Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  Even though I was going to Upton Park regularly throughout the seventies and eighties – what you’d probably consider the ‘golden age’ of football violence, if football violence could have a golden age – the hooligans and all that never really interested me. I suppose the ideal thing would’ve been the Inter City Firm (ICF), but I didn’t know anyone who was in it because I didn’t live round there any more – a lot of them were Canning Town boys too – and I don’t think I’d have been involved, anyway. I had too many other things I wanted to do.

  The funny thing is, I do know a couple of those old ICFers now. They’re wealthy businessmen, because they got in on the rave scene in the early days and made a lot of money. I think they’re mostly in clothing these days, so at least something good came out of it all in terms of economic benefits for the area, and there’s no denying they were a proper firm in their prime – better than Tottenham, anyway.

  The main thing about football violence is that it’s very territorial, and I never really saw things that way. Maybe if we’d stayed in Plaistow it might’ve been different, but by the time I was in my early teens I was so used to bombing around London on trains or Red Bus Rovers that the idea of defending one bit of turf against another didn’t really make much sense to me. I was never really one for being part of a gang, either in or out of school. Obviously there were gangs about, but I tended to knock about with two or three geezers, and if we were going somewhere, it was usually because we knew someone, so I never remember thinking we’d better watch ourselves in this place or that place, because there might be trouble (except in South London, obviously).

  I suppose in a way – although I never saw it like that at the time – my parents did me a favour by moving us out to Enfield, because that stopped me putting my roots down so deep in one part of East London that I couldn’t go anywhere else. Me and my mates didn’t really have any boundaries we wouldn’t cross over. It was never like that with us. We weren’t really affiliated with anyone except each other, so we were at liberty to come and go as we pleased.

  Tony Yeates was a good example of how freely we moved around, because when I first met him he was boxing for the Fitzroy Lodge club in South London, but then he moved over to the Repton because that was the place to be. He’s going to be cropping up a lot in this book from now on, because he’s one of my best mates. In day-to-day life I usually call him Yeatesie, but that looks a bit pony written down – if he was Yates instead of Yeates it would look better – so in print I’m going to refer to him by his full name for the purpose of guaranteeing him literary immortality.

  Anyway, Tony Yeates came from Bow Common, which is between Bow and Poplar. They had a famous battle there once where a firm came out of the station carrying pick-axe handles and a load of Old Bill were waiting there with shooters – I think it was one of the first few times police had been armed like that on the British mainland. They shot one of the guys in the head and the bullet went between his skull and his skin and came out the back. It was all kept very quiet at the time. The official line was that the robbers had the guns, but I’ve spoken to people who were there and that’s not how it went down.

  Obviously, none of this had anything to do with Tony, who was every bit as squeaky clean as I was. One of the great things about boxing was that it didn’t just give you a legitimate outlet for any tendency towards physical aggression which might have got you into trouble otherwise, it also gave you discipline, which stopped you doing the things that make teenage kids more likely to get into strife, like taking drugs or drinking heavily before you’re old enough.

  Tony and I made up for lost time later of course, but when we were in our mid-teens we were too dedicated to our training to be falling over drunk or getting into fights outside the minicab office like a lot of the kids we knew from school would’ve been. Even a few years later when the boxing had dropped off a bit and the lure of other distractions had begun to get a bit more powerful, we’d still meet up at West Ham gym for an hour before going out for a drink.

  Looking after yourself is a habit that’s hard to break, and so is getting out and about. Boxing meant we had mates from all over the East End. A lot of people have their one precise patch they’ll hang around in – whether that be their street, their estate, or just a particular area or neighbourhood – but we used to go everywhere. West Ham, Stratford, Bethnal Green, Hackney; it was all the same to us. We’d even go somewhere like the Isle of Dogs (which should in theory have been totally off our plot, because it was Millwall) to see my mates Billy Jobling or Russell True.

  Once we’d got a bit older, in our late teens, and were young men knocking about having a drink, Moro’s and the Two Puddings in Stratford and the Charleston out towards Maryland Point would become our main haunts. But sometimes we’d go further afield – even as far east as Southend or Canvey Island – to nick a bird. I know this sounds ridiculous, but at that age it felt like travelling the world. And once we came back to town, the whole of East London felt like home to us.

  Back at school in Enfield I still wasn’t one of those kids who knocks around in a gang – I don’t mean big horrible gangs like the Crips or the Bloods, I just mean a big load of mates. It’s not for me to say whether that’s because I didn’t want to be, or because there was no larger group that would have me. But even when it came to school trips, it’d usually just be me and a couple of mates hanging around together. I suppose because I was always off training and had my own mates from boxing, I must’ve seemed like I didn’t really want to be part of the normal social life of the school.

  I remember one skiing holiday, which my parents had kindly got the money together to pay for, when I looked around and saw that, well, it’s a little bit unfair to say it was me and the nerds, but I can’t think of another word that sums ’em up. All the kids who wanted to be off drinking and getting in trouble, which wasn’t really my cup of tea yet, were back at home doing whatever it was they were doing. I suppose going somewhere with a load of teachers didn’t seem cool to them any more. Luckily for me there was a rather nice girl called Suzanne who hadn’t got that memo either, so she’d come on the trip too and all the real competition had stayed at home.

  The whole lone-wolf thing would stay with me once I became an actor too. Obviously there are people in the business I’m mates with, but from the moment I got cast as Carlin in the TV version of Scum with all the Anna Scher boys ranged against me, I don’t think I’d ever be thought of as being in a gang of actors. I think the reason why is that – without sounding too Californian about it – I kind of know who I am. I’ve never really reinvented myself, so I don’t need the reassurance of a lot of other people being like me to tell me that I’ve made the right (or the wrong) decisions.

  No disrespect to ’em, but a hell of a lot of actors choose to go down this particular career path because they don’t like who they actually are. This isn’t something I’ve deduced, it’s something they’ve told me. I speak to many of them who feel that way. Don’t get me wrong, they’re nice kids, but they’ve got no history from before they became an actor, or if they have got history, it’s not something they want to take with them. They’re only interested in where they’re going or where they are now, not where they started out.

  Life’s never been like that for me, because I’m proud of where I come from. But that doesn’t mean I never want things to change. For instance, on the controversial subject of West Ham moving to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford in 2016, a lot of people who ask me about it expect me to get really upset, but I don’t think it’s a shame at all. I will miss Upton Park, but it’s always been hard work to get to. And if we want the club to progress, we’ve got to take the chance of a proper stadium with better transport links and parking facilities, as that’s the only way to attract better players. On top of that, to be honest, the whole thing has probably been worth doing just for how much it’s pissed Tottenham off.

  Obviously, it was a bit of a touch for West Ham’s owners, Sullivan and G
old, because they got the government to pay for the transformation of the Olympic stadium to stop it becoming a white elephant, and then sold off Upton Park to property developers. But that’s business, and they’re entitled to prosper so long as the club benefits in the long term.

  The 2012 Olympics certainly changed the view from the end of Caistor Park Road, but the building of the actual stadium was a complete fucking con. I got myself in a lot of trouble at the time because I was asked to carry one of the flags round in front of the Coldstream Guards at the opening ceremony and I said no. I was gutted to have to do that, because obviously it was a huge event and it would’ve been great to be a part of it, but I’m a bit trappy sometimes. I get these bees in my bonnet and I have to let them buzz.

  It wasn’t the Olympics themselves I objected to – I really admire the athletes and the effort and dedication they put in – I just looked around at East London and thought, ‘When we’ve built the hospitals and paid the teachers to be teachers and stopped closing all the fire-stations down, maybe then we can afford this, but at the moment it’s an outrageous fucking liberty.’

  The Olympic organisation isn’t really about the sport, it’s about the building, and when I see the people who run the Committee – not so much Lord Coe, but he’s a puppet, anyway – they look like white-collar gangsters to me. The corruption isn’t just a side issue, it’s at the heart of the whole enterprise. And FIFA are even worse.

  They’re a law unto themselves, and the government allow them to come in and basically rape the country that’s hosting, then move on somewhere else four years later and leave the people who live there to clean up the mess. I went to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010 and had an amazing time (that was actually the biggest group I’ve ever been away in – we went forty-handed and stayed in Mauritius). But I also saw the way they built walls around the shanty towns and tried to sweep all the poverty under the carpet. I love sport as much as anyone, but to me there are things which are more important. It would’ve been an honour to carry the flag in front of the Coldstream Guards, who I love to pieces, but I had to say no, otherwise I’d have been a hypocrite for supporting something I didn’t believe in.

  I think you owe it to yourself to be true to your own moral code, however much flak it brings you. It’s like with the Bet 365 adverts I do. People ask me why I do them. And I tell them: number one, it’s very, very good money, and number two, it’s for gambling which people have a choice about whether they do it or not. If you wanna gamble, you gamble; if you don’t, you don’t. I like gambling – I have a little flutter myself every now and again – so I have no qualms whatsoever about advertising it. But I’d never do a bank commercial or something for an insurance company, because that’s something you’re forced to do and it’s a rip-off. They fucking slaughter you and I don’t agree with that. No doubt there are plenty of people who’d see this completely the other way round – they’d be happy to take the banks’ money, but wouldn’t touch Bet 365 with a barge pole – but good for them if that’s how they feel. It takes all sorts to make a world.

  When it comes to West Ham leaving Upton Park behind, I say bring it on. If you look at the magnificent World Cup heroes’ statue, just across the Barking Road from the Boleyn Cinema, it kind of makes sense that the team who won us those medals in 1966 should move to the stadium where Britain did so well in 2012. None of us live round that way any more – at least, no one I know does – and unless the younger generation of Bangladeshi kids who live there now are really into football, I don’t see what good it does them to have a match there on Saturday afternoons when they’re trying to run a business.

  You do see a lot of the sari shops on Plashet Road will have saris in claret and blue at the right-hand end of the window (the one nearest the Boleyn Ground), but I’m not sure that’s to support the team. I think that’s more to stop a passing thug smashing their window. Now, I’m not saying I won’t ever turn up to watch West Ham in a sari, because you never know where the tide of fashion is going to carry you. Obviously, David Beckham’s tried it, but I did beat him to the punch by wearing one out in the Maldives years ago, although to be honest it probably looked a bit better on him than it did on me.

  CHAPTER 12

  VICTORIA PARK LIDO

  I lost my virginity when I was fourteen years old. I was staying at Nanny Rich’s in Shoeburyness and I met a girl on the beach. She must’ve been a raving lunatic because it was a freezing cold winter’s day and she only had a bikini on.

  There was no one else about. One minute I was just having a chat with her, and the next thing I knew I was in the woods by the mini-golf, losing my virginity standing up. I thought I’d done myself some damage afterwards.

  I think she was eighteen, and I wasn’t one of those kids who look older than they are. When I was fourteen, I looked it, maybe even younger. Bearing in mind our ages I suppose I was less a sexual partner and more a (willing) victim of abuse, but it didn’t feel that way at the time, God bless her! I don’t remember the girl’s name – if I ever knew it – but I know her initials were ‘GG’, because she had them on a gold chain around her neck. Of course, I’ve loved the gee-gees ever since.

  There’d always been girlfriends in my life, right back to when I was a little kid in Plaistow playing ‘put a big bandage on the war hero’ with the twins Kim and Tracy and Jeanie Green from down the end. Obviously the sexuality part of it is new from twelve or thirteen onwards, and it was different in those times – kids didn’t mature as early as they do today.

  Bikini-clad lunatics aside, the first port of call in the courtship process would usually be taking a bird up the pictures. The trouble was – aficionado of the big screen that I was even then – I always wanted to watch the film. If it was more a cuddle and a handful that you were after, you were better off taking them to a poxy movie you weren’t interested in. It would probably be Love Story with Ryan O’Neal, and there’s only one reason any heterosexual teenage boy would go and see that.

  I’m not sure if it was Love Story (although the dates are about right, as I was thirteen when it came out) but I remember being sat in the cinema once with my arm round a girl and thinking my hand was on her threepenny when it was actually on her shoulder. She must have thought I was very sensitive to be paying so much attention to that particular area of her body – a shoulder massage would’ve been considered wildly metrosexual in Enfield in 1970.

  By the time I got properly into my mid-teens, I’d probably be going out to a club once a week. I couldn’t afford to do it more often than that, but it was possible to go up the Tottenham Royal and pull a bird on a fiver in those days. The bus-fare alone wouldn’t be far off that now.

  I still looked young, so I was always being asked my age on the door, but I overcame that obstacle with the same strategy which worked so well when it came to getting in to X-rated films. I used to say I was a jockey up at the Crews Hill country gallops at Enfield. It worked every time, probably because it had the element of surprise about it, as it didn’t seem like the sort of story anyone would bother to make up. Even once I’d grown quite tall this ruse didn’t stop doing the job for me. The only time I ever got turned away from anywhere was a few years later when I actually was eighteen. At that point I parked the jockey story, and they refused to believe I was old enough, even after they’d seen my driving licence. Sometimes it’s easier to look like you’re in the right when you’re guilty than when you haven’t actually done anything wrong, because that way your mind is properly focused on what you need to do, and innocence can breed complacency.

  Once inside the Tottenham Royal, what we were all looking to do was get on the last-dance express. We weren’t really much for dancing, we just used to chat with the birds and have a look about, then, when the night started to wind down, we’d be in like Flint.

  I remember ‘Love Train’ by The O’Jays was a song that was very good to me. ‘Slow one?’, ‘Alright, then’, ‘Where d’you live?’, ‘Stamford Hill’, ‘Sorry, w
rong way’. If there was someone going back towards Enfield, that was perfecto, but you might consider the other direction if she was a really good sort. That’s terrible, isn’t it? But you know what boys are like. . . and girls ain’t too far behind when it comes to being unmerciful.

  My way around that was always to start off going for the ones where it looked like you didn’t have a chance, because if that didn’t work out you could always work your way down the scale a bit. At least that way the other girls would be impressed that you’d had the balls to give it a go and they might think they’d got a catch. It’s no good starting at the bottom and trying to work your way up. Sometimes you’d get yourself in trouble by having three or four girls on the go at once and end up with nothing. But that would serve you right for getting too greedy, and next time you’d know that a bird in the hand is worth three in Shepherd’s Bush.

  A lot of people who get into acting or music do it for the girls (or the boys) they wouldn’t have a shot at otherwise. I’m not being flash when I say that this was never what it was about for me. I already knew how to talk to a girl – or pull a bird, or whatever way you want to put it – so I never had that problem.

  I’m not saying it was easy, because it wasn’t. In fact, it was hard work. Looks weren’t my forte. No girl worth having was just gonna see me on the dance floor of the Tottenham Royal and think, ‘Oh, he’s lovely.’ We’d have to have a talk if I was going to get anywhere. That’s why going to gigs never appealed to me, because the music was so loud you couldn’t talk to anyone, and you (or at least I) couldn’t pull a bird if she couldn’t hear what you were saying. Me and Tony Yeates or whoever else it was would be more likely to give the big-band night at the Southgate Royalty a try, which was like a throwback to the forties. Or when we were a little bit older, we’d go to the Goldmine on Canvey Island, where they did all the Glenn Miller stuff.