Juniper’s Daughter: Frontier Town by Nick Armbrister

Juniper’s Daughter: Frontier Town by Nick Armbrister
Other groups of boys formed groups in Renford for many reasons: safety in numbers, for support in the many crises that dogged the town from one day to the next, to working with rival gangs, fighting them or running a hundred and one illegal rackets. Protection was one of the biggest earners with individuals, businesses and other organisations paying to be “looked after,” what this resulted in was peace of mind. Those who didn’t pay were warned by smart well groomed men in suits, if that didn’t work a brick through the window led to the premises being fire bombed, machine gunned or blown up. Individual’s received a similar visit, if this failed then they were knee capped or had their legs broken by masked men who couldn’t be traced, like they never existed and the injured party had just slipped on the soap.
Gant ran the largest racket; he didn’t collect the payment, this was delegated to lesser characters than himself working their way up the gangster chain of command. The attacks on premises was carried out by keen young angry thugs as was the assaults on individuals, when it went wrong Gant or one of his boys had to discreetly sort it out. This often involved the actual attacker being taught a lesson to give him one more chance or simply him/her disappearing (it was an equal opportunities job).
Most of the people who lived in Renford were local or displaced citizens like Gerald who after getting out of jail stayed with Gant and co, if he went back to independent Wales he would be put to death brutally for aiding the English gangs as an example to anyone else who wanted to live the gangster life style hand in hand with the enemy. A feudal society spread all over the mainland of England, Scotland and Wales, a land like the middle ages with death, disease and lots of deadly radiation poisoning blanketing the land. Guns and ammunition were in plentiful supply as were vicious wicked people with a death wish and the will to use weapons. Several generations had fighting experience, whole families that survived thrived on decades of fighting, killing, violence and gangster style behaviour.
Of this, Gant’s family was an example; his mother was a weapons dealer with contacts ranging into the Irish Republic to Libya to the Continent (excluding France which was destroyed). She armed her son with the latest and deadliest weapons, explosives, knives and other evil tools, in turn Gant passed some to his group, sold others and kept some as a healthy reserve just in case big trouble kicked off. She was born into a working class family, in the decades following the civil war, nuclear war with France and the fall back to a medieval society, it toughened up Gant’s mother. Her husband was an idle drunkard who didn’t want to know about Gant, his mother Sheila told her son when he was five that daddy was dead, it was better than explaining the awful truth that surrounded the man she once thought she had loved. He had gone to fight a group of people in the Cornwall area of the country, which was the last his ex-wife had heard of him for twelve years until one day he returned. He tried to make it up to his forsaken family but it was all in vain, Gant had a nervous breakdown after seeing his father who was alive but hideously wounded from his Cornish battles. A psychotic episode followed in which Gant shot dead his own father in cold blood after years of lies that finally came out and at how upset and inconsolable his once strong willed mother once was. He grabbed a gun and emptied the entire magazine of sixteen rounds into his absent father’s face and then dragged the body into the front garden, poured cooking oil on it and set it alight. For nine hours he stayed there watching the body burn, as his mother wept indoors on the edge of an even bigger mental breakdown. Burying the blackened shrunken skeleton under a dead rose bush Gant returned inside with a face like thunder, he was a man now who vowed never to end up like his father – he would look after his mother no matter what. He didn’t even know the name of the man he had just murdered, he never wanted to know and he blocked this evil act out of his mind.
Illegal actions would be the forte of his life. He set up a network of boys early on in his teens to do dug dealing, street robberies and selling knives (Gant had sold knives to forty year old men when he was eight years old); also professional attacks for money, sabotaging the English army’s communications and many other shady jobs were done, in the strictest confidence.