by Ray Winstone
Not all the memories prompted by seeing my old primary school again are happy ones. Quite early on in my time there I got six of the best across the arse for throwing stones up in the air. OK, one came down and hit another kid on the head, but he wasn’t badly hurt, and it was obviously an accident. The headmaster wasn’t having any of it though, and he gave me a caning I can still remember to this day. I was absolutely terrified to tell my mum and dad, and the fact that the weals only came to light because my mum was bathing me shows you how young I was.
She asked what had happened so I had to tell her. When my dad found out he went round to the school to hear the headmaster’s side of the story. He sat down calmly and listened to his explanation, then when the teacher had finished talking he said, ‘So let me get this straight. My boy is five years old, and you’ve given him six hard wallops across the arse for something he didn’t even mean to do?’
I’m not exactly sure what happened next but the impression I got was it was something along the lines of my dad forcing the teacher’s head down onto the desk and trying to shove his cane down his throat. Either way, the headmaster never looked at me again, which was a result as far as I was concerned. I did get caned a few times over the years, and sometimes I deserved it, but that one was a fucking liberty.
When you’re five or six years old, the boundaries of your world are very clearly defined. Going somewhere in the car was fine, but if I ever walked further than the school, it was like you were Christopher Columbus and didn’t know if you were going to fall off the edge of the world.
Apart from Sunday trips over to Hackney to see Maud and Toffy, the main excursion we used to go on would be out of London to see Nanny Rich, Reg Hallett, Auntie Olive and Uncle Len in Shoeburyness. Those drives along the old Southend road seemed to go on forever, and there were three trips which particularly stuck in my mind.
My dad had an old Austin van. If we were all going to squeeze into it, I usually ended up sitting over the engine, between the passenger seat and the driver, which was not so great in the summer. But in the winter I’d be the only one who was warm, especially while the van was lacking a back window, as happened for a while after it got smashed. One time we were driving east in thick snow when the car broke down near the Halfway House pub. Obviously you couldn’t just call the AA on your mobile in those days and there wasn’t a heater you could put on in the car, so we were absolutely freezing.
I can’t actually remember who rescued us on that occasion, but another time we didn’t make it all the way to Nanny Rich’s house was when we hit a Labrador which ran out in front of us. The dog flew up in the air and came down in the road with a horrible smack, then just got up, shook itself and ran away, apparently none the worse for the impact. We were alright too – just a bit shocked – but my dad’s van was not so lucky. The front of it was severely smashed to pieces and there was steam coming out of the radiator, so we had to wait till someone we didn’t know stopped to help us. When this guy found out what had happened, he ended up giving me, Mum and Laura a lift all the way back to Plaistow.
That wouldn’t happen now – apart from anything else, a woman would be frightened of taking their kids in a car with a stranger – but the geezer genuinely wanted to help and there was a different mentality in those days. I’m not saying there weren’t evil fuckers about, because there were, but everyone wasn’t so primed by the media always to be thinking about the worst thing that could possibly happen. We didn’t have that same fear factor we do now everyone’s got Sky News.
In my memory, that change in people’s thinking wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened more or less overnight when everyone found out about the Moors Murders. I’m not saying children hadn’t been taken away and killed before, but it wasn’t something people ever really thought about until Brady and Hindley put it in their heads. In a way, taking away that freedom for parents and children to live without fear was another crime that they committed. Even though it happened all the way up north in the hills outside Manchester, it was such a horrific case and it scared everyone so much that it might as well have happened just up the road. When we got up the next morning after it had been on the news, the streets of East London were empty. A lot of the old freedoms that we used to enjoy had gone out of the window overnight. I must have been eight at the time.
It was a dangerous old road, that one out to Southend. The third – and most dramatic – of the incidents I remember from those drives was the time we drove past a big car crash. There were police everywhere, and as we approached what appeared to be a fair amount of carnage, my mum said, ‘Don’t look.’ Obviously that’s the worst thing you can say to a kid – it’s right up there with ‘Never play with matches’. So by the time we drew level with the scene of the accident, Laura and I both had our faces glued to the window.
I’ve never forgotten what happened next. Things kind of went into slow motion, as they always seem to at moments of crisis. I suppose it’s your body’s way of protecting you – the adrenaline speeds up your brain, so whatever else is happening seems to slow down in comparison, which (in theory at least) gives you more time to respond. That’s why when we’ve seen something really horrible, we usually remember every unfolding detail, because it’s like we’ve recorded it so fast that when we try to play it back at normal speed it comes to us in slow motion. Anyway, as we drove past the wrecked car, the back door swung open and a body fell out. I hoped she wasn’t dead, but the absent look in that woman’s eyes has stayed with me ever since, and there was someone else in the car who looked in a bad way too.
As I’m describing this, I’m realising that it sounds quite like the car-crash sequence in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and probably loads of other films as well. When something shocking’s happened to someone and they say it was ‘like being in a film’, they usually mean it was out of the ordinary. But the reason things happen the way they do on the screen is because a lot of people have got together and done their best to create the illusion of what it actually would be like. So it’s no wonder we use those kinds of scenes as a way of understanding reality and distancing ourselves from it at the same time.
I’ve had similar experiences several times since, of being a witness to really bad things happening. I’m not saying I see dead people like the little boy in The Sixth Sense (although I did look a bit like him as a kid), but knowing what death is does change you as a person. And I can understand what they say about people who see a lot of it – whether they be soldiers or doctors, policemen or undertakers – finding that their emotional responses start to close down. We use the word ‘deadened’ for a reason.
It’s the same with me and violence, which I’ve seen a fair amount of over the years. I’ve never liked it – and I’ve liked it less and less as I’ve grown older – but it doesn’t shock me either. I don’t see it happen and think, ‘Oh, what was that?’ I know exactly what it is, and, to a certain extent, I understand it.
CHAPTER 4
THE ODEON, EAST HAM
When we first arrived there, in the late fifties, Plaistow was in Essex, which used to reach as far into London as Stratford. But from the day they changed all the boundaries around (1 April 1965, and I think we know who the April Fools were – us), the Essex border got pushed back to Ilford, and Plaistow was bundled up with East and West Ham to become part of the Frankenstein London borough of Newham. Why? What did they want to go and do that for?
Essex is one of the great counties of England. You just have to say the name to know what sense it makes: Wessex was to the west and Essex is to the east, with Middlesex somewhere in the middle. But some soppy cunt who sits in a council office somewhere has a bright idea, and all of a sudden something which has worked very well for hundreds of years has got to change, just so he or she can pat themselves on the back for inventing ‘Newham’.
Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always been really interested in the mythology of East London – the kind of stories which might or m
ight not be true, but which help to define the character of the place either way. One of my mum and dad’s best friends was a Merchant Navy man who we called Uncle Tony. I learnt a lot from him – he told me all about his voyages round the world as a young man, which probably helped encourage me to want to travel, as that wasn’t something people in my family had tended to do much before. He also had a lot of great stories about the games they used to play in the docks.
For instance, there was one fella whose party piece was to bite the head off a rat. Everyone would bet on whether he could do it or not, then he’d get the rat and put his mouth all around its neck . . . apparently the secret was that you had to do it cleanly, just pull it by the tail and the backbone would come out. Now I’m not recommending anyone try that at home, but being a kid of six or seven and listening to a story like that is certainly going to have an impact on you. As I grew older I loved all the tales about ‘spillage’ – for some reason, the closer you got to Christmas, crates of whisky would get harder to keep a firm hold of – and the canniness of the docklands characters.
There was one about a geezer who owned a pub that used to do lock-ins for the dockers. They’d stay in there all night and then when it got light the next morning they’d go out and go to work. Obviously he didn’t want them to leave, so first he took all the clocks out and then he painted the windows black. They’re all in there having a booze up and since it never gets light, he’s got them in there forever. Looking at that written down, it seems more like a fairy tale than something which actually happened, but I love the dividing line where something would be on the edge of being made up for the sake of the story.
When I was a bit older and started going to Spitalfields Market with my dad, people used to tell me how all the bollards around Gun Street and through the old city of London were made from the old cannon that had helped us win the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Now I don’t know if that was true or not, but either way it gave me a sense of the history of the place. And if we had any reason to be down in the Shadwell or Wapping areas – where the Ratcliff Highway murders took place more than 200 years ago – I’d usually get told how if you’d gone down there at that time it was like some kind of zoo, because sailors would bring back baby giraffes or lions or monkeys as pets, and by the time they’d get them home they’d be fully grown.
Even as a small boy, I was never averse to a bit of make-believe. I had two little girlfriends called Kim and Tracey who lived just up the road from me. They were twins, and we used to play doctors and nurses together (I think I peaked too soon as a ladies’ man). I was always the soldier who came back from the war injured and they had to kiss me better. That was where it all started for me as far as acting was concerned.
Another place that helped incubate the bug was the Odeon, East Ham. There were a couple of local cinemas we used to go to, but this was the main one – it was just near the Boleyn Pub as you go around the West Ham football ground. Do a left onto the Barking road at the end of Green Street and you’re there, down by the pie and mash shop (which we never ate at, because my dad hated pie and mash almost as much as he hated the Salvation Army).
It was a beautiful cinema which had opened just before the Second World War with a live show called Thank Evans starring Max Miller. You’d go in and the organ would come up from the floor and you’d all have a little sing-song. Then you’d get the B-movie before the main picture – you weren’t just in there for a couple of hours, it was the whole afternoon. The first film I ever went to there was 101 Dalmatians, which came out in 1961, so I must have been four.
My mum took me, and by all accounts I got quite angry with Cruella de Vil, because she was bullying the doggies. Apparently I got out of my seat and ran down the aisle towards the screen waving my fists and shouting ‘Cruella de Vil, leave them puppies alone!’ I don’t actually remember doing this myself – the red mist must’ve really come down – but Mum told the story so many times I can’t forget that it happened.
The slant she put on this incident was that I was so trappy as a kid that I ‘even wanted to have a fight with a cartoon’. With hindsight I suppose you could also take it as evidence of how willing I was to get caught up in a drama even then.
Although my mum was the first person who ever took me to the cinema, my dad soon took over the reins. Obviously he had to rise very early to work on the markets. The upside of that was that he tended to be free in the afternoons, and every Wednesday from the age of five onwards he’d pick first me and later me and Laura up from Portway and take us to the pictures. There’s a few stories later on that’ll show Ray Winstone Senior’s harder side, but he was a great dad to us, and I might not be doing what I am now if he’d decided to go down the pub instead of taking his kids to the cinema every week.
Of course, part of his motivation was that he fancied an afternoon kip, but if it was a good film – like 633 Squadron – he’d stay awake to watch it. I remember him falling asleep in Jason and the Argonauts, though, and by the time he’d woken up I’d watched it all the way through twice. We used to see some pretty adult films given how young I was, but the only one I ever remember us being turned away from was a war film called Hell is for Heroes with Steve McQueen and James Coburn in it. I think it was an X, which at the time meant sixteen and over, and I remember the ticket-seller (who knew us) very politely telling my dad, ‘Sorry, Ray, your boy can’t come in.’ With hindsight, I can’t really fault the guy from the Odeon for that. It is quite a violent film – especially the bit where the guy gets shot and you see his glasses crack – and I was only five years old.
Going to the movies wasn’t just a local thing. About once a month, usually on a Sunday afternoon, we’d go up the West End. Cinerama was a big draw then, and we’d go and see big, grown-up films like Lawrence of Arabia or Becket with O’Toole and Burton – which I loved, even though I was only seven when I first saw it.
My nan and granddad took me to see How the West was Won in 70mm, and I had the poster up on my wall with a big map of America and pictures of Annie Oakley on it. Even though grand historical epics were the films I felt most strongly drawn to, I liked stuff that was meant for kids as well. Probably my favourite film of all when I was a youngster was Mary Poppins. Where else do you think I got the accent from?
The Sound of Music was good as well – that was definitely one for the West End.
The only small dampener on going to the cinema with the whole family was Laura saying, ‘I wanna go toilet.’ Sometimes she wouldn’t even last till halfway through, and because Mum would have to take her, we’d all have to stand up so they could make their way out into the aisle.
Even though we went up West regularly, sometimes it felt like people there would dig us out a bit. The first time we saw Zulu was one of those occasions. It’s probably the best film ever, and I know it more or less off by heart now, but the day we went up to Leicester Square to see it has stuck in my mind for a different reason. It’s one of the earliest memories I have of people trying to make us feel like we weren’t good enough to be somewhere.
We’re all sat down, we’ve got our popcorn, sweets and drinks, and the music’s playing. The film hasn’t started – I don’t think the trailers have even started – and obviously there are a few crackling noises as the bags are opening. But this woman sitting behind us with her Old Man almost barks at us, ‘Could you keep the noise down, please?’ My mum twists round with a polite half-shrug and explains, ‘The film hasn’t started yet, darlin’ – we’re just opening the popcorn and some sweets for the kids.’
Obviously a few more sweet-wrappers get rustled over the next couple of minutes, but no one’s making a noise deliberately, and it’s still a while before the film’s due to start. But the woman can’t help herself – she decides to have another go. This time she practically hisses, ‘Keep the noise down’, and the ‘please’ is nowhere to be heard. Now my mum’s had enough. She stands up, turns round to look the woman straight in the eye and says, ‘Do yoursel
f a favour, love, or you’ll be wearing it.’
At that point, the pair of them got up and moved. My dad hadn’t even said anything – because it was a woman causing the trouble and he would never have a go at a woman. He was probably waiting for the bloke to start and then it would really have gone off. I clearly remember the feeling of ‘Oh, sorry, are we not allowed to be here?’ Just because we’re off our manor, suddenly everyone’s going to have something to say about it. This was a feeling I would grow quite familiar with over the years, not just in day-to-day life, but once I started acting as well.
As a small child looking up at that big screen, the idea that I might one day be up there myself would have seemed completely ridiculous. Of course a kid might say they’d ‘like to be in a film’, in the same way they might want to fly a space rocket or captain England at Wembley, but it wasn’t something that was ever going to happen. One of the big differences in those days was you didn’t have the Parkinsons or the Wossies – let alone the internet – so film stars were fantasy figures. That was your two hours of escape, and you believed who they were on the screen was who they were in real life.
That said, we did have one film star in the family already. My cousin Maureen, Charlie-boy’s sister, was an extra in a Charlie Drake film once. It was set in the Barbican, which was where they lived at that time, and when the film came out we all had to go to the pictures to see Maureen in a big crowd of local kids chasing Charlie Drake down the road at the end. Good luck to anyone trying to get a load of local kids together for a crowd scene in the Barbican these days – you’d have to contact their agents first.
The Odeon East Ham’s been through a few changes over the years as well – which one of us hasn’t? The last film they showed with the place as an Odeon was Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in 1981, but then fourteen years later it reopened as the Boleyn Cinema, which was one of the biggest Bollywood cinemas in Britain. They’d have all the dancing films on, and I’d often go past it on the way to and from West Ham games. But when I went back there specially to have a nose around for this book, I saw it had closed down again. Who knows what’ll happen next? Maybe someone will buy the place up and re-open it screening Polish art films . . . you never know.