Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  Going back to the Plaistow area in 2014, there’s no doubt about what the biggest change is: it’s the shift in the ethnic backgrounds of the people who live there. In the space of a couple of generations, it’s gone from being the almost entirely white neighbourhood my family moved into, to having the predominantly Asian feel that it undeniably does today. Anyone who thinks a population shift of that magnitude in that short a space of time isn’t going to cause a few problems has probably never lived in a place where it’s actually happened.

  I remember the first black man who came to live on Caistor Park Road. He was a very smart old Jamaican gent who always wore a zoot suit and a hat with a little turn in it. In truth he probably wasn’t all that old, he just seemed that way. But he was so novel to us that we just used to stare at him and sometimes even (and I realise this isn’t something you’d encourage kids to do today) touch him for luck. He’d just smile and say, ‘Hallo, children’, in a broad Caribbean accent. He knew we didn’t mean any harm by it – we were just kids who hadn’t seen a black man before.

  I say that, but in fact we had, in the familiar form of Kenny Lynch, who knew my dad. Lynchy had been on the fringes of my dad’s world for a while – he was a regimental champion boxer in the Army and went on to have a few hit singles (as well as writing ‘Sha La La La Lee’ for Newham local heroes the Small Faces) and sing in the kinds of clubs that the Krays used to run – but I’m not sure if he really booked himself as a black man, or wanted anyone else to for that matter.

  When the first West Indian and then Asian people moved in, people weren’t worried about them; they were a novelty. But as more and more came, a feeling began to develop – particularly with regard to the new arrivals from Bangladesh and Pakistan – that they wanted to just stay in their own community rather than joining in with ours. That was what caused the problems: people sticking with their own.

  In a way, you couldn’t blame them. They tended to come more from rural areas and maybe had more of an adjustment to make to living in London – if someone from your village goes and lives halfway across the world and they’re your mate, then if you do the same thing, it’s inevitable you’re going to want to join them. And under the pressure of trying to establish yourself in a new environment – especially when what makes you different is visible to all – it’s only natural to close ranks. Looking back now, I can understand the fears they must have had, but there were fears on both sides – fear of losing jobs to people who would work longer hours for less money, fear of the manor you’d lived in all your life being taken away.

  Going back to East and West Ham now, they’re not just ‘cosmopolitan’, they’re probably more Bangladeshi and Indian and Pakistani than they are anything else. The positive thing I can see happening in the playground of my old school is that maybe the younger generation are kind of educating us. Whether one side is becoming more Anglicised or the other is becoming less so – or most likely a bit of both – what they’ve got to do is learn to meet in the middle.

  Whatever happens, it’s probably not going to be anything that hasn’t happened along the banks of the River Thames plenty of times before. The other side of all those dockyard traditions that have always given the inner London section of the East End its exotic edge is that it’s also always been the place that immigrants have come to first, whether that’s meant the Huguenots or the Chinese or the Jews or the Hindus or the Muslims or the Poles or the Romanians. The docks might be gone now, but the tide still goes in and out.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE NEW LANSDOWNE CLUB

  The years just before and after our move away from Plaistow are marked out in my mind by three huge moments in football history. In May of 1964, West Ham won the FA Cup for the first time ever. Dad, Mum, Laura and I walked down the bottom of Caistor Park Road (in those days you could still get straight out onto Plaistow Road) for the parade.

  They couldn’t even afford a double-decker. West Ham’s idea of an ‘open-topped bus’ in those days was sitting on the roof of a coach, but that didn’t stop us having a great time. We blew all our bubbles and had a little party afterwards. You don’t get many days like that (at least, West Ham fans don’t) so it’s best to make the most of them when they do come around.

  A year later, the good times miraculously continued as West Ham won the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup at Wembley. My dad had been thinking of getting us tickets for that one, but sadly decided not to take me with him in the end because he thought I was a bit young to be in such a big crowd (he probably had a point, as almost a hundred thousand turned up to see us beat Munich 1860 2–0). We were only the second English team to win that competition. I can’t remember who the first mob were.

  Luckily, by the time the World Cup came round a year later, my dad had decided that at nine I was now old enough for Wembley. So he called in some favours from people he knew in the fruit and veg trade and we ended up getting tickets to every game England played. Full match reports are coming later in this chapter for anyone who doesn’t know how the tournament ended. But before that, there’s another landmark to be negotiated – nothing to rival Bobby Moore bringing the World Cup home in terms of historic significance, but an event which probably defined the course of the rest of my life.

  If the Winstones had just stayed in Plaistow, that probably would’ve been it for me for the duration. But in the year between those two Wembley finals our family had made a move which brought us much closer to the twin towers, but took us what felt like a long way from the place I’d always thought of as home (and probably continue to think of that way, despite all physical evidence to the contrary). It’s not like my dad sat us down and told us we were moving to Australia – it was only Enfield, or to be more precise 336 Church Street, on the Winchmore Hill side of the A10 – but it might as well have been the furthest shores of the Antipodes as far as I was concerned.

  North London is a foreign country, they do things differently there. I couldn’t really even book Enfield as being in London, anyway (it is now, but then it felt more like Middlesex). From being a kid with a very clear idea of who I was and where I belonged, I suddenly found myself moving to another place where the only things anyone at my new school knew about me were that my accent was different, I didn’t really have any friends, and I seemed to be a couple of years behind where I should’ve been with my education.

  I don’t think I was fully dyslexic, but when I wrote something my eyes tended to move around the page, and I’d have to check over what I’d done at the end to make sure that the thought which had left my mind had actually reached the paper. It’s the same with emails even now – I have to go through them at the end to make sure I haven’t got distracted and left something out. I wasn’t a great one for reading at school, either, and it’s probably only having to learn scripts that has brought my spelling up to a level where I can just about get by.

  As a defence mechanism to protect me from the things about my new life that I was finding difficult, I became a bit of an inverted snob. In my eight-year-old mind, I was a proper Plaistow geezer and all this country-bumpkin business wasn’t for me, but that probably made life more difficult rather than easier. It’s hard for any kid to move away from their mates and everything they know and love, and when you go into school for the first few times, you just feel like an alien. I’m not saying I know what someone who comes here from Poland or Pakistan goes through, because obviously the language is more of a factor there (although they do talk funny in Enfield), but if there’d been a ready-made community of East End kids for me to join up with at my new school, I’d have been in there in the blink of an eye.

  I know what you’re thinking: ‘Enough of this bollocks about you being a sensitive cockney flower that should never have been transplanted up the A10, Ray, just tell us about the football.’ The great thing about going to the 1966 World Cup was that even though my dad managed to get two tickets for every game, he made it a surprise every time. It was really good of him to take me because deep
down he wasn’t even that much of a football fan – he’d supported Arsenal when he was younger, so he can’t have been.

  A lot of people of my age or older will tell you that their memories of these matches are in black and white, because that’s how they saw the games on TV at the time. My recollections are a strange mixture of Technicolor from actually being there – the light blue of Uruguay’s kit, or the green of Mexico’s – overlaid with the monochrome of endless subsequent viewings. The commentaries have seeped in too at some key moments, even though I only heard them afterwards.

  The first game was Uruguay at Wembley. Geoff Hurst didn’t play, but I’ve got a feeling Greavesie did. He was a fantastic player, and we had Terry Payne from Southampton on the wing, but that didn’t stop it being a boring 0–0. England weren’t expected to do too much in the World Cup and Uruguay were a tough nut to crack.

  The one thing I’ll never forget about that day is, you know how at the beginning of the game they’ll have all the teams coming out represented by schoolchildren as mascots? With the World Cup now it’ll be all fireworks going off and balloons going up, someone sings a song and it’s a big show. But then it was just a few kids coming out with sticks – like people would use to make a banner for protesting outside an embassy – with the name of the team written at right angles on a piece of wood.

  My dad bought me a ‘World Cup Willie’ pennant and also a West Ham one which I’ve still got to this day. With those lucky charms in place, the following two games went much better. Bobby Charlton scored a screamer against Mexico, and Roger Hunt got one too, then Hunt scored both our goals against France.

  Next up were Argentina. Geoff Hurst played in that one and Antonio Rattín got sent off. We did well to hold our tempers as Argentina were scrapping like animals, but then Bobby Moore put the ball down quickly and flicked it up for Geoff Hurst to nut it in, and Argentina were history. It was almost like a dress rehearsal for our first goal in the final. By then a measure of optimism had really started to take hold, but Eusébio’s Portugal were still favourites to knock us out in the semis. They were blitzing everyone, but Geoff Hurst and Bobby Charlton both scored and now England were in the final.

  When that great day came I had more than a vague idea of what being 1–0 down to the German machine meant, because I could still feel the clip round the earhole I’d got off the copper for playing in one of the bombsites they’d left. There was a lot of historical friction and a real sense of them being the old enemy, so going 2–1 up just set you up for the emotional sucker punch of them equalising. I remember almost crying when they pulled that goal back – which wouldn’t have been the done thing then, although you see dads doing it as well as kids on Match of the Day all the time now.

  The sense of pride when we finally did them at the end of extra time was amazing (that’s where the voice of Kenneth Wolstenholme butts in, even though I wasn’t listening to him at the time), especially as three of the most important members of the team – the captain Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst who scored a hat-trick and Martin Peters who scored the other goal – were West Ham heroes. To see Bobby Moore holding up the trophy with his chest puffed out at the end of that gruelling game was an experience I’ll never forget.

  The funny thing is that when you’re nine years old, the euphoria of actually being World Champions seems perfectly natural. We’re British and we won the war, so it’s sort of expected that we should win the World Cup as well. Forty-eight years later, I can look back on that feeling from a more worldly-wise perspective. I suppose the era I was brought up in was basically the end of the British Empire, but we still felt like a force in the world. We had The Beatles, we had the World Cup. We were kind of alright.

  Times were still hard for a lot of people, but the economy was doing pretty well. Our family’s improving situation was probably a good example of the way people from working-class backgrounds could get on in the mid-sixties. Although I was pissed off to have had to leave Plaistow, I had a lot to be thankful for.

  We’d moved into a really nice four-bedroom George Reid house. My parents had paid four and a half grand for it, which was a lot of money at a time when the average weekly wage wasn’t much more than £16. It was the equivalent of buying a house for £750,000 today, which was obviously a bit of a stretch, but my mum and dad were, for the moment at least, on a much sounder financial footing than they had been. On top of that, they’d gone thoroughly legit.

  Ever since the nasty incident in Walthamstow with the Kray brothers, my dad had backed away from the ducking-and-diving side of things. That can’t have been easy, because there was quite a romantic image to it in those days, but I think there comes a time when you’ve got a family that you don’t want to be shitting yourself every time there’s a knock on the door. He stepped back from all the other bollocks and concentrated on going to work, to the point where he’d been able to step up to running his own grocer’s.

  His first shop was in Bush Hill Parade, just outside Enfield, which was why we ended up moving there. The impetus for the move came from Mum. She’d got Nanny Rich’s genes after all. Whereas my dad – no disrespect to him – was quite set in his ways, and if left to his own devices might have been happy staying in a council flat in Hackney all his life. Although I didn’t know this at the time, my sister told me recently that my mum just sold our home in Plaistow without asking him. Some blokes came around making offers on a lot of people’s houses for buy-to-let and she just turned it over to them and went off and picked out the house in Enfield without saying a word to Dad. Then again, if she had asked him, he probably would’ve said no.

  Either way, Mum was the motivator, and even though I wasn’t too happy about the move at the time, there was no denying we’d gone up in the world. We had a nice bit of garden now, and after we’d been in Enfield for a few years we got a bar installed in the front room – the forerunner of Raymondo’s, whose doors are still always open in my house to this day – with one of those Bobby Moore World Cup ice buckets. Everyone had one of those, or at least every West Ham fan did. Bobby was standing on the brown-coloured ball holding the World Cup, then you’d lift him up and all your ice would be in there.

  We got a dog as well. He was a Boxer (I suppose that ran in the family) called Brandy. He was soppy as a bag of bollocks with us – you could do what you liked with him – but if anyone else came within range, he’d mullah ’em, even when he got so old he only had one tooth left.

  They say your porn name is your first pet and the first street you can remember, which makes mine ‘Brandy Caistor’. I reckon I’d do alright with that, then if I wanted to redefine myself as an actress and go a bit respectable later on in my career, I could always change it to ‘Brandy Caistor-Park’, which sounds much more distinguished. Brandy was a clever old bastard as well. The dustmen used to tease him in the alley where the bins were, so he worked out how to back up and make it look like his lead was tighter than it was, then when the dustman came to torment him, Brandy had him on the penny and gave him a right good biting.

  When we’d lived in Plaistow, one of the things I’d liked doing best was driving over to Hackney to see Maud and Toffy on a Sunday. There were all sorts of different cars we’d go in – they weren’t necessarily ours. In those days if you wanted a car, you just had one. You could do that then – thank God you can’t any more, because I don’t want anyone just taking mine. One of my dad’s cars (well, I say it was his . . . we certainly used it a lot) – a black Ford Zephyr – ended up in a pond at Victoria Park once after someone had nicked it and used it on a blag.

  We’d jump in the car (whichever one it was) all suited up and looking nice to go off and meet the cousins while Mum would stay at home and cook the dinner. Even the mums who wore the trousers had to miss out on a lot of fun in those days, on account of their place still being in the home. My aunties Irene, Barbara (Charlie’s wife) and Joycie (Kenny’s wife) would all be back in their kitchens cooking up a storm, while their kids Scott, Spencer and Be
cky, Charlie and Maureen, and Tracey and Melanie came down to Hackney to meet us.

  We’d go up to the flats first to see Granddad and Nanny. Obviously she’d have to stay at home to cook the dinner as well, so it would just be Toffy who came down to the New Lansdowne Club with us. It was a proper old East End gaff – a working men’s club with a snooker table and a boxing gym. My granddad had been on the committee so he had a lot of mates there, like Archie who could hit you with either hand. A few of them and maybe some of Charlie’s pals would come and join us until there was quite a gathering.

  All the fellas would have a drink and a chat and the kids’d be fucking about and getting up to mischief, messing around on the drumkit. Someone might even get up and sing a song – me and my sister would do ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ or Sonny and Cher’s ‘I Got You, Babe’, and one of the uncles might give us a bit of Sinatra. Then we’d all head home in time for our separate Sunday dinners at three or four in the afternoon – there was never too much traffic on the roads on a Sunday.

  I had a few tussles at the Lansdowne with my cousin Charlie’s sister Maureen, who was a couple of years older than us and even trappier than I was. She’s my cousin and I love her to death, but we did used to bicker a lot. That said, I remember one time when we were visiting her mum and dad in the Barbican, and me and Charlie were getting bullied by a gang of older kids, Maureen went and sorted them all out – shut them right up with a couple of swift right-handers. It’s a good job she wasn’t born a geezer because then she’d have been even more dangerous.