Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  After we’d moved, being in Enfield exile made those weekly trips to the Lansdowne something to look forward to even more. It wasn’t actually much further to bomb down the A10 than it had been to drive over from Plaistow, anyway, and going there to see all the family felt like going home. When I went back to have a look at the old place again recently the building was still there – walk south down Mare Street past the Hackney Empire and the town hall and it’s on your right – but there were boards up all around it.

  I’m hoping someone’s got some Lottery funds to restore it, because I know it had fallen into serious disrepair. There were a load of depressing photos online showing how it had been squatted by some junkies who’d made a horrible mess of the place, but you could still see the beautiful interior underneath. If I had the money, I’d do it up myself.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE CAGE, SPITALFIELDS MARKET

  My new primary school in Enfield was called Raglan, and as I may already have mentioned – probably three or four times – I didn’t like it much there at first. Things only began to look up once I got into the school football team. We were a pretty good little side and managed to get to a regional cup semi-final. We lost 2–1 in that but my mate Colin Bailey scored.

  Even as young as nine or ten, I was already looking for any excuse to get back to East London. So when my dad asked me if I fancied getting up early and going down to Spitalfields Market with him before school, I jumped at the chance. It wasn’t really to work at that age, it was more just to meet his mates – they’d all bring their boys down to see how life was and show them there’s a great big world out there. This was at the time when he had the shop in Bush Hill Parade, so we’d be back for Dad to open it and for me to get to school. The other kids would be at home having their Ready Brek and I’d be down the market, drinking in the local colour – a commodity of which there was not a shortage, in fact ‘colourful’ is the politest word you’d use.

  Spitalfields Market was as formative an educational experience as any boy could hope for. I used to shadow-box down there with a real gentleman called Sammy McCarthy, who had boxed as a pro and will turn up in the story again later on in somewhat less happy circumstances. There were a lot of old fighters around who my dad had known as kids, and I’d have a spar with them all. My dad’s pal Archie Joyce’s older brother Teddy would throw a few imaginary right hands for me to fend off, and that’s when the ‘Little Sugar’ nickname really started to stick.

  Another thing I loved down there was the special market coinage which you could only spend in A. Mays, the big shop on the corner. It came in triangles and 50p shapes, but before the 50p had even come out – I suppose they were tokens more than anything – and I saved loads of them when I was little. Until recently I still had thousands of them in boxes and tins in the garage that I was going to polish up and get framed, but then when I was having some work done at home the fucking geezer threw them on the fire and they all melted. I could’ve killed him.

  The breakfast you’d have on that market early in the morning would taste better than you could get anywhere else on earth. To this day I still love a bacon roll – a good crusty white one with brown sauce in it – and the place we’d get them was the Blue Café. It’s not there any more, but it was just up from Gun Street, along the south side of the market, and it was owned by Vic Andretti’s dad Victor – we called him Uncle Victor. His son, who was a mate of my dad’s, won a European boxing title, and gave me the gloves he wore, which still had the claret on ’em.

  By coincidence it was outside Uncle Victor’s café that I saw the longest street-fight I’ve ever seen in my life. Two fellas had what we used to call a ‘straightener’, which is like a formal stand-up bare-knuckle fight where someone’s got a grievance and everyone backs off to let them sort it out. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating – and I probably am a bit, because I was only a kid – but I swear this fight went on for twenty minutes. Now, that might not seem like a long time to you if you don’t know anything about boxing, but if you think that even a fit professional fighter will be blowing after a three-minute round, then you can imagine that twenty minutes without a break feels like a lifetime.

  Not that they didn’t have the odd pause for breath, because when one of them knocked the other down, he’d stand and wait for his adversary to get back up. Every time someone got knocked over it was almost like the end of the round. There was no kicking anyone in the head or anything like that – it was all very courteous and old-fashioned. All the guys were standing round watching, and I was there with them, a small boy with a bacon roll.

  By the time those two were done it didn’t even seem to matter who won any more. At the end they both shook hands and went in the café to have a nice cup of tea, and everyone was clapping them and saying, ‘Blinding fight.’ Obviously this is a very romantic notion of what violence should be like, but that only made it more impressive to see it actually happen. In a strange way it was a beautiful thing to watch – two men just being men – but it was also pretty scary. I wasn’t much more than ten years old at the time, and they were really going at it: I mean, this was a severe tear-up, but it was still some way short of being the most unnerving thing I saw happen in that market.

  Across the way from the Blue Café was a place called ‘the Cage’, which was where all the big lorries pulled up to load in and load out. That was also where the methers – the tramps – used to burn the bushel boxes to keep warm. They’d all be sleeping around the fire in the winter with big old coats on. You don’t see meths drinkers so much now – it’s like it’s gone out of fashion. I suppose they’d be crystal methers now. Maybe the news has finally broken that drinking methylated spirits is bad for you – I think the clue was in the way they coloured it blue and purple.

  The meths drinkers used to have their own hierarchy, with different pitches and guv’nors who sometimes used to fall out among themselves and have a ruck. I don’t know if it’s still like that among the homeless today, but you’re going to get that kind of thing going on wherever people are under pressure, and I don’t suppose changing the intoxicant of choice will have ushered in a new era of peace and harmony.

  My dad used to bring them in old coats and shoes sometimes, but you could guarantee that the next week they wouldn’t have them any more, because they’d have sold them to buy meths. He wasn’t the only one on the market who used to do this, either. Other people would bring them out a bacon sandwich or an egg roll. The methers did get looked after, they just didn’t look after themselves.

  I remember standing by the Cage once with my dad and Billy and Johnny Cambridge. They were two of his mates from over the water – not the Irish Sea, the Thames – and they used to have a painted cab with horseshoes on it. Quite a few of the South London greengrocers were a bit gypsy-ish, and the Cambridges were wealthy fellas and grafters with it. I remember Billy having a row with a one-armed mether once – the geezer pointed to the stump where his arm used to be and said, ‘If I still had that, boy, I’d put it on ya!’

  Anyway, Billy and Johnny were nice guys, from a really good family. And we were just standing there having a fag (well, the men were – I’m not sure I’d’ve been allowed one at that age) when an articulated lorry drove into the Cage without looking carefully enough and ran straight over one of the tramp’s legs in his sleeping bag. The worst part of it was, this old boy was so cold and rotten with meths that he never even woke up. Hopefully that meant he didn’t feel the impact, but it was a horrible thing to see – never mind hear. He was still alive when they took him away in the ambulance, but he was in for a nasty surprise when he eventually woke up. I’ve had some pretty serious hangovers in my time, but nothing on quite that level.

  Spitalfields in the late sixties and early seventies was a rough, noisy old place, but it was definitely alive. When I first started going there I was only a kid, so I wasn’t really old enough to understand the politics of it all. Everyone would make a fuss of you, but sometimes you�
��d get a sense that there was a bit of an edge to it when someone from a different firm came over.

  I was walking down the market with my dad one day when a fella went to doff his cap to us. Bosh! My dad knocked him out. My jaw was on the floor – just like the other geezer’s was, but for different reasons. I was thinking, ‘What’s he done that for?’ But it turned out a lot of the lorry drivers from up North used to carry a razor blade in their cap, and if you crossed ’em they’d whip it out and cut you with it. Obviously something had gone on between them before and my dad needed to get his retaliation in first.

  Apparently they used to hide razors in their lapels as well, so if you grabbed their jacket and went to nut them, the blade would cut your hands to pieces. I think it’s an old Teddy Boy thing, but the lorry drivers used to do it too. All sorts of nasty things could happen if you got on the wrong side of the wrong people in that market. I never saw this done myself but I heard about people getting their legs held down across the kerb and broken the wrong way, or someone getting a pencil through their eardrum. It wasn’t like there was any reason for that to be happening to me, but the fact that some real tough guys worked on that market was definitely a big part of the character of the place.

  If you go to Spitalfields now, the atmosphere could hardly be more different. There are new shops, which certainly don’t take triangular tokens, where A. Mays and the Cage used to be, and while there’s still a market, it now sells clothes to tourists on one day and antiques or artworks on another. The basic layout of the whole covered section is pretty much unchanged, but it’s all been tidied up so much that it’s hard to believe it’s the same place. It’s kind of recognisable and unrecognisable at the same time – like a big crab shell that a smaller sea creature has moved into after the former resident has departed.

  The same thing’s happened at Covent Garden, the old fish market at Billingsgate was moved out to the Isle of Dogs years ago, and it won’t be long till the meat market at Smithfield follows. Sometimes it’s a shame things have to change. Many of those men I met at Spitalfields as a kid were members of families who’d passed stalls down from father to son since the time of Henry Mayhew’s coster-mongers and before, and yet now all those traditions which have come down across the generations have disappeared.

  I’m not one of those people who believe nothing new should ever be allowed to happen, though. And some of what went on in that place we’re probably better off without. I never actually saw my dad come off worse in any of the tussles he had, but everyone does some time, and it’s much better to be coming home from work without lumps and bumps all over you. I wouldn’t want to paint a picture of him as someone who was constantly having rows, but those are the stories you tend to remember.

  When my mind turns to happier times, there’s a holiday in Bournemouth that always comes back to me, for some reason. One day – I think it was a bank holiday Monday – we got the boat across to the Isle of Wight. Dad was never great on boat trips and when we got to the other side where there was a coach waiting to take everyone round the island, he said, ‘We’re not getting on a coach, let’s walk round the island.’ He had no comprehension of how big it was – I think he thought it was like the Isle of Dogs – ‘Of course we can walk round the Isle of Wight. It’s a dot on the map to us. You get on your coach and we’ll have a little bit of proper . . .’

  We were only kids at the time, and the minute the coach drove off, the realisation hit us that this place was not only huge, it was also pretty desolate. What’s more, nothing was open ’cos it was a bank holiday, so we were basically going to be stuck there for the next seven hours. As it turned out, we ended up having a blinding day. We found this little hotel which was willing to take us in and give us a bit of dinner. We played football and flew a kite. I think it was that make-the-best-of-it attitude that the English have when we’re not moaning about everything which saw us through.

  All nearly didn’t end so well, though. We had the dog with us, and at one point we were walking along the top of some cliffs when Brandy came to a hole in the sea wall and jumped right through it. I looked over the edge and I could see him disappearing like in a cartoon – sailing through the air to land on his chin with his legs splayed out all around him. I knew he was dead – there was no way he could’ve survived that fall. But just like that indestructible Labrador on the Southend road a few years earlier, he got up, shook himself and found a path to run all the way back to us. It was fucking unbelievable – who did he think he was, Superdog?

  Some other holidays I look back upon really fondly were with my nan and granddad. I was probably nine or ten when they took us to the Ocean Hotel in Brighton, which was like Butlins’ flagship hotel. There was a fancy dress competition and I went as a billboard – it was my first big advertising job – while Laura was the Queen of Hearts. We watched She Wore a Yellow Ribbon at the cinema club in the afternoon (I’ve always loved John Wayne and I still think he’s a very under-rated actor). And I remember Maud and Toffy dancing together in the evening – my granddad was a terrific dancer and loved spinning Nanny Maud round the floor.

  A couple of years later – it must have been right at the end of the sixties – they took us on our first foreign holiday. We went to Arenal in Majorca, and I loved the freedom of being abroad right from the off. You can get the paella, but if you don’t fancy it, they still eat egg and chips just like us. Granddad would still always have a tie on when he was on the beach – they would, the old guys, they always looked immaculate – and he couldn’t pass a woman without lifting his hat, even if she was only wearing a bikini.

  CHAPTER 7

  RONAN POINT

  Early on the morning of 16 May 1968, an old lady who’d recently moved into a newly built East London block of flats lit a match to get the stove going for her morning cup of tea. The gas explosion that followed sent her flying across the kitchen and left her shaken but miraculously unharmed. That should’ve been the end of it, but weaknesses in the just-completed building caused the whole southeast side of the block to collapse with a human toll – four dead and seventeen injured – that would have been much higher if most of the flats hadn’t still been unoccupied.

  This disaster made a huge impression on me at the age of eleven because it happened on our old patch – just down the road from Plaistow, on the way to Custom House. Looking back, I can see it also had a wider significance. It was certainly poetic justice that the block concerned had been named after a former chairman of Newham council’s housing committee (I didn’t know that at the time, I just Googled it), because the now infamous Ronan Point became a symbol of the huge mistakes that were made back then in building the new accommodation that East London, and Britain as a whole, so desperately needed.

  We wanted homes building – and quickly – but instead of houses, they gave us prisons in the sky. I realise that some of the architects and town planners responsible were probably quite idealistic people, but it was easy for them to be idealistic when they didn’t actually have to live in these places. Those gaps where the bombsites were should have been filled with the kind of properties that would have enhanced the communities that already existed. Instead, whole streets of perfectly good houses were demolished and everyone was shipped off into these fucking great big concrete tower blocks.

  Not only did these new high-rise buildings split up communities and separate people from the neighbours they’d lived with all their lives, they also – as the Ronan Point disaster demonstrated – weren’t very well built. However idealistic some of the original plans might have been, a lot of the good intentions got lost in the transition from two-dimensional drawings to three-dimensional reality. It wasn’t just government cost-cutting that did the damage, there was a lot of skulduggery going on as well, with a lot of the money going into the wrong people’s pockets via the old secret handshake.

  Obviously this wasn’t bothering the Winstone family too much in our nice new house in Enfield, but when I’d go back to Plaistow
to visit my old mates, I could feel the landscape changing. My memories of growing up there were very much low-rise – you could see the sky, it wasn’t all huge blocks looming up over you, and there was much more of a village mentality. But once they started turfing people out of their old terraced houses and moving them into these new flats, no one knew who lived next door to them any more. Sometimes it almost felt like a divide-and-conquer thing.

  Going back there started to get depressing as more and more people moved on. The last time I went back there on a Red Bus Rover I was probably thirteen. By that time I only had one mate left living on Caistor Park Road. His name – and I’m not making this up – was Micky Ghostfield. A field of ghosts was what that place was starting to feel like to me, and when I went back to knock for him, the fucker lived up to his name by blanking me. He might as well have answered the door with a white sheet over his head. I guess he hadn’t seen me for a while and didn’t want to know. I suppose I can understand it in a way, but then again, if you’re reading this, Micky, fuck you.

  One place out East I never got tired of going was Shoeburyness. In the summer holidays we would basically be shipped off there for six weeks. My mum would come with us and then my dad would drive down for the odd weekend because he’d be working. I remember going up the OAPs’ club with my nan quite a lot. Sometimes me and my sister would get up and do a song to entertain the troops. You’ve got to have your party piece, and we had some great parties at home and at our aunties’ and uncles’ houses at that time, when everyone would get up and sing.

  After a few years in Bush Hill Parade, my Old Man progressed to a bigger shop up in Watford. My dad was always known for having a great flash. I’m not being personal, that’s what they called the display of produce you’d use to entice the punters into your shop. The apples would all be beautifully polished, and he found a way of putting mirrors in at the back of the shelves to make the fruit look massive, so people would come in just to look at it. It was like fruit and veg CGI.