by Ray Winstone
The host of the party is screaming at me, understandably enough, and I’m trying to explain that I’m very, very sorry, but my friend was falling and I couldn’t let her hit her head. We’ve only been there ten minutes and we’ve hardly had a drink, but I’m telling her I’ll pay for the damage – even though I don’t know how, ’cos I’ve not got more than a tenner on me. By this time the lady of the house is right up in my face shouting, ‘Son, if you work from now till Doomsday, you won’t be able to afford that fucking light’, and I’m saying, ‘I think we’d better leave’, because now I’m starting to get angry.
Me and the Typhoid Mary of Limehouse had quite a good chat on the tube home, but we never went out together again. She was a lovely girl and everything, but I think on balance we realised that it probably wasn’t meant to be.
Not all of my misadventures when it came to girls were quite so much like something out of a romantic comedy. Once we had wheels Tony Yeates and I would go all over East London and Essex in pursuit of a bird, and there was one time in Southend when we both caught crabs at the seaside. We’d nicked the bouncers’ girlfriends at a club called the Zero 6, which got its name from the runway at Southend airport that it was sitting right at the end of. They used to play Donald Byrd and the Blackbyrds’ ‘Flight Time’ as their theme song at that place, because it had some great plane noise sound-effects in it. They should’ve handed out some peanuts and a face towel as you came in to complete the effect, really.
Naturally, the bouncers weren’t too happy about what we were up to, and they had a little go at us outside, but we had it away a bit lively and everything was sweet. The two girls took us back to their place and we did what we done – boom boom boom boom. The next day they cooked us Sunday dinner. The two bob went in the gas, then it went off again after we’d eaten and we had a swoppo – which is the opposite of a stoppo.
A week after returning home, we’d both got crabs. There was no way of knowing which of the girls had given them to us – it could’ve been both of them. Either way, we had no idea what to fucking do about it.
I shaved all the hair off my bollocks, but that didn’t do any good and the stubble growing back is the worse thing in the world – worse even than the crabs themselves. Then Tony did some research and got us some blue ointment – ‘unction’ I think it was called – and they all jumped off, pyong . . . job done.
One night not long after that we were standing in a club at the Seven Kings. It was one of those places where the UV lights give everyone a blue tinge, and this geezer we were talking to had a crab crawling across his eyebrows. They’ve got a kind of black dot in them – almost like a pin head – and once you’ve had a visitation you’re not going to have any trouble recognising one, especially when it’s floodlit by ultra-violet. We both looked at this geezer with his unwanted guest on his face and we both looked at each other and we were out of there before he’d finished his sentence.
Although I was out and about a lot at this time, I’d still usually be back in Enfield for Sunday dinner (unless I had a better offer on the Essex Riviera, of course). Even now I like to get the family together for a big meal at least once a week if everyone’s about. If we’ve got guests I have to warn them that we don’t stand on ceremony. Don’t blink at the wrong moment or everyone else will have had all the best roast potatoes.
Of course, bringing people together to eat can cause friction as well as harmony, especially when you’re dealing with a family who all have quick tempers. We did have our moments around that Church Street dinner table. Mum and Dad would be sat at either end with me and Laura bickering across the table. Once she got the hump so badly over something I’d said that she threw her knife at me across the table. It stuck right in my sternum and kind of wobbled a bit like a knife-thrower’s in a cartoon would. I remember looking down in disbelief to see it fall to the table and a little trickle of blood flowing down my white shirt.
I went garrity and dived at her across the table, then she dived back at me and we’re strangling each other, and by the time my mum and dad have got their arms round our necks trying to stop us, we look like one of those Tasmanian Devil cartoons where a fight almost becomes a cloud. Even the dog’s going mental. Brandy’s gone to the big kennel in the sky by that point, so it’s a little Jack Russell called Ben who’s barking his head off. In the ensuing melee one of my legs goes through the French windows and gets quite badly cut, but there’s no sulking in my house. Something happens and then it’s over – done. Twenty minutes later, we’re all sitting on the sofa holding hands and watching the Sunday film together.
I clearly remember that film as being The Champ because I’ve got a mental picture of us all holding hands and crying at the scene near the end where Jon Voight’s boxer dies (an event which was always going to tug at the heart-strings of the Winstone household). The little kid’s going, ‘Champ, wake up! Wake up!’ My mum’s crying, my dad’s crying, I’m crying, Laura’s crying – even the dog’s crying. But that film didn’t come out until 1979 and I’d left home by the time it could’ve been on TV, so maybe I’d just come back for Sunday lunch a bit later on to reconnect with my family. It’s good to stay in touch with your family, but not necessarily via a knife stuck in your chest.
I should say at this point that my sister Laura tells this story differently to the way I do. She insists she stabbed me with a fork, not a knife, but I think she’s getting mixed up with another earlier occasion, when I’d showed her up in front of her mate and she went for me on the staircase. The only thing that comes back to me from that one is the excruciating pain of the fork she’d stuck in the back of my hand. All in all, there’s a lot to be said for plastic cutlery.
There’s also a lot to be said for kids who are ready to spread their wings getting the chance to do that, and I finally got my marching orders from the family home after an incident with a party which got a bit out of control. My mum and dad had gone on holiday, leaving strict instructions for me not to have a party. So, of course, I had to have one. It was the classic scenario of loads more people turning up than I’d expected, and by the end it did get a bit outrageous. There was talcum powder and baby oil everywhere – they trashed the gaff.
When I woke up in the morning and surveyed the devastation all around me through the fog of my brutal hangover, it was just like that old Yellow Pages advert where the kid goes, ‘French polisher? It’s just possible you could save my life . . .’ Except there was no French polisher around to do the honours.
I did everything I could to tidy the place up, but it just wasn’t within my power to put everything right. When my mum and dad came back and saw what had happened, that was me gone. I was angry with them for throwing me out at the time, but looking back it all worked out OK.
After a few nights of sleeping on different people’s settees, I thought, ‘Bollocks to this, I’m going to see Granddad’, and went and moved in with Toffy, who was on his own by then and didn’t mind the company. My mum and dad wanted him to kick me out so I’d have no choice but to come home, but he wouldn’t do it. I think he could see that living with him was good for me – it gave me a bit more independence without leaving me completely on my own.
I might’ve been twenty by this time but I was still a bit wayward, and having a much older role model I loved and respected around wasn’t going to do me any harm. Another upside was I got to live in Hackney for the next year or so – just over the road from the house I’d spent the first twelve months of my life in.
There’s a postscript to the story which shows how much things have changed these days in terms of everyone knowing what everyone else is up to. On the night of my party a couple of mates who I’d gone to school with took two girls home with them and had a really bad car crash on the way out to Ware. Everyone survived but they all had to be cut out of the vehicle, and the two guys were in hospital in traction for months on end. But because my mum and dad kicked me out the next day and I went off to live with my granddad, I didn’t find
out what had happened till a year or so later.
I suppose as much as anything this tells you how happy I was to be back in the East End – it turned out that if you took the man out of Enfield you actually could take the Enfield out of the man (well, this one, anyway). But still, no one thought to ring and tell me. Obviously mobiles weren’t in use yet – not even the giant ones we had in the eighties – so the next time I saw my mates a year or so later they were really angry with me. ‘You fucker,’ they said, ‘we had a terrible car crash and you didn’t even come and visit us.’
CHAPTER 19
GATSBY HOUSE
It’s true what they say about your grandparents – sometimes you can talk to them in a way that you can’t talk to your mum and dad. I’ve spoken to a lot of my mates who’ve said they were always drawn to their granddads, partly because they aren’t there all the time, whereas your dad is so close to you that there will often be some kind of trouble either bubbling under or boiling over. It’s unfair on dads in a way, but as you get older that competitive element about who is the guv’nor is always going to creep in.
There was none of that with my granddad Toffy. He still lived in the same two-bedroom council flat where he’d been on his own since Nanny Maud died a few years before. It was in an old-fashioned brick block called Gatsby House on the Frampton Park Estate, just east of Mare Street in Hackney. The name Gatsby tends to be associated with good living, and even though his circumstances were obviously less luxurious than Robert Redford’s or Leonardo DiCaprio’s in the films, Toffy always maintained his own elegant personal style.
This wasn’t just about looking immaculate or lifting his hat to the ladies as he walked down the road – it went deeper. He was an absolute gent and living with him for a year was a great education in little things you shouldn’t even have to think or talk about. As a result I will still open the door for a woman or stand up on a train to let her sit down, even now. Of course, nine times out of ten women are so independent that they’ll just say, ‘I’m alright, thank you’, but that’s no reason for me to stop making the effort.
Because I’d been so stubborn about not going back to my parents’, I hadn’t just lost my home, I’d got the sack from my job as well. Although I couldn’t work with my dad on the markets any more, I didn’t want to sign on and all that shit, so I ended up getting a job with Fred, a friend of his who ran a grocer’s called Oliver Marcus in Muswell Hill. He was a good man, big Freddie. Even though he was my dad’s mate, he wouldn’t be pressured into giving me the old heave-ho so I’d have to go home like my dad wanted. Looking back, I put both Freddie and my granddad in a bit of a situation as far as my dad was concerned, but I was grateful that they both stuck up for me, and I suppose this made me feel like more of my own man in a way, which was probably what refusing to come back home was all about in the first place.
Every working day for about a year I travelled from Hackney to Muswell Hill to do my shift in that shop. I was happy to work there because I knew the fruit and veg game inside out by then. I didn’t know the area, though. It was very . . . bohemian would be a good word. TV faces would come in all the time – Wilfred Pickles, he was a regular – and there were loads of poets and people like that as well. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Just Ray’s home turf.’
I’ve always had an affinity with people from earlier generations, and I suppose going off to work in the shop all day, then coming home and maybe going to the pub with my granddad and his mates, I was living the life of someone much older than I actually was. Even when Tony Yeates and I were out and about in the clubs at that time, the older guys would be looking out for us. They certainly knew how to enjoy themselves, and that was true of my granddad as well. Neither of the two main pubs he used to go to is there any more, but one was called The North and the other was The Frampton Park Arms. I remember coming home late one night after I’d been to a party – creeping into the flat as quietly as I could so as not to wake him up at about three o’clock in the morning. Two hours later I heard the front door shutting quietly as Granddad came back from a lock-in.
As far as Granddad’s work as a tic-tac man went, I never really got involved with it. That was his business and he just got on with it. He was still going all over the country when I lived with him – not just to Kempton and Sandown, but as far as York, Dublin, even Paris. Tic-tacking is another game which is pretty much over now. Mobile phones killed it. That’s a shame because it was a big part of the excitement of going to the races, but I suppose the whole online betting thing has kind of expanded to fill the space.
The idea of having a flutter on your computer at home would’ve seemed like science fiction to us when we saw Lester time Roberto’s run perfectly to win the Derby in 1972. And nothing had changed when I went to Epsom for the big race again in 1978. Lester had won on The Minstrel the year before, but he didn’t win this time. Greville Starkey did. Six years on from the day-trip that ended my school career, I wasn’t selling umbrellas any more, but my granddad was still tic-tacking, and Billy Brown and his firm who I knew from Chrisp Street Market were still down there too.
Granddad got mugged one day coming home from the races. He was a shrewd old boy in that he’d keep a couple of quid in his pocket and the rest he’d have tucked away. So when two guys followed him on the way back to the flats, he turned round and said, ‘What do you want, son? Do you want a few quid off me? Well, that’s all I’ve got. Rather than you give me a bashing, why not just take that?’ And they did, so he came home unscathed with his wad of notes in his sock. All we could find out about the main mugger was that he had blond hair, so anyone we bumped into with blond hair was potentially in strife for a while from that point on.
My granddad had been no pushover as a younger man. Obviously he’d done his bit of boxing, and there was a story – which I know is true because the guy who ran the newsagent’s confirmed it – about him going to the shop opposite the Frampton Park estate with one of my cousin’s kids when they were still a baby. Someone barged to the front past a woman in the queue so Granddad called them on it: ‘Mind out, son, you’re pushing the lady there.’ But the guy didn’t apologise, so Granddad handed the baby to the woman and knocked him to the ground, then took the baby back, finished queuing for his paper and justice was done.
On a scale of general belligerence from one to ten, he’d have come a lot lower down than my dad, though. My dad, I’d say, was an eight (although some people might call him an eleven), but my granddad was no more than a three or four. His was the example that made me aspire to be a gentleman, not so much in the way you talk, but in the way you are with people and how you deal with them. I’ve changed my outlook on a lot of things over the years, but even now I’m still drawn to that idea of an unspoken moral code. It’s not necessarily the strictness of it that I like, so much as the sense of everyone having respect for each other.
The atmosphere in that flat wasn’t all uptight and old-fashioned. He was a very kind man, my granddad. The whole time we lived together, he did all the cooking. Once I’d made the mistake of telling him a particular meal was my favourite, I used to get it three times a week. The meal in question was a pork chop with some apple sauce, a grilled tomato, chips, baked beans and peas. I did like it at the time, but I ate a lifetime’s supply of it in that year.
As well as having a generous spirit, Toffy was also an absolute character. He used to love talking to his goldfish. He’d say, ‘That goldfish understands every word I say’, and you’d be fairly sure he was joking, but not quite certain. He was also one of those people it’s really good fun to play a prank on, and I used to wind him up something terrible.
One time, I was sitting up in the flat with my two cousins Melanie and Tracy. Mel was sitting on the floor and she had these big boots on, so while Granddad was out of the front room for a minute I said, ‘Take your boots off and bend your legs back, then we’ll put the boots up against your knees so it looks like your legs are stretching straight out.’
Another memorable occasion was the time Granddad and I went to visit my cousin Charlie in prison. The bright bubbly boy I used to knock about with at the Lansdowne Club had taken a few wrong turnings in the intervening years and got himself banged up for armed robbery. He got himself done for what’s called a ‘ready-eyed job’ in Hatton Garden, which was an insurance caper where a guy on the inside actually wants it doing. Charlie went in when there was supposed to be no one about, but someone had made a boo-boo, and as it turned out there was a meeting going on, so they had to tie everyone up and take a bit of tom away. (Tomfoolery/jewellery – keep up.)
Instead of simply burying the stuff till the heat was off like any sensible person would, Charlie-boy put it on top of the wardrobe in his bedroom and bought himself a Mercedes. There weren’t too many of them on the street in Hackney where he lived – just down the road from my granddad’s flat, on the way to Victoria Park – so it attracted a bit of attention. In the end the Old Bill came round, and he got captured and sent down for a few years. He got it wrong, old Charlie-boy, and he paid a heavy price in the long run.
The day we went down to visit him in Maidstone prison, there was no sign of how sadly this story was going to pan out. Me and Granddad made it down to the station, probably London Bridge, to get the train to Maidstone, and on the platform there was a bloke done up as a cowboy, with the hat and the six-guns and everything. He had two birds in hot-pants with him, one on each arm. They were good sorts as well, which attracted my interest. I said to Granddad, ‘Look at that, I wonder where they’re going.’
