Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  Nanny Rich was married three times – once more than old Hannah Durham – and she outlived all of her husbands. We’d started to look at her in a different way by the end. Her short-lived first husband, my auntie Olive’s father, wasn’t my grandfather. That was Husband Number Two. My mum’s dad was Mr Richardson (no relation to the notorious South London clan), but he died before I was old enough to really get to know him. By all accounts he was a very tall man, and the only one in the family who ever fought in the First World War. True to form for my family he came out of it in one piece, but it’s possible his death in the late fifties may have been caused by the lingering effects of mustard gas forty years before. I remember being in bed one night and hearing my mum distressed and crying, but not really knowing why he’d died or what that meant.

  My nan’s last husband, Reg Hallett, who she married after a decent interval, was a terrific old boy. I had a lot of time for him. Reg was a mason – a very well-to-do man from Shoeburyness, which sounds like an Ian Dury song. I think he worked in Churchill’s Treasury during the war. When I got a bit older he used to beg me to become a mason too, but I wasn’t having it.

  Whoever she ended up marrying, mason or otherwise, Nanny Rich never stopped being her own boss. I believe she made fur coats for the Royal Family, although that is the sort of thing that sometimes gets said without too much evidence to back it up. She definitely made them for Donald Campbell, though – the Bluebird man who held the land and water speed records simultaneously and died in that terrible crash on Coniston Water – which is no less impressive in a way, as Campbell was renowned for enjoying the good things in life, and no doubt knew a nice bit of fur when he saw it.

  This is probably as good a moment as any to tell the story of my childhood brush with another snappy dresser: Ronnie Kray. I think how my dad knew the twins was that when they were kids they’d all boxed at the New Lansdowne, a club on Mare Street in Hackney which my granddad Toffy was on the board of. Reg and Ron were actually pretty good boxers before other more nefarious activities began to take precedence.

  I was still a baby the day Ronnie Kray came round to Caistor Park Road to see my dad, but I’ve been told this story so many times that I can see it unfolding in my head. Obviously everyone’s on their best behaviour, but then Ronnie picks me up, and by all accounts I’ve pissed all over him. He’s got a new Mac on, which has probably cost a few bob, and I’ve absolutely covered it. Everyone’s laughing. Well, not at first. At first they’re all thinking, ‘Fucking hell, he’s pissed on Ronnie Kray!’ But then Ronnie cracks up, so everyone else knows it’s safe to join in.

  Cups of tea get drunk, and him and my dad have a talk about whatever it is they need to talk about, and then everyone breathes a sigh of relief when Ronnie leaves. The Kray brothers hadn’t yet reached the peak of their notoriety by that time, but people still knew who they were. The funny thing was that earlier on the same day my dad had got in a row with a bloke who lived up the road, and after Ronnie fucked off to get his coat dry-cleaned, this guy came round going, ‘Look, we’ve only had an argument – there’s no need to bring them into it.’ Obviously there was no way my dad would ever have done that. If he needed to have a fight with a bloke up the road, he was quite capable of doing that on his own initiative, without calling in the Krays for back-up.

  Readers are entitled to a measure of curiosity about what mutually advantageous business Ron and Ray might have been discussing. There was a time while I was still very young when my dad was possibly up to all sorts, with or without Ron and Reg, but I think something happened that he didn’t like when he was out with them in Walthamstow once. He only told me this years later – and even then in quite a cryptic, Edwardian kind of way – but I think my dad saw someone get stabbed, fairly brutally, and he just thought it was unnecessary. When is that kind of violence ever anything else? But for my dad I think that was the moment he thought, ‘Not only is this wrong, but also it ain’t for me.’

  He wasn’t going to be joining the Salvation Army any time soon, but from the time I was old enough to remember, he was mostly working on the markets. Not only my dad’s two brothers but also most of his friends seemed to work in either the meat market, the fish market or the fruit market, so we never went hungry. My dad started off on the meat at Smithfield Market, but then moved to fruit and veg. Either he got caught nicking something, or they were trying to guarantee the family a balanced diet (given that his brother Kenny already had a butcher’s).

  There was a fair bit of ducking and diving going on in those days. It still wasn’t long since the end of the war, and people needed a bit of a lift – especially as even though we’d won, we seemed to be rebuilding places like Berlin and Munich (which had admittedly been smashed to pieces) before we got started on our own cities. At that time people reckoned that the best job was the bread round, because you’d get your wage and pay your little bit of tax – whatever that was at the time – but you’d also have your own bread. That was your bunce. It was allowed. The company knew it went on but turned a blind eye, and the bread-man lived a good life.

  It was the same on the docks, where a few of my dad’s friends who didn’t work on the markets seemed to earn a crust. There they even had a name for it: ‘spillage’. A box would get dropped, and whatever the contents were, the people working there were allowed to keep. I suppose that kind of thing would be looked upon as theft today, but I prefer to think of it as ‘garnish’ – that little something extra which meant we didn’t go hungry and always had a shirt on our back and shoes on our feet.

  My dad’s eldest brother Charlie was doing a little bit better than that. He’d got a job in the print when he was younger. Those jobs were so well paid that what they used to do was sub them out – some geezer would give you half his wage if you let him take over from you, and that gave you money to go and do something else. Charlie went on to own his own factory which upholstered settees. He was very generous and would always give us a ten-bob note every time we saw him. He usually had nice cars as well – often those big old Rovers that look like Bristols – and he’d let my dad borrow them sometimes if we were going somewhere nice.

  I think Maud and Toffy might’ve lost as many as three kids (ages ranging from infant to young child, and at least one of them to whooping cough, which was rife at the time) to leave them with just the three boys and my auntie Irene. That was the main reason people had bigger families in those days – to cover themselves, because you were probably going to lose a few.

  Laura and I had plenty of other ‘uncles’ who weren’t genetically our uncles to make up the numbers. A lot of them worked in the fish market at Billingsgate, like Frankie Tovey, who was a Catholic, and Ronnie Jacobs, who was Jewish. We were Church of England, but people’s religious denomination was something you only tended to find out about later in life. Like with my best mate Tony Yeates: even though we basically grew up together from my mid-teens onwards, I only found out he was a Catholic when he got married. No one ever knew, and I think London’s always been a bit like that. It’s one of the great things about it in a way. Basically, who gives a fuck?

  It was the same with my dad’s mate Lenny Appleton – ‘Apples’ everyone called him – who was gay. He was a terrific guy, always immaculately turned out, and all the girls loved him, but no one ever worried about who he was having sex with. I’m talking about a load of hairy-arsed geezers here who didn’t give a fuck for anyone. They were the chaps – out pulling birds and doing what they were doing – and what Lenny got up to on his own time just wasn’t a problem for them. When someone’s your mate, they’re your mate, and that’s all there is to it.

  I found out some interesting things about the situation with homosexuality in old London – and sexuality in general – when I was making that TV show about Hannah Durham. It turned out that people in those times were much less prudish than we tend to think of them as being, and than we are now. It was only towards the end of the Victorian era that everyone started to get
more buttoned up.

  In terms of public life, everything was still pretty much under wraps by the fifties, but looking back at the way Apples was accepted by my dad and his mates, it gives you a fresh perspective on people who weren’t necessarily highly educated. They weren’t moving in the supposedly enlightened circles of the art or literary worlds. These were geezers who worked in markets and had their own street education and would often be presented as quite brutal – shouting ‘Fucking poof’ at Quentin Crisp in TV dramas or whatever – so it’s quite refreshing to realise that they weren’t always like that. In fact, it was a shame the people who actually had power in the country weren’t as tolerant as my dad and his mates. People who come from where I come from don’t get to make the laws, we just get to break them.

  There was a tradition on my dad’s side of our family of naming eldest sons after their father, so my uncle Charlie’s son got called Charlie-boy. My dad – as those of you who are on the ball will already have noticed – was Ray, so a lot of my relatives used to (and still do sometimes) call me ‘Ray-Ray’ to differentiate between us. When I got a bit older, my dad’s mates also used to know me as ‘Little Sugs’, because his nickname was ‘Sugar’, in honour of the great Sugar Ray Robinson.

  There were signs from very early on that I was going to carry on the family’s pugilistic tradition. The nursery school I went to was up on the main road on the way to Stratford. I got suspended from it once for having a fight with another kid on a climbing frame. It was only a skirmish, and I don’t think I was a generally disruptive presence, although you probably won’t be surprised to hear that this was not to be the last educational establishment I would be suspended or expelled from.

  I loved that place, though. They used to get us all to lie down and have a kip in the afternoon, and you didn’t just get free milk in a little bottle, you got orange juice as well. The only other thing I remember really clearly was that every kid was allocated their own special decorated peg for putting your coat on, and mine was a camel – probably because I always had the hump.

  CHAPTER 3

  PORTWAY SCHOOL

  Our house was a happy house, and it was also a loud house – in good times and in bad. Sometimes there’d be rows, and sometimes there’d be parties, but Sunday mornings were always the same. Dad would go out and get the bagels, and then Laura and I would get into his and mum’s bed while she did the breakfast. We had a little pink-and-white Pye record player, and we’d listen to some Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones or Judy Garland on it while Dad read the papers. Then after breakfast we’d get smartened up in our best clothes and head over to Hackney to see the grandparents.

  At other times, the family would come to us. When we were in Plaistow, we always used to have a big party on Bonfire Night. My dad’s brothers and sister would come round with their kids and we’d make a load of noise in the garden. All the fireworks would be kept in the outside toilet to keep them dry and warm. One time, Uncle Charlie went in there for a more traditional purpose and a Jumping Jack went under the door. We heard a kerfuffle inside and everyone was laughing, then out came Uncle Charlie swearing and running round the garden. The Jumping Jack was in his trousers. He was lucky he’d come out the door because you wouldn’t want that blowing up in a confined space.

  Another evening – I want to think of it as the same night but it would almost certainly have been a different one – the party was in full flow when a policeman turned up, on a motorbike, wearing one of the old strap helmets like in The Blue Lamp. He knocked on the door and asked for Sugar – all the local coppers knew my dad’s nickname, not least because about nine out of ten Old Bill in those days came from the area they policed – then told him there’d been a complaint about the noise. This was unusual so it must’ve been loud. My dad was very polite about it, and invited the copper in and gave him a drink, and by the end of the night he was giving all the girls rides up and down the street on his motorbike.

  They were good times, but it was one law for the law and another for me, as my dad would never let me ride a pushbike, let alone a motorbike. I’ve been a bit the same with my girls – I’ll let them ride a bicycle in the garden, but not outside. (Obviously Lois and Jaime are all grown up now, so I can’t stop them going out into the world without stabilisers, but Ellie-Rae is only twelve, so she still has to do things my way.) It wasn’t an irrational fear on my dad’s part – he’d seen a guy on a bike get his wheel stuck in a tram line on Stratford Broadway once, and the tram had done him.

  I remember one tricky moment when my dad came out of the house and saw me riding a mate’s bike round the corner. I jumped off it and came charging back up the road, vaulting over everyone’s fences to come out behind him on our front path, but I still got a clip round the ear to send me back inside. Those little patches out the front of the houses in Caistor Park Road are nearly all gravelled over now, but in the early sixties there were a lot more postage stamp-sized patches of grass.

  Once The Beatles had come along, you’d find us standing between the hedges with our plastic guitars and Beatle wigs on, singing ‘She Loves You’ and making out we were John, Paul, George or Ringo. Another one of my favourite activities was watching the mods and rockers go roaring down the road like the Lancaster Bombers I used to make Airfix kits of.

  All the mods seemed to live on our street, and all the rockers came from the next one down (close enough for me to know how wide of the mark my wardrobe of leathers and Liberace haircut was in Quadrophenia fifteen years or so later). They were all mates and they’d all been in the same class at school, but they’d get together to go to Margate or Southend and have a fight on a bank holiday, then for the rest of the year it would all be forgotten.

  In terms of historic events which made an impact on people, the one that springs to mind for me is the one that springs to mind for most people, but maybe not for the same reason. Even though I was only six years old at the time, I can clearly remember what I was doing when the news of John F. Kennedy’s death broke in November 1963 – I was wondering what all the fuss was about.

  Obviously it was sad for him and his family, but I couldn’t understand why grown adults were breaking down in tears in the street over something that didn’t really have too much to do with them, because he was a Yank. For some reason, everyone seemed to see it as being their business. I suppose because he was young and well liked, and people thought of him as more of a celebrity than a politician.

  By then I’d left the afternoon kips and free orange juice of nursery behind for the relatively grown-up world of Portway Primary School. As a kid I never thought of it being ‘Portway’ as in ‘you’re on the way to the port’ – that’s the kind of connection which is lodged so deep in your mind it doesn’t really occur to you. And by the time I would’ve been old enough to get them, those jobs in the docks that might once have been waiting for me had all gone.

  You can’t be hanging around the gates of your old primary school for too long at my age or people will think you’re a nonce. But it made me laugh to retrace the footsteps of my walk to school again all these years later – at the time it felt like miles and miles, but in fact it was only a couple of hundred yards. A little group of us used to assemble on the way down there in the morning, and we’d usually meet up with a mate who had a glass eye. His mum used to let us watch her put it in – you can’t believe how much space there is in the socket at the back of the eye – and it used to roll around all over the place until it settled in position.

  He’d got his real eye poked out by the spoke of an old bicycle wheel on a bombsite on the main road. With the city to the west and the docks to the south, East London had taken a belting during the Blitz – anything the German bombers had left, they unloaded on us on their way home.

  Of course we always won in the endless re-run of the Battle of Britain that was being staged by the Airfix kits hanging from my ceiling, but the fabric of the place I grew up in was definitely holed. If the spaces in the city that the bombs
ites opened up were the war’s legacy to young Londoners, it was our duty to make the most of them. Everyone knew they could be dangerous places which we weren’t really meant to hang around in, and that was half the appeal.

  A copper caught me messing about in one when I was five or six, and took me straight back to ‘Sugar’s house’, where the punishment for my crime was to be kicked straight upstairs to bed and grounded for a week. It’s not just your family, friends and neighbours keeping an eye on you which helps set you on the right road as a kid. If policemen, teachers and doctors know where everyone lives too, that helps you grow up with a sense of being part of a community, rather than just a mass of disconnected individuals. Not that this would stop me getting into a fair amount of mischief, obviously.

  Another time when I was messing around on a bombsite I found this big kind of metal torch. I think I’d just watched Spartacus, so I knew what to do – I got hold of a box of matches and tried to set fire to some straw in it. Nothing’s more interesting to you as a kid than fire, because there’s such a big warning sign over it as far as adults are concerned. Unfortunately on this occasion things got a bit more interesting than I’d intended, as some of the flaming straw fell down and set fire to a chair. I was shitting myself after that – every time we walked passed that bombsite I thought the police were after me. And the next few times I went shopping with my mum I’d duck down in the seat of the car if a police car came past, which I suppose was good training for later life.

  All the bombsites are gone from Plaistow now, but you can still see where they once were from where the houses stop. A little block of flats in the middle of a terrace is always a tell-tale sign, and where the gaps have been filled in it’s like the street has got false teeth.