Читать книгу Young Winstone - Ray Winstone - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

CAISTOR PARK ROAD, PLAISTOW

When I started writing this book the first thing I did was go back to the street I lived on as a kid. I wanted to have a look around to see if people or incidents I’d forgotten would come flooding back to me. What I couldn’t get over was how much smaller everything was than the way I remembered it. Obviously when you’re little you’re down at hedge and gate level, so the world looks massive to you, but there was more to it than that. Going back to Plaistow now, it feels very quiet and suburban, whereas in my childhood there seemed to be people everywhere, and something was always happening.

Of course at that time – in the late fifties – the London docks were still working at full speed and strength. The southern end of our road wasn’t far away from the Royal Victoria and Royal Albert Docks, so a lot of the hustle and bustle of the neighbourhood (not to mention the odd bit of unofficial bounty from shipping crates that had accidentally on purpose fallen open in transit) could be traced back to there.

The docks are long gone now, or at least the idea that anyone would use them for unloading stuff from boats is. But my home from the age of one to the age of eight – 82 Caistor Park Road, Plaistow – is still very much there, looking more or less unchanged over the intervening half century.

It’s a boxy, two-storey house near the end of a terrace. When we first moved in, we lived upstairs while an old lady and her sister kept the ground floor. Then after my sister Laura came along – in February 1959 – the Winstones took over the downstairs as well. There was never a bathroom (I’m assuming they’ve got one now). We had an outside toilet in the small back garden, and a tin bath would come out in the front room when it was time for a scrub-up.

In my early years my mum had to keep me on reins, because as soon as I saw daylight, I’d be off like a greyhound out of the trap (my eldest girl Lois was the same). But from pretty much the moment Laura and I were old enough to walk around unaided, we played outside in the street all day. There were very few cars about in those times, and we still had a milkman with a horse-drawn cart. He’d come round the corner at a set time every morning, and since all the kids knew he was coming we’d have plenty of time to put bricks in the middle of the road so he’d have to go round them like he was doing a slalom, shouting, ‘You little bastards!’ as he went.

At the north end of Caistor Park Road was, and is, the main drag down to Stratford, and beyond that thoroughfare stretches the wide open space of West Ham Park, which is still a lovely bit of grass to have a walk around. Returning to the area now, I can see that the houses at the top of the road tend to be much better finished off, whereas our bit is more of a khazi. Don’t go down my end – it’s a shithole.

I don’t recall it being that way when I was a kid, but then again, in my memories the sun has always got his hat on. Even though my rational mind knows Londoners were still afflicted by deadly pea-souper fogs at that time, all I can remember is clear skies and long days of unbroken sunshine.

In my mind, Plaistow in the early sixties is like one of those adverts filmed in New York where it’s a hot day and someone knocks the top of the fire hydrant off, except done the English way – with a hosepipe. Over the years you do colour your memories in a bit (at least, I have done), but I’m going to try and keep them as toned down and close to reality as possible. Obviously you’re only going to be seeing things from my point of view, because that’s what an autobiography is all about. But I realise there’s at least one other side to a lot of these stories – just ask Matthew McConaughey – and if someone’s given me another perspective, I’m not going to hold back on it.

For instance, I look back on myself as a little boy and I think I was alright, but my aunties always tell me I was a right little fucker. I’ll insist I was a nice kid and they’ll say, ‘No, you were an absolute fucker – always up to something.’

Now that must be true, because it’s not the sort of thing they’re gonna make up, so I have to start thinking about how they might’ve got that idea. I do remember there was a little parade of shops round the corner from our house where I used to sing for the greengrocer and he would give me a banana – well, every showbiz career has got to start somewhere, hasn’t it? I was still in the pram, so I couldn’t have been that old, but one day I sang for him and he didn’t give me one and I told him to fuck off. My mum would laugh telling me that story years later, but she was embarrassed at the time because she very rarely swore, so wherever I’d picked that word up from, it hadn’t been from her. And ‘No, you’ll have no banana’ was my first bad review. There’ve been a few more since . . .

In Plaistow in the fifties and sixties, there used to be a shop on every corner, and the one change to my immediate childhood surroundings which I really couldn’t get my head round when I went back on my fact-finding mission was that the old corner shop is now just a normal house. The shopkeeper’s name was Mr Custard, which was obviously a gift to us as kids. He had a big shock of unruly white hair and looked a bit like Mr Pastry. We used to terrorise him, going in there and shouting ‘Cowardy, cowardy Custard, can’t eat mustard!’ You know what kids are like. I feel quite sorry for him now, as he was probably a nice old boy.

A lot of good people lived on Caistor Park Road. A couple of doors up from us was a girl called Sylvie who lived with her mum – I don’t remember a dad, and there might not have been one. She must have been in her mid-teens and she used to babysit for us and take me up the park. One day, before my sister was born, she was pushing me to the swings in my stroller when a geezer jumped out in front of us and flashed her. I was only a baby, so I don’t seem to have accrued any deep psychological scars, but when my parents told me the story they were still really impressed that she hadn’t just fucked off and left me. She was a lovely girl, Sylvie, and it was very sad that a few years later she committed suicide. I always hoped it wasn’t what happened in the park that day that upset her.

Everyone living on Caistor Park Road knew everyone else, and all the stuff you always hear about windows being left open and it being OK to leave a key hanging behind the door was still true. There was even an old girl living on her own over the way who my mum used to cook dinner for. She had no connection with our family, other than that she lived near us. I know this sounds corny, but people looked after people. They really did. Every time you went out of the house in the morning you’d see women doing their steps and their windows. I know that sounds a bit chauvinistic now, but how can it be a bad thing for people to have taken pride in themselves and in their community?

Our home was always spotless, inside and out. My mum made sure everything was in its place and everything was done properly. She’d learnt that from her mother, who was not a woman to be trifled with.

My nan on my mum’s side was called Dolly Richardson, but she was always Nanny Rich to me. We called her Nanny Rich because she was . . . rich. By the time I was born, she owned a fair bit of property in the Plaistow, Manor Park and Forest Gate areas, and I think it was down to her that we ended up living where we did. She was a furrier by trade – not a farrier shoeing horses, a furrier making coats – and she’d done well enough to move out of East London to Shoeburyness, just along the Essex Riviera from Southend, after the war. There are a few fur coats left in the family somewhere, but obviously you can’t wear ’em any more because someone will throw paint over you. I presume there must have been a few quid poking around when Nanny Rich – God rest her soul – eventually went away in the early eighties, but I never saw any of it.

Nanny Rich was married three times – once more than old Hannah Durham – and she outlived all of her husbands. We’d started to look at her in a different way by the end. Her short-lived first husband, my auntie Olive’s father, wasn’t my grandfather. That was Husband Number Two. My mum’s dad was Mr Richardson (no relation to the notorious South London clan), but he died before I was old enough to really get to know him. By all accounts he was a very tall man, and the only one in the family who ever fought in the First World War. True to form for my family he came out of it in one piece, but it’s possible his death in the late fifties may have been caused by the lingering effects of mustard gas forty years before. I remember being in bed one night and hearing my mum distressed and crying, but not really knowing why he’d died or what that meant.

My nan’s last husband, Reg Hallett, who she married after a decent interval, was a terrific old boy. I had a lot of time for him. Reg was a mason – a very well-to-do man from Shoeburyness, which sounds like an Ian Dury song. I think he worked in Churchill’s Treasury during the war. When I got a bit older he used to beg me to become a mason too, but I wasn’t having it.

Whoever she ended up marrying, mason or otherwise, Nanny Rich never stopped being her own boss. I believe she made fur coats for the Royal Family, although that is the sort of thing that sometimes gets said without too much evidence to back it up. She definitely made them for Donald Campbell, though – the Bluebird man who held the land and water speed records simultaneously and died in that terrible crash on Coniston Water – which is no less impressive in a way, as Campbell was renowned for enjoying the good things in life, and no doubt knew a nice bit of fur when he saw it.

This is probably as good a moment as any to tell the story of my childhood brush with another snappy dresser: Ronnie Kray. I think how my dad knew the twins was that when they were kids they’d all boxed at the New Lansdowne, a club on Mare Street in Hackney which my granddad Toffy was on the board of. Reg and Ron were actually pretty good boxers before other more nefarious activities began to take precedence.

I was still a baby the day Ronnie Kray came round to Caistor Park Road to see my dad, but I’ve been told this story so many times that I can see it unfolding in my head. Obviously everyone’s on their best behaviour, but then Ronnie picks me up, and by all accounts I’ve pissed all over him. He’s got a new Mac on, which has probably cost a few bob, and I’ve absolutely covered it. Everyone’s laughing. Well, not at first. At first they’re all thinking, ‘Fucking hell, he’s pissed on Ronnie Kray!’ But then Ronnie cracks up, so everyone else knows it’s safe to join in.

Cups of tea get drunk, and him and my dad have a talk about whatever it is they need to talk about, and then everyone breathes a sigh of relief when Ronnie leaves. The Kray brothers hadn’t yet reached the peak of their notoriety by that time, but people still knew who they were. The funny thing was that earlier on the same day my dad had got in a row with a bloke who lived up the road, and after Ronnie fucked off to get his coat dry-cleaned, this guy came round going, ‘Look, we’ve only had an argument – there’s no need to bring them into it.’ Obviously there was no way my dad would ever have done that. If he needed to have a fight with a bloke up the road, he was quite capable of doing that on his own initiative, without calling in the Krays for back-up.

Readers are entitled to a measure of curiosity about what mutually advantageous business Ron and Ray might have been discussing. There was a time while I was still very young when my dad was possibly up to all sorts, with or without Ron and Reg, but I think something happened that he didn’t like when he was out with them in Walthamstow once. He only told me this years later – and even then in quite a cryptic, Edwardian kind of way – but I think my dad saw someone get stabbed, fairly brutally, and he just thought it was unnecessary. When is that kind of violence ever anything else? But for my dad I think that was the moment he thought, ‘Not only is this wrong, but also it ain’t for me.’

He wasn’t going to be joining the Salvation Army any time soon, but from the time I was old enough to remember, he was mostly working on the markets. Not only my dad’s two brothers but also most of his friends seemed to work in either the meat market, the fish market or the fruit market, so we never went hungry. My dad started off on the meat at Smithfield Market, but then moved to fruit and veg. Either he got caught nicking something, or they were trying to guarantee the family a balanced diet (given that his brother Kenny already had a butcher’s).

There was a fair bit of ducking and diving going on in those days. It still wasn’t long since the end of the war, and people needed a bit of a lift – especially as even though we’d won, we seemed to be rebuilding places like Berlin and Munich (which had admittedly been smashed to pieces) before we got started on our own cities. At that time people reckoned that the best job was the bread round, because you’d get your wage and pay your little bit of tax – whatever that was at the time – but you’d also have your own bread. That was your bunce. It was allowed. The company knew it went on but turned a blind eye, and the bread-man lived a good life.

It was the same on the docks, where a few of my dad’s friends who didn’t work on the markets seemed to earn a crust. There they even had a name for it: ‘spillage’. A box would get dropped, and whatever the contents were, the people working there were allowed to keep. I suppose that kind of thing would be looked upon as theft today, but I prefer to think of it as ‘garnish’ – that little something extra which meant we didn’t go hungry and always had a shirt on our back and shoes on our feet.

My dad’s eldest brother Charlie was doing a little bit better than that. He’d got a job in the print when he was younger. Those jobs were so well paid that what they used to do was sub them out – some geezer would give you half his wage if you let him take over from you, and that gave you money to go and do something else. Charlie went on to own his own factory which upholstered settees. He was very generous and would always give us a ten-bob note every time we saw him. He usually had nice cars as well – often those big old Rovers that look like Bristols – and he’d let my dad borrow them sometimes if we were going somewhere nice.

I think Maud and Toffy might’ve lost as many as three kids (ages ranging from infant to young child, and at least one of them to whooping cough, which was rife at the time) to leave them with just the three boys and my auntie Irene. That was the main reason people had bigger families in those days – to cover themselves, because you were probably going to lose a few.

Laura and I had plenty of other ‘uncles’ who weren’t genetically our uncles to make up the numbers. A lot of them worked in the fish market at Billingsgate, like Frankie Tovey, who was a Catholic, and Ronnie Jacobs, who was Jewish. We were Church of England, but people’s religious denomination was something you only tended to find out about later in life. Like with my best mate Tony Yeates: even though we basically grew up together from my mid-teens onwards, I only found out he was a Catholic when he got married. No one ever knew, and I think London’s always been a bit like that. It’s one of the great things about it in a way. Basically, who gives a fuck?

It was the same with my dad’s mate Lenny Appleton – ‘Apples’ everyone called him – who was gay. He was a terrific guy, always immaculately turned out, and all the girls loved him, but no one ever worried about who he was having sex with. I’m talking about a load of hairy-arsed geezers here who didn’t give a fuck for anyone. They were the chaps – out pulling birds and doing what they were doing – and what Lenny got up to on his own time just wasn’t a problem for them. When someone’s your mate, they’re your mate, and that’s all there is to it.

I found out some interesting things about the situation with homosexuality in old London – and sexuality in general – when I was making that TV show about Hannah Durham. It turned out that people in those times were much less prudish than we tend to think of them as being, and than we are now. It was only towards the end of the Victorian era that everyone started to get more buttoned up.

In terms of public life, everything was still pretty much under wraps by the fifties, but looking back at the way Apples was accepted by my dad and his mates, it gives you a fresh perspective on people who weren’t necessarily highly educated. They weren’t moving in the supposedly enlightened circles of the art or literary worlds. These were geezers who worked in markets and had their own street education and would often be presented as quite brutal – shouting ‘Fucking poof’ at Quentin Crisp in TV dramas or whatever – so it’s quite refreshing to realise that they weren’t always like that. In fact, it was a shame the people who actually had power in the country weren’t as tolerant as my dad and his mates. People who come from where I come from don’t get to make the laws, we just get to break them.

There was a tradition on my dad’s side of our family of naming eldest sons after their father, so my uncle Charlie’s son got called Charlie-boy. My dad – as those of you who are on the ball will already have noticed – was Ray, so a lot of my relatives used to (and still do sometimes) call me ‘Ray-Ray’ to differentiate between us. When I got a bit older, my dad’s mates also used to know me as ‘Little Sugs’, because his nickname was ‘Sugar’, in honour of the great Sugar Ray Robinson.

There were signs from very early on that I was going to carry on the family’s pugilistic tradition. The nursery school I went to was up on the main road on the way to Stratford. I got suspended from it once for having a fight with another kid on a climbing frame. It was only a skirmish, and I don’t think I was a generally disruptive presence, although you probably won’t be surprised to hear that this was not to be the last educational establishment I would be suspended or expelled from.

I loved that place, though. They used to get us all to lie down and have a kip in the afternoon, and you didn’t just get free milk in a little bottle, you got orange juice as well. The only other thing I remember really clearly was that every kid was allocated their own special decorated peg for putting your coat on, and mine was a camel – probably because I always had the hump.