Read Online Essex Boys, The New Generation by Bernard O'Mahoney - Free Book Online

the misfortune to cross his path. On the contrary, Alvin was known to be a very shrewd and cunning individual. He selected weak or defenceless people to use violence against simply because he wanted others to think that he was a force to be reckoned with. Alvin was sitting in a café with his friends, reading a copy of my best-selling book, Essex Boys, when a friend of mine, Gavin Spicer, first met him.
    ‘This O’Mahoney is a fucking mug,’ Alvin said to Gavin, whilst prodding the cover of the book with his finger.
    ‘That fucking mug is my mate,’ Gavin replied. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’
    Unlike Gavin, Alvin was all mouth and no genuine muscle, so he laughed off his own comment as a joke and buried his head back into the book.
    This incident highlights the sad truth about Alvin: despite being a very violent and dangerous individual to some, behind the facade he was no more than a coward.
    One evening, Alvin was perched on an elderly man’s garden wall, having an argument with his then girlfriend, Clair Sanders, who many years later would become his wife. Clair handed Alvin a letter, which he screwed up without reading and threw into the well-kept garden. Upon seeing this, the owner of the house came out and complained bitterly about the litter that had been deposited in his garden. He asked Alvin to get off his wall and leave, but he refused to do so.
    Irate, and perhaps rather foolishly, the elderly man tried to physically remove Alvin, who responded by giving him a mouthful of abuse before walking off. Later that night, Alvin returned to the house with another man. He knocked on the door and when the unsuspecting occupant opened it, Alvin struck him hard in the face. The force of the blow threw the man back into his doorway. He staggered forward in an effort to regain his balance and fell head first into the garden.
    Feeling satisfied with his handiwork, Alvin bowled down the street with his friend, leaving his victim dazed. The man suffered a broken ankle and told police that Alvin had assaulted him with a pickaxe handle, but unsurprisingly, when Alvin was arrested, he denied using any weapon.
    Regardless of how the man sustained his injury, Alvin was charged with grievous bodily harm and remanded in custody to await trial. This was his first experience of prison life and he promised the judge, whom he eventually appeared in front of for sentencing, that it would be his last. Believing Alvin would never wish to return to prison after his experience on remand, the judge sentenced him to a two-year period of probation.
    The following year Alvin and four others were arrested after two men were found, one having been punched, kicked and beaten with sticks as he lay on the ground and the other stabbed. Alvin was charged with violent disorder and inflicting grievous bodily harm, but the case was discharged after the witnesses and victims failed to appear at court. It’s unclear why the victims changed their minds about testifying against Alvin as they have refused to answer any questions about the matter since. Perhaps they had a genuine change of heart, or God once more intervened on Alvin’s behalf. Whatever the reason, Alvin was freed. One person Alvin couldn’t convince to come round to his way of thinking was Clair Sanders. She had grown tired of Alvin’s constant brushes with the law and, after failing to honour numerous promises to mend his ways, ended their relationship. Distraught and disillusioned, 18-year-old Alvin left Essex in the hope of turning his life around. He washed up on the Aylesbury estate in Walworth, south-east London, where he set up home with Barbara Russell, who was several years his senior.
    The Aylesbury estate, known locally as ‘the Bronx’, is made up in the main of high-rise flats and is often used by politicians as a typical example of urban decline. A contradiction of style and sorrow, it is considered to be an area of extreme social disadvantage. Alvin, a