Young Winstone (6 page)

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 yourself 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.

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.