Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  That sort of thing used to happen all over the country, but Chelsea was the worst place I ever went for it – I suppose they’ve always been a bit less cosmopolitan in West London. Their fans used to call it 0–0 if one of their black players scored, ’cos a black geezer shouldn’t be playing for them. His own fans! I remember going there with a mate of mine once when they were playing Leicester and a whole stand stood up and Sieg-Heiled. There were grown men of fifty doing it who were old enough to have fought in the war. It was fucking disgraceful.

  Boxing was the first sport that, I believe, dealt with the problem of racism without even consciously approaching it; it approached itself, in a way. No one ever said, ‘There will be no discrimination in boxing’, it just kind of happened. I suppose because people were constantly in a one-on-one situation, or just training together in the gym, they couldn’t help finding out, ‘Hey, you’re just like me.’ Maurice Hope was older than me, but he was someone I really looked up to, and boxing opened up all our minds by sending us out into the world with a common identity to take with us.

  CHAPTER 10

  CHRISP STREET MARKET, POPLAR

  When my dad had his grocer’s shops – first in Enfield, and then in Watford – my mum used to come in and work with him. I’m pretty sure she lost a couple of kids during that time – not because she was working so hard, it was just bad luck. There was definitely one morning when she had to be taken home from the shop in Bush Hill Park because she’d miscarried, and I had a sense of it happening another time as well, even though it was never talked about. Dwelling on such things was not encouraged in those days, and even though she must have felt sadness about this loss, she never shared it with us.

  The Old Man had a good spell with the shops and we lived well for a few years, but the fruit game was changing, with the supermarkets squeezing out everyone else. I was still only a kid but I think what made his business start to go tits up at the shop in Watford was when they put a new one-way system in so no one could park nearby any more. My dad probably hung in there for a bit longer than he should’ve done, because that shop was his pride and joy and he’d got a good living out of it. So in the end it totally ironed him out. He had no option but to go back out on the markets.

  He had some mates who still had stalls so he started off working for them on various different markets – which wasn’t something he’d had to do much before – until he got back on his feet. Me and Laura never went hungry, but there must’ve been a couple of years when the family was a bit financially challenged. My mum put a shift in too. She got a job collecting the money from fruit machines – not in a strong-arm kind of way, she was meant to be doing it – and inadvertently she taught me a useful scam.

  On the old big machines, when you got a ‘hold’ you could fuse them out by pouring your Coca-Cola or lemonade over the buttons, and then they’d just carry on paying out until the machine was empty. This was something else I never looked upon as thieving. It’s not as if the fruit-machine business is run on principles of good will to all men, anyway – it was just another kind of spillage. The money did come in handy, but you couldn’t do it too often in the same pub, and sadly it doesn’t work on the new machines. . . not that I’ve ever tried it, obviously.

  The areas my mum was working in, mainly Hoxton and the bottom end of Islington, were quite rough at the time, so someone from the pub would usually escort her to the car. The sort of woman my mum was, if someone had come up to her and demanded the money, she wouldn’t have been the one to risk her life by not giving them the bag. She’d probably have said, ‘Here you go, son, take it’, because money’s not that important – at least, it’s not when it’s not yours. I guess there’s always an element of danger any time you’re collecting cash, but it’s the cash that makes it dangerous, not the place you’re picking it up. That said, in somewhere like Hoxton, life might actually be more dangerous for the person who’s trying to nick it, because they don’t know whose fucking place they’re ripping off.

  Returning to the markets was obviously a bit of a needs must for my dad. It wasn’t a world he’d totally left behind, but he’d got pretty respectable with his shop in Watford and now he was having to go all over the place just to make a crust. Chrisp Street in Poplar is not necessarily somewhere you’d be setting up if you had any choice. But I was delighted, because I was old enough to go and help him now – on Saturdays, and maybe a day or two in the week sometimes as well – and as far as I was concerned, we were going home.

  Obviously, you’ve got fewer overheads in that situation because you’re just buying daily and selling what you can. Well, usually you’re buying daily. If things are really tight, you might have to nick a bit of stock here and there to make up a deficit. I remember once we were a bit short of cash so we had to steal some tomatoes at Spitalfields Market. We had to have them away or we’d have had nothing to sell.

  My dad kept the guy busy while I loaded the big old barrow with Canary tomatoes. Unfortunately I piled it too heavy at the back – I was only about fourteen at the time, and I suppose my eyes might’ve been bigger than my arm muscles. When the time came for me to have it on my toes, I came out of the market at top speed with the barrow behind me, hit the cobbled street, and the weight of it threw me what felt like twenty or thirty feet in the air. I seemed to be up there for ages – I was waving to the man in the moon – and by the time I finally landed in a heap with tomatoes splatting on the ground all around me I was lucky I hadn’t burnt up on re-entry.

  There would have been murders if we’d been caught, so we made as rapid an exit as possible, and I probably got a clip round the ear for my foolishness afterwards: ‘If you’re not any good at it, son, don’t do it.’ The way I was brought up was that if you owe someone some money and you’re too skint to pay ’em back, you should usually front up and go and talk to them, but I suppose there were times when you have to find a way of earning the money to pay off the debt and you just have to do what you have to do. I remember us going to Covent Garden instead of Spitalfields to buy stock once or twice, which seemed perfectly natural at the time, but looking back it probably meant there were people on our usual plot we didn’t want to run into.

  These occasional incidents of ducking and diving probably gave me a head-start when the time came for me to play a gullible mechanic in Minder a few years later, but as a general rule my dad was no Arthur Daley. He was a grafter and he expected me to be the same, so when we arrived at Spitalfields at four in the morning there was a strict rule that we’d have to buy all our bits and get the lorry packed and tied up before we could stop for a nice cup of tea and a bacon roll.

  Then we would head off to Chrisp Street or Roman Road or wherever we had a pitch and we’d have to pull the stall out and dress it. Cutting the cauliflowers was the worst job, especially in the winter. It used to get so cold that to this day I find I can’t wear gloves in normal life, because if I put them on, my hands just start sweating.

  Obviously, working on markets is no picnic. Sometimes you can stand around freezing your arse off all morning and come home with absolutely nothing. When I used to go to work with my dad, I knew that if we had a bad day I wouldn’t get paid. Those were the rules of the job and I had no qualms about them. Well, I say that now – at the time I probably thought, ‘Fuck it, I was going out tonight’, but I knew that was the way things were done when you were part of a family business, and every now and then when you had a blinding day you would definitely get looked after.

  The principle of ‘fair’s fair’ also covered giving my mum housekeeping. ‘Raymond, you’ve gotta do the right thing’ were words drummed into me from an early age. Even if sometimes you borrowed it back by the end of the week, it was the gesture that counted – showing you knew you shouldn’t take your food and lodging for granted, just because it was your parents who were giving it to you. My mum and dad shared that work ethic, and they’ve passed it on to me.

  I remember falling back to sleep once after my dad
had woken me up early to go to the market and getting a bucket of cold water thrown over me to make sure it didn’t happen again. That gets you out of bed pretty sharpish, I can tell you, and it’s another one of those childhood lessons that’s stayed with me. I’m a stickler for timekeeping to this day. If I’m going anywhere I have to be punctual, if not early – it’s almost an illness. And even if I’ve not gone to bed till four in the morning, I’ll still be up with the sun. It’s unheard-of for me to be asleep after nine in the morning.

  Although as I said I was really pleased to be working at the market again, sometimes I used to moan about getting up early for work – especially if I’d got a bit of a hiding in the boxing ring the night before – but once we got there I loved getting to grips with the various personalities of the different markets we used to go to. Roman Road in Bow, for instance, was a funny old market, because it was only on Thursdays and Saturdays, not Fridays. It could be desolate there sometimes on a Thursday, especially because we were stuck at the Old Ford end, which is quieter than the Bethnal Green end.

  We had a yard there just round the back of a little kids’ clothes shop called ‘Trendy’, and there was a blinding old boy who used to work with us called Sammy Keyworth. I think he was Jewish and he’d make this kind of ehhh noise when he spoke, a bit like Blakey from On the Buses. One of my jobs at Roman Road was to take the orders to the other stalls. I’d have a big bag to carry with potatoes, carrots and cauliflowers on the bottom, softer fruit and veg higher up, and grapes on the top.

  One time I’d taken them all up the road and delivered them when I saw from the look on my dad’s face as I returned that I must’ve taken them to the wrong people. As I turned to walk away and give him a chance to cool down, a cauliflower hit me full bore on the back of the head. I was laid out sprawled across the middle of Roman Road – I know cauliflowers aren’t normally thought of as weapons of mass destruction, but you know about it when one of those fuckers hits you on the canister. It was a bit harsh, but I never made the same mistake again, and I’ll always have these two cauliflower ears to remember it by.

  There was a nice girl who worked on one of the other stalls. Our eyes used to meet across the Roman on a regular basis, but I was a bit too shy to talk to her. Then I met her one night out and about somewhere and we had a lovely little evening together. It was weird though, because the next time I saw her on her stall we both went back to being exactly how we had been before. We liked each other too much to actually have a conversation.

  Rathbone Market in Canning Town was a rough old place – not much chance of romance there, especially as our pitch was opposite the fish stall. Luckily we didn’t hang around for too long, although I used to like the fact that we still knew a few people in that manor, because it was just down the road from Plaistow.

  Chrisp Street in Poplar was a bit further from where we used to live, but that didn’t stop it becoming my gateway to Upton Park. We used to work there quite regularly with Terry Brown, who was one of my granddad’s tic-tac mates. All those families knew each other, and me and Terry’s son Billy would take it in turns to go up to the Boleyn Ground for West Ham home games. I’ll save that for the next chapter though, to give fans of lesser teams a chance to prepare themselves for the thrill of another visit to the Academy of Football.

  This market offered a further exciting diversion in the form of a stall where I bought my first ever records. ‘Speed King’ by Deep Purple was one of them. I don’t know why, ’cos I was never really into heavy metal. I just thought the song was alright. Then there was ‘The Resurrection Shuffle’ by Ashton, Gardner and Dyke – I still love that to this day – and ‘Banner Man’ by Blue Mink, whose singer was that black girl with big teeth, what was her name? Madeline. I think that was the other side of ‘Melting Pot’.

  While we’re on the subject of melting pots, I’m not a Catholic – although my wife Elaine is – but there was a young priest who used to walk through the market wearing a West Ham scarf. He used to have a rabbit with everyone, he was a real character. The thing about working on markets is, even when you’ve had to get up at two or three in the morning at the end of a week of school with a couple of nights of boxing training thrown in, you can’t help noticing people. You’re in a unique position in a way. It’s very much a man’s world, but at the same time you’re having a lot of conversations with women, because they’re the ones buying your produce.

  You’ve got to learn how to talk to people the right way, or you’re never going to sell anything. So when it got towards the end of the day and I’d have to ‘bang up’ some cauliflowers – which basically means shouting and screaming to let everyone know you’re taking the price down – the pressure would really be on. You know you’ve got cauliflowers left that will go pear-shaped before you get another chance to sell ’em, and no one wants a pear-shaped cauliflower, so you’ve got to holler, ‘Come on, girls, lovely big juicy ones, two bob a time’, and you’ve got to make it sound convincing.

  If you’re ever on a market and you hear people doing this, you’ll probably notice the way their voice sounds, which is usually like they’ve just taken a deep breath, even if you know they haven’t. That’s because you need to puff out your chest like it’s full of air as a way of showing confidence, the same way a robin does if it’s having a fight in your garden.

  Banging up is not an easy thing to do as a teenage boy, especially if you’re at that age when you’re not exactly sure which way your voice is going to go at any given moment, and you’ve got all these girls looking at you waiting for you to make a mistake. You know what they’re like, women. ‘Ooh look, he’s made a mug of ’isself’ – they love that ’cos it gives them one up on you. Once you know you can do it, though, it gives you confidence in other areas of your life. I suppose it’s a bit like boxing in that way, or at least it was for me.

  When I was fourteen, there was a girl I really fancied at school, a lovely little Jewish bird. I won’t name her, because she’ll know who she is and it’ll be embarrassing for her, but when I found out she was doing a school play I thought, ‘I’ll have a go at that – get in there.’ The play was Emil and the Detectives, and I played the newspaper boy. On paper, this was a nothing part, but it turned out to be a first step down a happy path of doing exactly what I’d normally do and calling it acting. I’m not saying I’m still on that path today, but it certainly took me a fair way in the right direction.

  All I had to do was walk through the audience acting like I was selling them papers. This gave me the perfect opportunity to have a pop at the headmaster, Mr Hudson. I could dig him out by saying that he looked like Hitler dressed in his baggy suit – ‘You wanna sort yourself out, son’, something a bit saucy like that – and he couldn’t do anything but pretend to find it as funny as everyone else did.

  The whole place was laughing and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I like this.’ My mum and dad came as well, and I think it was probably seeing how much I was into it that gave them the idea of me going to drama college. But I still had another year or so of banging up, doing the markets two or three times a week and generally being up and down the A10 like a whore’s drawers before that would happen.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE BOLEYN GROUND, UPTON PARK

  The first football match I went to that wasn’t the 1966 World Cup was to see Southend play at Roots Hall with my uncle Len. I was always mad for West Ham – still am – but I look for Southend’s results to this day, and not just because I live in Essex.

  I don’t have any specific recollection of the earliest times I went to Upton Park (or the Boleyn Ground in Upton Park, as it’s officially called). I suppose it’s like with a car or train journey that you’ve done your whole life – all the repetitions blur the edges of the pathway to the memory in your brain. I used to love the atmosphere of the night games, though. There was always a real buzz about the place. And the time I started going regularly, or at least to every other home game, was when me and my mate Billy Brow
n would take turns on the Saturday afternoons we worked at Chrisp Street Market.

  It was only a bus-ride up the road, and I’d sit on the step on the side of the South Bank. Sometimes if it was quiet our dads would let me and Billy go together, and later on I started going with my mate Tony Yeates from boxing. But I never minded going on my own either. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, and you were part of a big crowd, anyway.

  There was much more of a fun atmosphere at the Boleyn Ground in the early seventies than you get today. I find football fans in general nowadays are much more cynical and angry than they used to be. I don’t know why, but I presume it’s something to do with the Premier League, because it’s only happened over the last twenty years or so. West Ham used to get beat a lot in the past as well, but then some of the abuse you’d hear them getting would make you laugh, whereas now there’s a rage in it that makes you catch your breath.

  I remember when Alan Curbishley was manager a few years back. He’d been a great player for us, and was a West Ham boy through and through. He comes from a big Canning Town family and his brother Bill was manager of The Who and producer of Quadrophenia. There was no reason for people not to like him. OK, Alan had been at Charlton before, but that’s not exactly the crime of the century and he’d done a good job there. And yet the coating he’d get off the crowd used to stop you in your tracks. I remember thinking, ‘Fucking hell! That’s a bit strong’, and it wasn’t just me. It got to a point where one guy was giving him so much abuse that all his mates had to tell him to sit down and shut his fucking noise.

  You never really got that at football years ago. People would make the odd funny remark and everyone would be laughing, and then you’d get all the firms having little rows, but that would be it. Maybe it’s stopping the violence at football that’s made it more miserable, because the anger’s got to come out somehow.