Young Winstone (8 page)

My dad used to bring them in old coats and shoes sometimes, but you could guarantee that the next week they wouldn’t have them any more, because they’d have sold them to buy meths. He wasn’t the only one on the market who used to do this, either. Other people would bring them out a bacon sandwich or an egg roll. The methers did get looked after, they just didn’t look after themselves.

I remember standing by the Cage once with my dad and Billy and Johnny Cambridge. They were two of his mates from over the water – not the Irish Sea, the Thames – and they used to have a painted cab with horseshoes on it. Quite a few of the South London greengrocers were a bit gypsy-ish, and the Cambridges were wealthy fellas and grafters with it. I remember Billy having a row with a one-armed mether once – the geezer pointed to the stump where his arm used to be and said, ‘If I still had that, boy, I’d put it on ya!’

Anyway, Billy and Johnny were nice guys, from a really good family. And we were just standing there having a fag (well, the men were – I’m not sure I’d’ve been allowed one at that age) when an articulated lorry drove into the Cage without looking carefully
enough and ran straight over one of the tramp’s legs in his sleeping bag. The worst part of it was, this old boy was so cold and rotten with meths that he never even woke up. Hopefully that meant he didn’t feel the impact, but it was a horrible thing to see – never mind hear. He was still alive when they took him away in the ambulance, but he was in for a nasty surprise when he eventually woke up. I’ve had some pretty serious hangovers in my time, but nothing on quite that level.

Spitalfields in the late sixties and early seventies was a rough, noisy old place, but it was definitely alive. When I first started going there I was only a kid, so I wasn’t really old enough to understand the politics of it all. Everyone would make a fuss of you, but sometimes you’d get a sense that there was a bit of an edge to it when someone from a different firm came over.

I was walking down the market with my dad one day when a fella went to doff his cap to us. Bosh! My dad knocked him out. My jaw was on the floor – just like the other geezer’s was, but for different reasons. I was thinking, ‘What’s he done that for?’ But it turned out a lot of the lorry drivers from up North used to carry a razor blade in their cap, and if you crossed ’em they’d whip it out and cut you with it. Obviously something had gone on between them before and my dad needed to get his retaliation in first.

Apparently they used to hide razors in their lapels as well, so if you grabbed their jacket and went to nut them, the blade would cut your hands to pieces. I think it’s an old Teddy Boy thing, but the lorry drivers used to do it too. All sorts of nasty things could happen if you got on the wrong side of the wrong people in that market. I never saw this done myself but I heard about people getting their legs held down across the kerb and broken the wrong way, or
someone getting a pencil through their eardrum. It wasn’t like there was any reason for that to be happening to me, but the fact that some real tough guys worked on that market was definitely a big part of the character of the place.

If you go to Spitalfields now, the atmosphere could hardly be more different. There are new shops, which certainly don’t take triangular tokens, where A. Mays and the Cage used to be, and while there’s still a market, it now sells clothes to tourists on one day and antiques or artworks on another. The basic layout of the whole covered section is pretty much unchanged, but it’s all been tidied up so much that it’s hard to believe it’s the same place. It’s kind of recognisable and unrecognisable at the same time – like a big crab shell that a smaller sea creature has moved into after the former resident has departed.

The same thing’s happened at Covent Garden, the old fish market at Billingsgate was moved out to the Isle of Dogs years ago, and it won’t be long till the meat market at Smithfield follows. Sometimes it’s a shame things have to change. Many of those men I met at Spitalfields as a kid were members of families who’d passed stalls down from father to son since the time of Henry Mayhew’s coster-mongers and before, and yet now all those traditions which have come down across the generations have disappeared.

I’m not one of those people who believe nothing new should ever be allowed to happen, though. And some of what went on in that place we’re probably better off without. I never actually saw my dad come off worse in any of the tussles he had, but everyone does some time, and it’s much better to be coming home from work without lumps and bumps all over you. I wouldn’t want to paint a picture of him as someone who was constantly having rows, but those are the stories you tend to remember.

When my mind turns to happier times, there’s a holiday in Bournemouth that always comes back to me, for some reason. One day – I think it was a bank holiday Monday – we got the boat across to the Isle of Wight. Dad was never great on boat trips and when we got to the other side where there was a coach waiting to take everyone round the island, he said, ‘We’re not getting on a coach, let’s walk round the island.’ He had no comprehension of how big it was – I think he thought it was like the Isle of Dogs – ‘Of course we can walk round the Isle of Wight. It’s a dot on the map to us. You get on your coach and we’ll have a little bit of proper . . .’

We were only kids at the time, and the minute the coach drove off, the realisation hit us that this place was not only huge, it was also pretty desolate. What’s more, nothing was open ’cos it was a bank holiday, so we were basically going to be stuck there for the next seven hours. As it turned out, we ended up having a blinding day. We found this little hotel which was willing to take us in and give us a bit of dinner. We played football and flew a kite. I think it was that make-the-best-of-it attitude that the English have when we’re not moaning about everything which saw us through.

All nearly didn’t end so well, though. We had the dog with us, and at one point we were walking along the top of some cliffs when Brandy came to a hole in the sea wall and jumped right through it. I looked over the edge and I could see him disappearing like in a cartoon – sailing through the air to land on his chin with his legs splayed out all around him. I knew he was dead – there was no way he could’ve survived that fall. But just like that indestructible Labrador on the Southend road a few years earlier, he got up, shook himself and found a path to run all the way back to us. It was fucking unbelievable – who did he think he was, Superdog?

Some other holidays I look back upon really fondly were with my nan and granddad. I was probably nine or ten when they took us to the Ocean Hotel in Brighton, which was like Butlins’ flagship hotel. There was a fancy dress competition and I went as a billboard – it was my first big advertising job – while Laura was the Queen of Hearts. We watched
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
at the cinema club in the afternoon (I’ve always loved John Wayne and I still think he’s a very under-rated actor). And I remember Maud and Toffy dancing together in the evening – my granddad was a terrific dancer and loved spinning Nanny Maud round the floor.

A couple of years later – it must have been right at the end of the sixties – they took us on our first foreign holiday. We went to Arenal in Majorca, and I loved the freedom of being abroad right from the off. You can get the paella, but if you don’t fancy it, they still eat egg and chips just like us. Granddad would still always have a tie on when he was on the beach – they would, the old guys, they always looked immaculate – and he couldn’t pass a woman without lifting his hat, even if she was only wearing a bikini.

CHAPTER 7

RONAN POINT

Early on the morning of 16 May 1968, an old lady who’d recently moved into a newly built East London block of flats lit a match to get the stove going for her morning cup of tea. The gas explosion that followed sent her flying across the kitchen and left her shaken but miraculously unharmed. That should’ve been the end of it, but weaknesses in the just-completed building caused the whole southeast side of the block to collapse with a human toll – four dead and seventeen injured – that would have been much higher if most of the flats hadn’t still been unoccupied.

This disaster made a huge impression on me at the age of eleven because it happened on our old patch – just down the road from Plaistow, on the way to Custom House. Looking back, I can see it also had a wider significance. It was certainly poetic justice that the block concerned had been named after a former chairman of Newham council’s housing committee (I didn’t know that at the time, I just Googled it), because the now infamous Ronan Point became a symbol of the huge mistakes that were made back then in building the new accommodation that East London, and Britain as a whole, so desperately needed.

We wanted homes building – and quickly – but instead of houses, they gave us prisons in the sky. I realise that some of the architects and town planners responsible were probably quite idealistic people, but it was easy for them to be idealistic when they didn’t actually have to live in these places. Those gaps where the bombsites were should have been filled with the kind of properties that would have enhanced the communities that already existed. Instead, whole streets of perfectly good houses were demolished and everyone was shipped off into these fucking great big concrete tower blocks.

Not only did these new high-rise buildings split up communities and separate people from the neighbours they’d lived with all their lives, they also – as the Ronan Point disaster demonstrated – weren’t very well built. However idealistic some of the original plans might have been, a lot of the good intentions got lost in the transition from two-dimensional drawings to three-dimensional reality. It wasn’t just government cost-cutting that did the damage, there was a lot of skulduggery going on as well, with a lot of the money going into the wrong people’s pockets via the old secret handshake.

Obviously this wasn’t bothering the Winstone family too much in our nice new house in Enfield, but when I’d go back to Plaistow to visit my old mates, I could feel the landscape changing. My memories of growing up there were very much low-rise – you could see the sky, it wasn’t all huge blocks looming up over you, and there was much more of a village mentality. But once they started turfing people out of their old terraced houses and moving them into these new flats, no one knew who lived next door to them any more. Sometimes it almost felt like a divide-and-conquer thing.

Going back there started to get depressing as more and more people moved on. The last time I went back there on a Red Bus Rover I was probably thirteen. By that time I only had one mate left
living on Caistor Park Road. His name – and I’m not making this up – was Micky Ghostfield. A field of ghosts was what that place was starting to feel like to me, and when I went back to knock for him, the fucker lived up to his name by blanking me. He might as well have answered the door with a white sheet over his head. I guess he hadn’t seen me for a while and didn’t want to know. I suppose I can understand it in a way, but then again, if you’re reading this, Micky, fuck you.

One place out East I never got tired of going was Shoeburyness. In the summer holidays we would basically be shipped off there for six weeks. My mum would come with us and then my dad would drive down for the odd weekend because he’d be working. I remember going up the OAPs’ club with my nan quite a lot. Sometimes me and my sister would get up and do a song to entertain the troops. You’ve got to have your party piece, and we had some great parties at home and at our aunties’ and uncles’ houses at that time, when everyone would get up and sing.

After a few years in Bush Hill Parade, my Old Man progressed to a bigger shop up in Watford. My dad was always known for having a great flash. I’m not being personal, that’s what they called the display of produce you’d use to entice the punters into your shop. The apples would all be beautifully polished, and he found a way of putting mirrors in at the back of the shelves to make the fruit look massive, so people would come in just to look at it. It was like fruit and veg CGI.

As his operation got bigger his overheads would’ve gone up too, but as kids we never felt we were going without anything. He must’ve felt pressure to pay the bills and put food on the table, and we could tell by the way he walked up the front path if he’d had a bad day. He didn’t get the hump with us as much as with himself, but I remember one night when he came home and we’d already got the
message that he was in a bad mood. Then Mum put his dinner on the table and he just threw it straight out the window.

There is an anger in our family, which for my part I like to think I’ve learnt to control much better these days, but it’s taken me a long time. We’re argumentative and stubborn and tend to have short fuses. My mum was the exception to that – she was very good at letting Dad have his tantrum while never letting there be too much doubt about who the real boss was. They did have rows, but it never got physical or violent.

Well, I suppose it depends on how you define violence. Some people think shouting and screaming or throwing things is violent, but I don’t. It’s what you’re used to, isn’t it? If you live in a quiet house, then someone raising their voice can be more shocking than a full-scale barney would be somewhere else. I think our way of doing things was quite healthy, really, because nothing got bottled up. There’d be a huge slanging match and next thing you knew we’d all be on the sofa, hugging each other and crying at the Sunday afternoon film.

My dad only properly hit me once in my life, when I was caught cheating in a school exam. I had done it, so they’d got me bang to rights. I came home from school to see the letter on the mantelpiece, so I had it on my toes rather than face the music. Obviously that only made the situation worse. By the time I finally got up the courage to go back home it was about ten o’clock at night. My dad opened the front door, and before he’d even finished asking me where the fuck I’d been, he’d gone bosh, and chinned me. I probably deserved it, and the message his punch delivered has certainly stuck with me: ‘If you’re not good at it, don’t fucking do it.’ That’s a very pragmatic moral code: not ‘don’t do it because it’s wrong’, rather ‘don’t do it because you’re not good enough at it not to get caught’.