POISON PEN
frightening, violent boy. They called him Dracula and recalled how he once tied another lad to a tree and set him on fire during a game of cowboys and indians.
But Brady preferred his own version of the truth – a misty-eyed recollection of all the fun he had as a child in the Gorbals.
He said he enjoyed Jimmy Boyle’s description of Gorbals life in his book, A Sense of Freedom.
And he added: “I recognised all the street games and customs of the period, now in the memories of a dwindling few.”
Brady complained about the demolition of the old Gorbals slums. He wrote: “Cumberland Street, Crown Street were bustling with crowds back then, with small shops busy the whole length...
“Bakeries with ovens behind the counters serving hot bread rolls, cakes and pies, sawdust-floored bars and pubs in abundance.
“Ditto fish & chip and ice cream shops with parlours, small cinemas in practically every street, cobbled streets, alleys and closes still gaslit and full of life and activity.”
Brady claimed he was still enjoying nostalgic trips home in 1965, just before he and Hindley were arrested. He wrote: “Even to the end I regularly returned to the Gorbals, strolling its alleys and backs after midnight, reliving childhood adventures, remembering air raids and the blackout, etc.”
But Brady claimed his trips back home were not always for pleasure. He said he would often be “called up” to Glasgow to do criminal work for Thompson, who was top dog in the city’s underworld for decades.
He claimed Thompson used him as a hired hardman, and boasted about how he learned to handle knives and guns when he was a kid at Camden Street.
In 2011 letters obtained by the Record, he told how he would meet up with Thompson’s associates in Glasgow’s famous City of the Dead, the Necropolis cemetery in the east end.
Brady wrote: “When called up to Glasgow, meetings would take place at a bench in the Necropolis.
“So when I arrived at Central Station I’d purchase a bottle of Cockburn’s and a wedge of cheese at Cooper’s (near old St Enoch Station) to breakfast upon while waiting up at the Necropolis.”
Criminologists believe Brady’s accounts were fantasies, designed to deflect his own mind from the depravity of his crimes.