Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  As his operation got bigger his overheads would’ve gone up too, but as kids we never felt we were going without anything. He must’ve felt pressure to pay the bills and put food on the table, and we could tell by the way he walked up the front path if he’d had a bad day. He didn’t get the hump with us as much as with himself, but I remember one night when he came home and we’d already got the message that he was in a bad mood. Then Mum put his dinner on the table and he just threw it straight out the window.

  There is an anger in our family, which for my part I like to think I’ve learnt to control much better these days, but it’s taken me a long time. We’re argumentative and stubborn and tend to have short fuses. My mum was the exception to that – she was very good at letting Dad have his tantrum while never letting there be too much doubt about who the real boss was. They did have rows, but it never got physical or violent.

  Well, I suppose it depends on how you define violence. Some people think shouting and screaming or throwing things is violent, but I don’t. It’s what you’re used to, isn’t it? If you live in a quiet house, then someone raising their voice can be more shocking than a full-scale barney would be somewhere else. I think our way of doing things was quite healthy, really, because nothing got bottled up. There’d be a huge slanging match and next thing you knew we’d all be on the sofa, hugging each other and crying at the Sunday afternoon film.

  My dad only properly hit me once in my life, when I was caught cheating in a school exam. I had done it, so they’d got me bang to rights. I came home from school to see the letter on the mantelpiece, so I had it on my toes rather than face the music. Obviously that only made the situation worse. By the time I finally got up the courage to go back home it was about ten o’clock at night. My dad opened the front door, and before he’d even finished asking me where the fuck I’d been, he’d gone bosh, and chinned me. I probably deserved it, and the message his punch delivered has certainly stuck with me: ‘If you’re not good at it, don’t fucking do it.’ That’s a very pragmatic moral code: not ‘don’t do it because it’s wrong’, rather ‘don’t do it because you’re not good enough at it not to get caught’.

  Now that I think about it, this was probably a bit later on, maybe more into my mid-teens, but I might as well do the other big family row while I’m at it. There was another incident when my mum and dad were having a barney and I thought I was becoming a man so I should probably intervene. I stepped in and said, ‘Why don’t you leave her alone?’ But it wasn’t my dad who reacted – he just looked at me as if to say, ‘You really don’t know what you’ve done here’ – it was my mum. She didn’t just tell me to mind my own business, she threw the gin and tonic she had in her hand at me to underline the point.

  I think she’d have hit me with it if she’d wanted to, but the glass smashed against the door close enough to my head to send me skedaddling out the door. I’m getting quite into these stories now, but maybe I should save the one where my sister stabbed me with a fork for a bit later on.

  The fact that I’ve gone on so far ahead of myself in time probably gives you a fair idea of how interested I was in my secondary school. Because I was still quite different to a lot of the other kids there, in terms of how I talked and how I carried myself, I did get picked on a little bit. At that point, if you’re not going to be someone who gets bullied throughout your time at the school, you have to kind of design a way to survive. Whether that means having a fight and taking a belting, or just trying to stay out of certain bigger kids’ way is up to you.

  When I first went to Edmonton County, a big change in the British education system had just shifted it from a grammar school to a comprehensive. On a practical level, this meant kids who wanted to learn were suddenly finding themselves in classes with kids who didn’t. No prizes for guessing which side of this line I was usually on. On the downside, this meant I could now experience the dubious pleasure of holding my brighter classmates back. On the upside, contact with kids who saw things a different way to how I did would actually have a beneficial impact on me.

  There was one boy called Stewart West, who was a big dumpy kid and a bit of a schoolboy philosopher. He said something once which really stuck with me, about life and death being like a cassette tape: once you get to the end it rewinds and plays again. I haven’t explained it as well as he did, and at the time I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but it certainly left an impression.

  Now I think about it, maybe someone had taught him the idea of reincarnation – perhaps his parents were Hare Krishnas. Either way, this was something that caught my interest, and it fed into the two subjects at school that I’d really started to get into, which were history and physics. I ended up getting more than ninety per cent in the end of year exams in those subjects because I liked them so much.

  Obviously history and physics is quite an unusual combination, and my enthusiasm for them didn’t stop me being shit at chemistry and geography. The reason I paid more attention in those classes was mainly because we had great teachers in them. Mr Povey, who was the physics teacher, was one of those mad professor types who capture your attention by being as nutty as a fruitcake. He threw a kid called Chamberlain out the first-floor window once, just to see what would happen.

  I was not immune to the joy of doing things for that reason myself. The Enfield ABC, which was the cinema where I went to the Saturday morning pictures, used to get a load of young rockers in, sitting downstairs. Me and my mates would lurk up in the circle, pouring drinks down on them over the balcony and generally causing murders. They’d try and run up the stairs to get us but we’d have it on our toes before they could catch us.

  The other big draw at the Saturday morning pictures was that every week would be your birthday. OK, maybe not quite every week, but they had this thing where if it was your birthday you would get called up onstage and be given candyfloss. I’ve always had a bit of a sweet tooth and I really liked candyfloss so I made sure I had as many different birthdays as possible under a variety of different names. I suppose I’d bought that East Ender’s scamming culture with me to a certain extent – either that or I was already testing the boundaries of my dramatic range.

  There was another cinema in Tottenham called the Florida which operated an unofficial open-door policy. Well, I say they operated it, really it was the creation of a new mate of mine called Alan Hewitt. This kid could climb anything – we used to call him Thomas O’Malley after the streetwise one in Disney’s The Aristocats. We’d be about four- or five-handed, and Thomas would shin up a drainpipe round the back, in through a window and down to open the exit door and let us in. The Florida still got our pocket money in the end, we just got some sweets for it.

  The cinema was still a big deal at that time, but TV was starting to make more of a fight of it. Steptoe and Son was quite popular in our house, and I remember pestering my mum and dad to be allowed to stay up to watch Roger Moore as Simon Templar in The Saint. I didn’t even particularly like the programme, but I’d beg to watch it just so I could stay up a bit later on a Sunday night. Somehow the counter-argument, ‘No, you’ve got school in the morning’, never quite swung it for me.

  The first colour TV in the family was my granddad’s. He got it just in time for the 1970 Cup Final. Chelsea versus Leeds at Wembley was a bruising encounter (it finished 2–2, with Chelsea eventually winning the replay) and now we could see those bruises in all the colours of the rainbow. That was when football was football. Norman ‘Bites yer legs’ Hunter and Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris – they wouldn’t have nicknames like that now. The sponsors of the Premier League would never allow it.

  CHAPTER 8

  RAYMOND’S TAILORS, LOWER CLAPTON

  Every year in the run up to Christmas we’d go to my dad’s tailor to get some clothes made. You had to have a special bit of clobber made for Christmas and Easter – it’s something I still do today.

  This geezer’s shop was up beyond the north end of Mare Street, past the centre
of Hackney that you have to drive round instead of through now, going towards Clapton Pond. I went back to have a look for the exact place recently but the shop was gone. I’m pretty sure the guy who owned it was called Raymond though, so when me and my dad came round we were three proper little Rays of sunshine.

  One particular time we were in there – it was when I was getting my first pair of long trousers made (so I must’ve been in my very early teens, as we mostly used to be in shorts before then) – I remember my dad buying a very smart but conservative suit, the kind of thing Sean Connery used to wear as James Bond. My choice was a little more flamboyant. I had a pair of grey flannel trousers made for me, along with a blue mohair blazer that had my initials embroidered on the pocket. My middle name, which I never use, is Andrew, so the initials spelt out R.A.W, which looked pretty good, though I say it myself. If your name is Colin Roland Arthur Patterson, I would advise you to give this gimmick a wide berth.

  My dad was always a snappy dresser, and I guess some of that rubbed off on me. When he was younger, he had a little bit of a quiff thing going on with his hair. He was never a Teddy Boy or anything, but that kind of Edwardian style sent its roots quite deep. That didn’t mean there wasn’t room for the odd moment of experimentation, though. I’ve got a great picture from the late fifties or early sixties somewhere (which sadly I’ve not been able to find to put in this book) of my dad and his mates all done up in these stripy jumpers with tapered trousers and pointy shoes.

  They saw a fair bit of dirt in their working lives (especially the ones who worked on the fish market, who would definitely need to come home and have a scrub up at the end of the day, because the smell was terrible) but when they went out at night they were immaculate. You’d never know they’d even been to work, let alone lugged sides of beef or bags of potatoes or big vats of mackerel about since the early hours of the morning. I suppose that’s half the point, really. You’ll often find it’s people who keep their hands clean all day who don’t feel the need to worry too much about how they look in the evening.

  It wasn’t just my dad and his mates’ fashion sense which harked back to Edwardian times. Their emotional lives had the same buttoned-up quality that their clothes did. To put it in a nutshell, they didn’t let a lot go. This wasn’t so much the case when I was little, when my dad was happy to be quite affectionate and even tender. But I remember a very clear cut-off point when I reached a certain age and the hugging stopped. I suppose you get to thirteen or fourteen and suddenly your balls drop and you become a man, and men don’t cuddle each other (or at least they didn’t in the early seventies). So one day your dad would get hold of you and give you a squeeze, and the next day he wouldn’t.

  This is an experience that a lot of men of my generation – or at least, a lot of the men I know – seem to remember. That’s probably why now we’re older we like to get hold of our mates and give them a cuddle, because we’re trying to fill that gap. This doesn’t always apply in other cultures, though. I say that because of an unfortunate incident with a younger American actor I was working with a few years back. I won’t name him, because he’s a big star and that would be a bit unfair, but it wasn’t Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh alright, then, it was Matt Damon.

  A lot of different people I’d worked with had told me about him, saying what a great kid he was, and he is a great kid – don’t get me wrong – but I’d heard so many good things about Matt that when I met him, I felt like I knew him, so I gave him a big hug and said, ‘Hello, kid, how are you doing?’ and he went as stiff as a fucking board. I said, ‘Oh, OK.’ I guess I’d kind of got into his space – which is an unusual thing for an Englishman to do to an American, because they’re notorious for doing it to us – but the poor fucker nearly had a heart attack. He probably thought I was trying to roger him.

  There’s a lot to be said for the modern way of doing things, where people are more open about their emotions, though. Especially when it comes to being a dad. Because sometimes as a kid you see things that trouble you, and if you can’t talk about them, they play on your mind.

  I’m not saying I’m bad luck to be around but, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve seen a number of people killed or injured, especially in car accidents. It always seems to happen when I’m on the plot. There was one time when I was up in Southgate, helping my dad sell stuff out of a lorry. I must’ve been in my early teens, and I’m doing one side of the road for him, knocking on doors and saying, ‘Hello, we’ve got this or that to sell’, whatever it was. I’ve finished my section of the street, so I’m coming back down the road to find my dad, but I can’t see him anywhere.

  At this point I have a little sit-down on a low wall by a junction – one of those ones where it’s almost like a roundabout but it ain’t a roundabout – and I’m going into a bit of a daydream about what a nice area it is and what it would be like to live there. At this point a car comes down the road, but when it gets to the curved bit it never slows down. Well, it tries to at the last minute, but it’s too late by then.

  The car clips the kerb, and I know things are pretty serious because everything goes into slow motion, like that time when Laura and I saw that woman’s body slide out of the car when we were on our way to Southend. The car takes off – not high enough to be actually flying, but certainly as high as in the film Bullitt – and as it goes flying through the air, the boot opens and the spare wheel falls out and starts bouncing down the road. Even as that’s happening, the car smacks against a wall – there are bricks everywhere – and a woman’s thrown out of the passenger side where the door’s burst open. I can see her arm’s bent round under her back at a bad angle, and even as I’m noticing that, what remains of the car comes flying back from where it’s hit the wall and rolls over on top of her.

  All this hasn’t taken more than a couple of seconds. At this point, the guy who was driving, who seems to be OK, gets out and runs round to the other side of the car looking for the place where she’s fallen. I’m trying to shout out, ‘She’s stuck underneath!’ but I can’t actually speak. I suppose I’m in shock – I was only a kid at the time. I want to go and help but basically I’m still rooted to my spot on the wall thinking, ‘Fuck me!’

  Before I’ve even had the chance to get myself together the guy – all on his own, it was amazing the strength that came to him in a crisis, because he wasn’t a big man – somehow lifts the car up and pulls her out from under it. By that time I’ve finally regained the power of movement, so I run up to him asking if they’re alright. At this point, my Old Man turns up, sees what’s happened, and instead of getting involved or seeing if there’s anything we can do to help, he takes me straight up the road, puts me in our motor and we’re gone.

  It’s what’s called a ‘stoppo’ – where your first priority is to get the hell out of there. He said it was because he could see I was in shock, but I thought afterwards maybe we were selling something we shouldn’t have been and he didn’t want me to get in trouble as an accessory. Either way, the right moment never came up to ask my dad why he did what he did, even though I would’ve liked to know.

  I was lucky that just at the point in my life where I maybe needed a bit of guidance – something to set me on the right road – boxing came along. Given that my dad and my granddad had both boxed before me, and my dad’s mates had been calling me ‘Little Sugar’ and mock-sparring with me for pretty much as long as I could remember, it was inevitable that I was going to give it a go at some point. What I could never have predicted was how much I would take from it into the rest of my life. I honestly think I learnt more that was useful to me from boxing than I did from over ten years in the British education system (though I’m not blaming my schools for that – it was my doing more than anyone else’s).

  Something happens to a boxer when they get in the ring that changes their whole lives. I think it’s mostly that you’re frightened, and in the process of having to overcome that fear you find a deeper humanity in yourself. Everyone is scared when they
step through those ropes – I don’t care who you are, even Muhammad Ali used to be – because you know you’re going to get some pain, and if that doesn’t frighten you, you’re a psychopath. But what boxing gives you is an understanding of your own capacity for fear, and a structure within which to deal with it.

  Beyond that, it’s not just the discipline of boxing which stands you in good stead, it’s the morality: the respect you have first for the people who are training you, who you really don’t want to let down, and then for your opponents. I’ve transferred so much from that into acting, where you’ve got to have respect for whoever’s playing opposite you, because you can only be at your best if you’re bringing the best out of them too. When I’ve talked before about the parallels between boxing and acting, people have sometimes thought I’m seeing other actors as my competition, but they’re not the opposition you’ve got to find a way to overcome (well, not usually – all that scene-stealing stuff doesn’t happen nearly as often as you might think), your adversary is the script.

  When I was growing up, I often heard it said that when you come from the East End you talk about boxing and birds, but when you come from North London you talk about football and birds. I don’t know how true that is in general, but I took my first tentative steps in the fight game as an East Londoner in exile at the New Enterprise boxing club in Tottenham. It was a good club, despite its unfortunate location in the heartland of an inferior football team.

  I went along with a couple of guys from my school, Charlie Woods and Jeff Coward. They were both better boxers than me. Not just technically, they were much fitter as well. I was a skinny little runt – a long way from the more expansive frontage I offer the world today – and the first time you walk into a gym as a raw kid of twelve years old and see a load of grown-up fighters training, there’s something wrong with you if you don’t feel at least slightly intimidated. I remember a big boxer at that gym at the time was a black kid called Battleman Austin. I know, it’s a great name, isn’t it? More like something out of a Marvel Comic than an actual person.