Eric Gavin was born in Lambeth , South London and grew up in Kennington , where his father was a GP. His Dutch mother had studied dentistry in Holland but gave it up to have children when she married his Scottish father. This a pretty middle-class background, but stuck in the deprived area that his father had to medically service. It was a tough neighbourhood that had been bombed out during the war and Eric would frequently be attacked by gangs of kids looking for trouble in the park, and the back streets of south London. “ My way out of trouble was to run and run fast, there was no point in confrontation as you’d just end up with a bloody nose. One of the favourite ways kids would try to pick a fight was to ask- “What are you looking at?” to which some unassuming kid would reply “Nothing” “Are you calling me a nothing?” they’d reply. And that was it, the license to punch someone. Eric got it on the nose by three of them; but only once. “The lesson was don’t make eye contact and run faster than them. There was no loss of face if you ran; they couldn’t catch you and you’d win that round.” This was really Eric’s first introduction to Crime.