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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

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