Young Winstone - Ray Winstone

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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.

      Next up were Argentina. Geoff Hurst played in that one and Antonio Rattín got sent off. We did well to hold our tempers as Argentina were scrapping like animals, but then Bobby Moore put the ball down quickly and flicked it up for Geoff Hurst to nut it in, and Argentina were history. It was almost like a dress rehearsal for our first goal in the final. By then a measure of optimism had really started to take hold, but Eusébio’s Portugal were still favourites to knock us out in the semis. They were blitzing everyone, but Geoff Hurst and Bobby Charlton both scored and now England were in the final.

      When that great day came I had more than a vague idea of what being 1–0 down to the German machine meant, because I could still feel the clip round the earhole I’d got off the copper for playing in one of the bombsites they’d left. There was a lot of historical friction and a real sense of them being the old enemy, so going 2–1 up just set you up for the emotional sucker punch of them equalising. I remember almost crying when they pulled that goal back – which wouldn’t have been the done thing then, although you see dads doing it as well as kids on Match of the Day all the time now.

      The sense of pride when we finally did them at the end of extra time was amazing (that’s where the voice of Kenneth Wolstenholme butts in, even though I wasn’t listening to him at the time), especially as three of the most important members of the team – the captain Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst who scored a hat-trick and Martin Peters who scored the other goal – were West Ham heroes. To see Bobby Moore holding up the trophy with his chest puffed out at the end of that gruelling game was an experience I’ll never forget.

      The funny thing is that when you’re nine years old, the euphoria of actually being World Champions seems perfectly natural. We’re British and we won the war, so it’s sort of expected that we should win the World Cup as well. Forty-eight years later, I can look back on that feeling from a more worldly-wise perspective. I suppose the era I was brought up in was basically the end of the British Empire, but we still felt like a force in the world. We had The Beatles, we had the World Cup. We were kind of alright.

      Times were still hard for a lot of people, but the economy was doing pretty well. Our family’s improving situation was probably a good example of the way people from working-class backgrounds could get on in the mid-sixties. Although I was pissed off to have had to leave Plaistow, I had a lot to be thankful for.

      We’d moved into a really nice four-bedroom George Reid house. My parents had paid four and a half grand for it, which was a lot of money at a time when the average weekly wage wasn’t much more than £16. It was the equivalent of buying a house for £750,000 today, which was obviously a bit of a stretch, but my mum and dad were, for the moment at least, on a much sounder financial footing than they had been. On top of that, they’d gone thoroughly legit.

      Ever since the nasty incident in Walthamstow with the Kray brothers, my dad had backed away from the ducking-and-diving side of things. That can’t have been easy, because there was quite a romantic image to it in those days, but I think there comes a time when you’ve got a family that you don’t want to be shitting yourself every time there’s a knock on the door. He stepped back from all the other bollocks and concentrated on going to work, to the point where he’d been able to step up to running his own grocer’s.

      His first shop was in Bush Hill Parade, just outside Enfield, which was why we ended up moving there. The impetus for the move came from Mum. She’d got Nanny Rich’s genes after all. Whereas my dad – no disrespect to him – was quite set in his ways, and if left to his own devices might have been happy staying in a council flat in Hackney all his life. Although I didn’t know this at the time, my sister told me recently that my mum just sold our home in Plaistow without asking him. Some blokes came around making offers on a lot of people’s houses for buy-to-let and she just turned it over to them and went off and picked out the house in Enfield without saying a word to Dad. Then again, if she had asked him, he probably would’ve said no.

      Either way, Mum was the motivator, and even though I wasn’t too happy about the move at the time, there was no denying we’d gone up in the world. We had a nice bit of garden now, and after we’d been in Enfield for a few years we got a bar installed in the front room – the forerunner of Raymondo’s, whose doors are still always open in my house to this day – with one of those Bobby Moore World Cup ice buckets. Everyone had one of those, or at least every West Ham fan did. Bobby was standing on the brown-coloured ball holding the World Cup, then you’d lift him up and all your ice would be in there.

      We got a dog as well. He was a Boxer (I suppose that ran in the family) called Brandy. He was soppy as a bag of bollocks with us – you could do what you liked with him – but if anyone else came within range, he’d mullah ’em, even when he got so old he only had one tooth left.

      They say your porn name is your first pet and the first street you can remember, which makes mine ‘Brandy Caistor’. I reckon I’d do alright with that, then if I wanted to redefine myself as an actress and go a bit respectable later on in my career, I could always change it to ‘Brandy Caistor-Park’, which sounds much more distinguished. Brandy was a clever old bastard as well. The dustmen used to tease him in the alley where the bins were, so he worked out how to back up and make it look like his lead was tighter than it was, then when the dustman came to torment him, Brandy had him on the penny and gave him a right good biting.

      When we’d lived in Plaistow, one of the

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