Young Winstone (25 page)

Phil Mayhew, who was on the camera, did hand-held all the way while I walked down the stairs, took a sock out of my pocket to put
the billiard balls in and then hit poor old Phyllis over the head with ’em. Because subconsciously you know there’s not been a cut, even people watching with no interest in how films are made think, ‘How the fuck did he hit Phil over the head and not kill him?’ I think Phil was thinking that too.

Here’s how we did it: there was a geezer lying on the floor by the door who swapped the sock with the balls for another one – containing ping pong balls in
papier-mâché
– as I walk in. We still have to have some weight in it so you can see I ain’t giving Phil a chance when he turns round and I go whack. It’s the shock of it that makes it effective.

I’ve not said too much about the technical side of things in this book, because I’ve found that the more I’ve learnt about those aspects of film-making, the less I enjoy actually watching a movie. And I don’t want to put you lot through the same pain I’ve suffered. One thing I do think is that we don’t give audiences enough credit for being willing to be challenged by something real. I remember when Hollywood made a more commercial version of
Scum
called
Bad Boys
– with Sean Penn in it – they swapped the billiard balls in a sock for a pillow-case full of Coca-Cola cans. I suppose there might’ve been a bit of product placement going on there, but I don’t think it was very credible.

By the time we got to the second
Scum,
Alan Clarke was manipulating us quite mercilessly to get the level of realism he wanted. When it came to the race riot in the borstal hall he went up to all the black kids and said, ‘Listen, all the white guys are going to have a go at you here.’ Then he told the rest of us to ‘watch the black kids – they might be gonna stick it on ya’. They were alright that lot – I think they’d come out of a youth club in Leytonstone – but they were definitely there to do a job, and there was never much doubt about what was going to happen as soon as someone said, ‘Action!’

I remember saying to Francis – who played Baldy, the black guy I use the tool on in the film – ‘Are you with them or with us?’ When he said the latter I thought, ‘Thank God for that! He’s a second dan karate expert.’ It was actually Phil Daniels who saved me from getting a belting in that scene. One fella came at me and as I chinned him he grabbed my legs and pulled me down on the floor. They were all piling in on top when Phil pulled me up and got me out of there, laying about him all the while. That’s one of the things I love about Phil – he’s a game little fucker who takes no prisoners, especially when he’s got some red wine inside him.

I’d had my last little go at the boxing by then. After a couple of years away I’d found that I missed it and wanted to get back in the ring. As comebacks go, mine went better than Ricky Hatton’s but not as well as George Foreman’s. Having left the Repton I trained at the Black Lion in West Ham, an excellent boxing gym with a blinding pub attached. My first fight was in the old Territorial Army place on the side of West Ham Park. I got off to a good start but I wasn’t fully fit yet, so I ran out of steam halfway through the second round. I tried to batten down the hatches as I was probably ahead at that stage, but it was too long to last and I lost on points.

You think you’ll be a bit wiser two years on and your mind will be working better, but I found I’d lost some of that speed I’d had before. There’s a natural kind of fitness you have in your late teens – especially if you’re not drinking too much yet – which gets much harder to maintain by the time you’re in your early twenties, so I wasn’t in much better shape by the time I got to the second fight.

That was in the old Tate & Lyle sugar factory, the big white building in Silvertown. I think they were renting it out for events to try and make a bit of money, because the docks had more or
less gone by then. The night in question was a West Ham boxing club show and I fought a guy called Chris Christiansen – not Kris Kristofferson, he’d have been singing.

Chris was a pretty solid performer who went on to win the Southern area title, but by now I was a bit less ring-rusty so I just about managed to pull through. I still wasn’t fully fit, so I had to hold him a lot in the last round – I needed something to lean on by then, anyway. I know Chris didn’t think I’d won it, but he had a head as big as Bournemouth and I couldn’t miss it. Either way, once I’d staggered out of the ring at the end of that fight I knew the game was up. As soon as I won, I retired.

Stanley Kubrick used some of the old warehouses up that way to film his Vietnam movie
Full Metal Jacket
a few years later. The funny thing about that was that we always used to know Dagenham as ‘The ’Nam’, anyway, so a war story about a bad night down there – which there were plenty of, as that place was almost as bad as Beirut – was always a ’Nam flashback.

That last fight was it for me as far as boxing was concerned. Although I still enjoyed socialising with people from the fight game, the only time I put my gloves on again was for a long boxing sequence in the ITV series Fox, which I’ll come back to a bit later on. Once I was with Elaine I didn’t need to get in the ring to take a bit of punishment any more, anyway. All I had to do was come home late. And when she’d come for me with those verbal volleys, there was no time to put my head-guard on.

Not long after
Scum
was finished, I got a last-minute call from the producers saying the film was being shown in Cannes and they needed me and Alan out there quick. They couldn’t get us on a normal flight, so they’d chartered a little three-seater to get us from Gatwick to Nice.

We must’ve looked a right odd couple on that runway. I know what I was wearing, because I recently found a photo taken just before I left. I was modelling a smart college-boy look with a crisp pair of cream Sta-Prest, brown brogues, a pale green linen shirt and a Pringle-type jumper, topped off with some nice blond highlights in my hair (well, it was nearly the eighties). By way of contrast, Alan was probably the unsmartest man in the world. I had a great time with him, but he wouldn’t know how to put a bit of clobber on if you paid him.

On that occasion he was wearing cowboy boots and three-quarter-length flared jeans with a crusty roll-neck jumper, and a velvet jacket with a little tear at the back. His hair was all curly and it didn’t look like it’d seen a comb in a while, never mind a blond highlight. Factor in our very different accents – his Scouse and my London – and it was obvious we weren’t brothers.

Alan never gave a fuck about money or success. After
Scum
he got offered six movies out in LA, including
The Omen II.
He was sitting in a shed down the bottom of someone’s garden out there, trying to work out what to do, then he just said, ‘I can’t have this’, and came home. He shunned Hollywood to make the documentary-type films that he really believed in back in the UK instead. All power to the man – he was another Ken Loach as far as I was concerned.

Alan was ill at the time of that Cannes trip. He had yellow jaundice, and probably shouldn’t have been leaving the house, let alone getting in a very small plane. I love flying now and I’ve been up in Spitfires and Mosquitoes since, but at that stage the idea of strapping myself into a metal coffin was quite new to me, and it was hard not to be struck by how fucking tiny that plane was.

The weather wasn’t looking too clever either. And as we were standing around waiting to get introduced to the pilot in the VIP
bit of Gatwick, it was all starting to feel a little bit Buddy Holly. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want this plane to go down now I’ve just cracked it.’ Living fast and dying young worked alright for James Dean, but that’s no reason for me to be doing it.

At that point the captain came out to meet us and I was reassured by the fact that he had the biggest moustache I’d ever seen – a proper old RAF handlebar, like a rear-gunner in a Lancaster would’ve had. So we got on the plane, with me and Clarkey in the two seats at the back and him at the controls in the front. The take-off was OK, but once you’re properly flying in one of those little planes you feel yourself dropping out of the sky every time you hit an air pocket.

It was a three-and-a-half-hour flight. At times it felt like it would’ve been quicker to go by car as the pilot negotiated his way around a series of storms. About halfway through, Clarkey leant forward – don’t forget he’s got yellow jaundice – and said to the captain (and you’ve got to read this to yourself in a really strong Scouse accent to get the full picture), ‘Eh, Captain, you know, could you drop down a couple of thousand feet so I can have a piss out of the window?’ Understandably, the captain’s not having that, so I give Clarkey the sick bag and say, ‘Do it in that, Al.’

Now he’s got to stand up to take a piss, but the problem is the plane is too cramped for him to do that, so he ends up all bent over. He whacks his cock out into the sick bag and pees into it. I’ve got to say that the smell from the yellow jaundice is diabolical. I’m gagging, the captain’s moustache has drooped, but Clarkey’s feeling very relieved. Finally we come into Nice airport and the captain taxis the plane round the runway. At this point he’s supposed to see us off and show us where to go, but instead he just opens the door and runs away. He’s had enough of us, so he’s just fucked off.

Me and Clarkey haven’t got a clue what to do, so we’re just wandering around on the runway – if that happened now you’d probably get shot. Eventually we find our way into the terminal, and at this point it suddenly dawns on me that we’ve left Alan’s piss in the sick bag on the floor of the plane. When that pilot gets back onboard for the return flight, he’s in for a nasty surprise.

Once we finally made it to Cannes, our accommodation went up a couple of notches. We were staying on Don Boyd’s boat. Don was the overall producer of the film – who’d just got Clive and Davina in to do the donkey work – and this was the first of several great trips abroad he took me on. Don was someone I had a lot of time for. He’s one of those big figures in the British film industry – like Jeremy Thomas who I ended up doing
Sexy Beast
with – without whom very little would ever actually happen.

It was very exciting being at Cannes for the first time. After what happened with the TV version being banned, the idea of the second
Scum
even being shown in a cinema seemed very unlikely to me. Now all of a sudden I was in this mad glamorous world with the Palme d’Or and all that stuff going on. There were film stars everywhere – I was the only one I didn’t know.

Alan Clarke was the perfect person to share that experience with, because however much of an outsider I thought I was, I could never be as much of one as him. That didn’t stop him making the most of his opportunities, though. Fuck me, that man loved a bird, and they were still attracted to him, despite what he looked like.

Clarkey could talk to anyone, he just had that way about him. I remember the film I really loved which was out at the time was a vampire comedy called
Love at First Bite.
The first time I saw it (in Margate with Elaine when I was filming Fox) I was laughing so much it made me cry. So you can imagine how excited I was when
I saw the star of it, George Hamilton, standing outside the Carlton Hotel in all his Transylvanian gear and the make-up and everything. I pointed him out to Alan, who must’ve smiled at him as he walked up the steps, because George Hamilton – thinking that he knew him, even though they’d never met before – said, ‘Hello, how are you?’

Actors in those situations usually pretend they know everyone, because otherwise they get too stressed out trying to remember whether they actually do or not. Alan would’ve known this and was happy to take advantage of it, so he was standing there with George Hamilton going, ‘’Ow’s the kids?’ And then they got into some big debate about something. That was what the whole week was like, and even though I’ve been back to Cannes on a bigger budget a few times since, you never forget your first time. Especially not if Clarkey’s involved.

CHAPTER 22

HACKNEY MARSHES

In between my first brushes with the international jet set, I was still doing the same kind of things I’d always done, like trying to stay out of strife at the Charleston or the Two Puddings in Stratford, or playing Sunday football on Hackney Marshes. As a consequence of going to school in Enfield, I’d had to play a lot of my football in alien territory, where people’s skill and understanding of the game were frankly not up to the level I had been raised to expect. But once I was a bit older and back in East London, I was finally in a position to put that right.

Hackney Marshes was the place I liked to play best. It’s amazing the way the pitches stretch out into the distance, and if you’re one of those East Enders who doesn’t leave your manor too much, that might be one of the biggest open spaces you ever get to know. You can’t let the sense of freedom go to your head, though – you have to keep your wits about you. I remember playing there once when a car drove onto the pitch next to us and tried to run one of the players over. Maybe England might have more of a chance at the World Cup if we were allowed to do that. Either way, there were a few shooters flying about that day on the Marshes. A couple of the games stopped
to watch, but it was the ones which carried on as if this was a perfectly normal everyday occurrence that made the biggest impression.

I’d like to be able to say that at the time I was taking a similarly level-headed approach to how well things seemed to be going with what was now officially my acting career. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be true. I didn’t carry on being the same no-nonsense down-to-earth geezer I’d always been. When I saw myself in the finished version of
Scum
– more or less holding my own with a lot of much more experienced and technically gifted actors – I didn’t think about how much I still had to learn, I decided I was Jack the fucking Biscuit.

Going to America with Don Boyd probably didn’t help in that regard. Because
Scum
was kind of the big underground film at the time, my first trip to New York found me moving in very different circles to the ones I was used to. Don took me to the Mudd Club, which was full of all these fucking strange people. Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees was there being ‘punk’ – which seemed to be a bit of a pose where everyone had to look really solemn and try to fuck everyone else off. She seemed like a bit of a prat to me at the time but I’m sure she was just doing her thing.