy who was serving the porridge, ‘Can I have some more, please?’ The guy with the porridge just looked at him. Then he dipped the big, heavy prison ladle back in the pot, took it out, swung it back, and smashed it into Bradley’s face. I’ll never forget the sound of that fucking porridge ladle burying itself into his head.
Thwack! His nose hadn’t even healed up from the previous attack, and it just exploded again.
Bradley was crying and screaming and staggering around, but the guard just whacked him on the arse with his stick and told him to move along the fucking line. It was heavy-duty.
Bradley refused to come out of his cell again after that.
This became a problem for the guards, because prison regulations meant you had to have a cell search every night and empty your bucket of shit and polish the floor every morning. So when the prison chief noticed that Bradley wasn’t coming out to eat, all these fucking whistles and bells started going off. I was in the kitchen at the time. This guard comes up to me and one of the other guys and goes, ‘You and you, I want you to get that disgusting piece of shit out of his cell and into the bath. Then I want you to scrub him.’
I don’t know how long they’d let Bradley fester in his cell before sounding the alarm, but it must have been a few days, judging by the state of it. The slop bucket he was supposed to use as a bog was knocked over and there was piss and shit everywhere. Bradley himself was covered in it, too. So we dragged him out and into this bath of cold water. Then we used the brooms for the yard to scrub him down. His whole face was swollen and black, his nose was a fucking mess, and he was shivering and crying. I felt sorry for the guy at the end of the day.
People say child molesters get a soft time inside. Believe me, they don’t. I’m surprised Bradley didn’t just top himself. Maybe he was too chicken. Maybe he just didn’t have any spare razor blades.
On one of my last days in Winson Green I was walking around the exercise yard and I saw a guy I recognised.
‘Hey, Tommy!’ I shouted.
Tommy looked up, smiled, and walked over to me, flapping his arms for warmth while smoking a fag.
‘Ozzy?’ he goes. ‘Fucking hell, man, it’s you!’
Tommy had worked with me at the Digbeth slaughterhouse. He was one of the guys who roped in the cows before I shot them with the bolt gun. He asked me how long I was in for, and I told him I’d been given three months, but because of my work in the kitchen and my help with Bradley they were going to let me out after six weeks.
‘Good behaviour,’ I said. ‘How long are you in for?’
‘Four,’ he replied, taking another puff on his fag.
‘Weeks?’
‘Years.’
‘Fucking hell, Tommy. What did you do, mug the Queen?’
‘Robbed a bunch of caffs.’
‘How much dough?’
‘Fuck-all, man. But I got a couple of hundred packets of fags and some chocolate bars and whatnot.’
‘Four years for some fags and chocolate?’
‘Third offence. Judge said I hadn’t learned my lesson.’
‘Fucking hell, Tommy.’
A whistle blew and one of the guards told us to get moving.
‘See you around then, Ozzy.’
‘Yeah, see you around, Tommy.’
My old man had done the right thing by not paying my fine. There was no fucking way I ever wanted to go back to prison after Winson Green, and I never did. Jail, yes. Prison, not a chance.
Having said that, I did have a couple of close calls.
I’m not proud of the fact that I did time, but it was a part of my life, y’know? So I don’t try to pretend it never happened, like some people do. If it hadn’t been for those six weeks inside, fuck knows what I would have ended up doing. Maybe I’d have turned out like my mate Pat, my apple-scrumping partner from Lodge Road. He just kept getting involved with heavier and heavier things. Got mixed up with a really bad crowd. Drugs, I think it was. I didn’t know the details, because I never asked. When I got out of the nick I drifted away from Pat, because I didn’t want any more to do with all that dodgy stuff. But every now and again I’d meet up with him and we’d have a bit of a drink and whatever. He was a good guy, man. People are always so quick to put people down, but Patrick Murphy was all right. He just made some bad choices, and then it was too late.
Eventually he turned Queen’s Evidence, which means you take a reduced sentence for ratting on someone who’s more important. Then, when you get out of prison, they give you a new identity. They sent him off to live in Southend or some out-of-the-way place. He was under police protection twenty-four hours a day. But after years of waiting for him to come out of the slammer, his wife broke down and asked for a divorce. Pat goes into his garage, starts up his car, puts a hosepipe over the exhaust, and feeds it through the driver’s window. Then he gets inside and waits until the carbon monoxide kills him.
He was only in his early thirties.
When I heard, I phoned his sister, Mary, and asked if he had been loaded when he’d killed himself. She said they hadn’t found anything: he’d just done it, stone-cold sober.
It was the middle of winter 1966 when I got out of the nick. Fucking hell, man, it was cold.
The guards felt bad for me, so they gave me this old coat to wear, but it stank of mothballs.
Then they got the plastic bag with my things in it and tipped it out on to the table. Wallet, keys, fags. I remember thinking, What must it be like to get your stuff back after thirty years, when it’s like a time capsule from an alternative universe? After I signed some forms they unlocked the door, pulled back this barbed-wire-covered gate, and I walked out into the street.
I was a free man, and I’d survived prison without being arse raped or beaten to a pulp.
So how come I felt so fucking sad?
2. Ozzy Zig Needs Gig
Knock-knock.
I poked my head through the curtains in the living room and saw a big-nosed bloke with long hair and a moustache standing outside on the doorstep. He looked like a cross between Guy Fawkes and Jesus of Nazareth. And was that a pair of…? Fuck me, it was. He was wearing velvet trousers.
‘JOHN! Get the door!’
My mum could wake up half of Aston cemetery at the volume she shouted. Ever since I’d got out of the nick, she’d been breaking my balls. Every two seconds, it was ‘John, do this.
John, do that.’ But I didn’t want to answer the door too fast. I needed a moment to sort my head out, get my nerves under control. This bloke looked like he was serious.
This could be important.
Knock-knock.
‘JOHN OSBOURNE! GET THE BLOODY—!’
‘I’m getting it!’ I stomped down the hallway, twisted the latch on the front door, and yanked it open. ‘Are you… “Ozzy Zig”?’ said Guy Fawkes, in a thick Brummie accent.
‘Who wants to know?’ I said, folding my arms.
‘Terry Butler,’ he said. ‘I saw your ad.’
