Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  We’d had a few drinks on Mare Street and when I stopped at the lights, a cop car pulled up alongside. What I tended to do in that situation – especially if I didn’t have a seatbelt on – would be look the policeman straight in the eye as if to say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ So they don’t think you’re hiding something.

  This time it was an old sergeant with a younger cop alongside him. I was a bit pissed and we didn’t have seatbelts on, so I did the old ‘hello’ stare and the older copper kind of nodded, so that was going OK. Unfortunately, as I went to pull away, I stalled the car and by the time I’d got the engine started, they’d slowed down. I went up the side of them and fronted ’em out, but the damage was done. They pulled us over round the corner of Well Street – right outside Granddad’s flat – and wallop, they were on us.

  Me and Tony had this ploy where if we were ever going to get arrested, we’d always give each other’s name. I’d be Tony Yeates and he’d be Ray Winstone – we’d swap birthdays and everything. Then if they get me to court as Tony Yeates, I can just say, ‘No, that’s not me.’

  We’re doing that when they get us out of the car. The young constable is about our age – early twenties – and he badly wants to nick us. I blow in the breathalyser bag as Tony Yeates and he’s going, ‘Blow in it properly.’ When it makes the noise that means you’re nicked, I can almost hear Tony going, ‘Oh thank you very fucking much’, under his breath.

  Because I can see we’re not going to get any joy out of the kid, I start talking to the old sergeant. I say ‘old’ but he’s not walking with a stick, in fact he’s probably in his thirties. His name is Alan, and as I’m explaining what’s happened, I can already see he’s a blinding fella. My story’s basically true, which always helps. I’m telling him, ‘Look, Sergeant, I don’t live here at the moment, because I’ve moved to Manchester. But I’ve come down for the weekend and I’ve borrowed my sister’s car to visit a mate I’ve not seen in years.’ That was where the only slight element of exaggeration came in. ‘We got on it and we’ve taken a bit of a liberty but we’re home now – I’m staying up in those flats with my granddad – and we certainly won’t be driving again tonight.’

  Anyway, we have a good old chat, and because his mate is so hellbent on nicking us, Alan decides to show him that there’s a different way of doing things. So he deliberately breaks the breathalyser bag and says, ‘If I ever fucking catch you boozed up round here again . . .’ I say, ‘Oh thank you very much, Sergeant’, and off we went.

  Cut to about three years later. Me and Phil Daniels – who is a terrible goalhanger by the way – are playing charity football against the Old Bill at a police ground up on the North Circular, near where Walthamstow dog track used to be. I think Tony Yeates has come up to watch, just to complete the circle, and as I’m sitting there having a fag as part of my half-time fitness regime, this copper comes up and says, ‘I know you, don’t I?’

  ‘Not me, mate’ is the standard answer to give a policeman in that situation, but Sergeant Alan isn’t having it. He says, ‘I breathalysed you in Well Street, and your name ain’t Yeates, is it?’ From that point on, we became really good mates. I used to do a lot of charity football for him out by Chadwell Heath. Alan ended up going into the special armed services and he does security now. His boy joined the force as well and he used to play against us. He was a lovely kid who sadly got cancer and passed away, but not before we did a few charity things for him as well.

  When you look at how this whole situation developed, Alan gave me a chance, so I gave him one too. If you’d asked me if I’d ever liked a copper before I met him, the answer would be no. But what he did for me changed my whole perception of the Old Bill. I wish I could say it rehabilitated me on the drink-driving front too, but there were a couple more incidents later on before I threw in the towel as far as that was concerned.

  The first one I was unlucky on. It was another charity football match, this time out at Hungerford in Berkshire. Terry Marsh, the former welterweight world champion, was meant to be driving us. Now Terry is a great guy to drive you because he doesn’t drink. That whole thing where he was accused of shooting the promoter Frankie Warren is something I would never ask him about. I don’t want to know and it’s not my business, but all I would say is that Terry had been a marine and I don’t think someone with that training would have used a .22 to try and kill someone from that distance.

  Anyway, I got a bit pissed at the do after the game, and suddenly started to worry that Terry had gone without me, so I jumped in another car to catch him up and tell him, ‘You’re meant to be taking us home.’ Obviously, that wasn’t the smartest or most logical decision I’ve ever made in my life, especially as I came round a corner and nearly hit a police car. In a country lane – what were the chances? By the time one of the coppers had opened the door and I’d fallen out onto the road, it’s fair to say my fate was sealed. To make matters worse I found out afterwards that Terry was at the do all along and when the time came to leave he’d been wandering around looking for me.

  You’d think this embarrassing incident would’ve done it for me, but no, I needed one more lucky escape. The day after I got my driving licence back, I was out at Worley Park playing golf when I got the hump at someone and stormed off home pissed. Then I took the wrong turn and ended up going down the M11. I was lucky I didn’t have time to kill someone before I got collared and banged up in Epping police station. Talk about three strikes and you’re out! It took me two convictions and someone giving me a chance before I finally got the message, but I’ve never done it since.

  You couldn’t drink and drive these days, anyway. There are too many idiots on the road.

  CHAPTER 24

  TROSSACHS, BARKING ROAD

  It wasn’t just my grasp of road safety that left a lot to be desired in the early eighties, I had plenty to learn about married life as well. I thought holy matrimony just meant the woman staying at home to cook the dinner while the man goes out to meet his mates. In my defence, all that New Man bollocks was still a long way off yet.

  To be honest, I probably wasn’t the greatest husband in the world. I was away a lot – not always getting arrested, only sometimes – and we both took a while to find our feet. It was tough. But Elaine never moaned about it when the money ran out. She’s not one of those wives who’d say, ‘It’s all gone pear-shaped – you need to go out and get a normal job.’ We never had that conversation.

  She’s always been very supportive when it’s come to my acting. Her approach was: ‘Whatever you wanna do, babe, however you wanna go about it.’ Not that she was a soft touch – far from it – but I think because I was already doing what I was doing when she first met me, she understood that this was the way things were gonna be. She’s quite arty herself, and I think she knew she’d got herself an artful one from the beginning.

  Elaine certainly did her bit when we were stuck up in Manchester without a pot to piss in. She’d make curtains for people or do a bit of interior designing for anyone who had the money to pay for it. And the food parcels from her mum down the road came in handy too, although I didn’t like to admit that at the time.

  By the time we’d had a couple of years of this, I think she was as fed up with it as I was. And the fact that we’d never really got around to keeping up the payments on our mortgage was inevitably going to bite us on the arse at some stage.

  At one point we got a very welcome cheque through for some residuals – probably from Fox. It was five grand or something like that, which was a lot of money in those days, especially to people in our situation. I looked at Elaine and said, ‘We’ve got two choices here – we can either pay the bills or go on holiday.’ She asked me what I wanted to do and I said, ‘Let’s go on holiday.’

  So we went away for a few weeks – I can’t actually even remember where to, that’s how much we enjoyed ourselves. By the time we got back we’d knocked out the five grand and I knew we were done as far as that house was concerned. The mo
rtgage company said, ‘We’re gonna take your house from you and we’re gonna sell it.’ So I replied, ‘I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna give you the house – you’re not gonna take it – and then I’m fucking off. How’s that?’

  They probably had a nice earner out of it in the end, and we were both ready to give it another go down south. It was either that or starve. Elaine’s mum couldn’t keep feeding and watering us forever. So we packed up what stuff we had and headed off back down the M6 (the right way this time, because Elaine wasn’t driving).

  Coming back to London was tricky at first because we had to go back and live at my mum and dad’s for a few months to get ourselves sorted. It was really good of them to have us, but it was impossible living there as a married couple. My mum looked after us really well but Elaine wanted to be her own woman and the tension in the kitchen was horrible. I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy about getting bossed around by my Old Man again either.

  Luckily for everyone’s blood pressure, my mum had taken the precaution of putting me on the council housing list in Enfield when I first went up to Manchester. I’d asked her why she’d done that at the time and she said, ‘Because I know what you’re like.’ Maybe that wasn’t the greatest vote of confidence, but it turned out Mum knew best, especially as Elaine was pregnant by this time.

  There was nothing doing in housing terms at first, but we kept on going up the housing office until finally they gave us a maisonette at a rent we could almost afford. We were lucky to be part of probably the last generation where having a single child could still get you a council house somewhere near your family home – you didn’t need to have one-legged triplets and an Arts Council grant yet. Once Maggie Thatcher sold all the council places off, some people made a lot of money, some more people got absolutely stitched up, and the lives of future generations got a lot more difficult.

  I didn’t see as much of the inside of that maisonette as I might’ve done in the early years of my lovely little Lois’s life, because I was still what you’d call a going-out dad. (What would being a stay-at-home dad even mean? Being indoors all day and doing fuck all?) And the kind of places I used to go out to still weren’t exactly domesticated. There was a pub called Trossachs on Barking Road which went through a few name-changes – always a sign of somewhere with a reputation to shake off. A lot of pubs and clubs did as the eighties progressed but there weren’t many that could hold their hands up to calling themselves a hat-trick of Raffles, Valentino’s and Memory Lane at one time or another.

  Now that I think about it, I’m not absolutely certain the following incident did take place in Trossachs, but it’s the kind of thing you’re generally best advised not to be too specific about, so let’s say it did. I was in there or somewhere very like it one night when a fella walked in wearing motorbike leathers and a crash-helmet and carrying a shotgun. The place was packed, and I guarantee you seventy-five per cent of the geezers drinking in that pub thought he was there for them. People were diving over the bar, under the tables, glasses were going everywhere. Some guys even put their birds in front of them, which probably didn’t win them any prizes for chivalry afterwards. Saddam Hussein hadn’t pioneered his human shields yet, so maybe this was where he got the idea.

  The guy with the shotgun looked all around the gaff and obviously the geezer or bird he wants ain’t in there – either that or he can’t see them through the helmet. But he still wants to make an impression, so he shoots the carpet – bang! A big hole right there at his feet, and just walks out. At this point everyone slowly comes out from their hiding places, and the only one not joining in the collective sigh of relief is the guv’nor of the pub: ‘Look what he’s done to my fucking carpet!’

  The carpets back at the maisonette in Enfield might not have got bullet holes in them, but the place did need a bit of a touch-up. And before that could happen I had to find a way of putting some food on the table. Luckily, a message that came to me via Don Boyd seemed to offer the prospect of some much-needed acting work. It was a big part, but there were some strings attached, as the phone-call came from a guy called Joey Pyle who was quite a major underworld face (although he denied everything till the day he died).

  I ended up becoming a great friend of Joey’s, and I still know his son today – little Joey Pyle Jnr – but at the time his was a name that made people (me included) very nervous. And when he told me they wanted me to play Ronnie Kray in a film Don Boyd had more or less ready to go, the stage was set for me to renew acquaintances with the man I had rather tactlessly pissed all over a quarter of a century before.

  I didn’t know where they’d got the idea of me playing the part from, because the twins certainly hadn’t seen my Trojan Women. It was possible the idea had come from an old mate of my dad’s called Laurie O’Leary, who was the only person I could think of who knew both them and me.

  Sure enough, when the meet finally happens, Laurie is one of the men in the car that picks me up. He sits on one side of me in the back, with the intimidating figure of Joey Pile on the other. Talk about a rose between two thorns! In the passenger seat is a guy called Alex Steene, who I’ve never met before, but I know by his formidable reputation. The car’s being driven by an old fighter called Alex Buxton, who’d boxed a world champion called Randolph Turpin years before.

  Alex Buxton is a lovely man, and him being at the wheel gives the whole trip an extra layer of grandeur, not that it really needs it. No one really tells me where we’re going at first, so I’m thinking, ‘Who the fuck have I upset now?’ Then as it slowly dawns on me that we’re heading out into the country in the general direction of Broadmoor, I get more and more sucked into the drama of the whole thing.

  It’s almost like we were going to meet folklore – this terrifying character who was one of the great gangsters of all time. That’s certainly how I’d have seen it when I was younger, and although I’d developed a bit more of a balanced perspective by the time all this was happening, it wouldn’t have been a good idea to let Joey or Alex Steene see me taking the whole thing too lightly.

  So even as I’m having a laugh with Laurie O’Leary, I’m being careful not to let anyone think I’m too relaxed. I’m also bearing in mind that it is a nuthouse we’re drawing nearer to. And not just any nuthouse, but one that’s full of sex offenders and murderers. What do I want to be going there for?

  Once we’ve arrived and are going through all the rigmarole of getting in, I’m thinking, ‘In an ideal world we’ll be out of here in a few hours, because an overnight stay doesn’t really appeal.’ In a normal nick you’re surrounded by people who’ve stolen a car or got pissed and hurt someone. In Broadmoor you’re in there with people responsible for some of the most heinous crimes in history.

  Every now and then you forget where you are, because it feels more like a hospital than a prison, but then you remember again. There’s one kid serving the tea who it transpires has murdered his entire family. You’re thinking, ‘How did he kill his family again? Not that it’s any of my business, but, just as a matter of interest, was it poison?’ It’s all very English in a way – sitting in a public place having a cuppa while trying not to mention the terrible things everyone around you has done.

  One of the big questions on my mind when it comes to my reacquaintance with Ronnie Kray is whether he is going to remember our earlier meeting. He does – either because he’s been primed to remember it by Laurie, or because it’s stuck in his mind for some other reason. I can’t imagine he got pissed on too many times in his life (at least, not in company), and he makes a little joke about it as I arrive, which puts me more at my ease.

  Ronnie is very smartly dressed, and looks well in himself, but he’s quite a frail man at this stage in his life. He’s not the same person you would’ve met on the outside fifteen years before, and you don’t know what medication he’s on, but there’s still no mistaking the force of his personality. He doesn’t just look at you, he looks straight through you to the wall behind,
and his eyes have that kind of blankness where you feel you can’t lie because he knows everything you’re going to say before you actually say it, anyway. The only other time in my life I’d encounter a stare like that would be a few years later at Lewis Collins’ house, where I met a few of the real-life SAS boys at a party for the film Who Dares Wins.

  There are a couple of additional factors Ronnie is bringing to the table in terms of how intimidating a presence he is. First, he hangs on every word you say with an intensity that you never come across in normal people. Second, he sits very close to you so that his leg is rubbing against yours, and his leg does not keep still – it’s constantly moving back and forth, almost like there’s a twitch in it.

  From the moment I’ve sat down he starts talking to me about Bob Hoskins, who I haven’t yet met at the time. Ronnie’s telling me about this play he’s heard Bob’s doing at a pub-theatre somewhere in South London. He says, ‘Do you know this fella, Bob Hoskins?’ His voice is a little bit nasal – almost like he’s got a peg on his nose. I say, ‘I know of him, Ron. He’s just done the film The Long Good Friday.’

  Ronnie nods. ‘Well, he’s been playing me in this play,’ he continues. ‘And this play implies I have incestuous feelings towards my mother.’

  Ronnie doesn’t swear very much, if at all, in conversation, because he’s old-fashioned like that, so when he pauses for a moment and then asks, ‘Is it a fucking crime to love your mother?’, it’s important to take him very seriously indeed. ‘No, Ron,’ I reply solemnly. ‘It’s not a crime to love your mother.’

  You can see how angry he is about the whole thing. At this point he starts whispering something to one of the other fellas and I’m getting a bit concerned about the implications for a fellow professional. So I say, ‘Let me tell you something, Ron. Bob Hoskins doesn’t know you. Bob Hoskins is an actor who plays what’s written in the script as close as he can to the way the director wants it. So it’s not Bob’s fault if there’s something in the play that you don’t like.’ At this point Ronnie goes, ‘Right, so who’s the writer?’ So now I’ve taken the heat off Bob and put it on a couple of other people without meaning to.