Young Winstone - Ray Winstone

Скачать книгу

car, you just had one. You could do that then – thank God you can’t any more, because I don’t want anyone just taking mine. One of my dad’s cars (well, I say it was his . . . we certainly used it a lot) – a black Ford Zephyr – ended up in a pond at Victoria Park once after someone had nicked it and used it on a blag.

      We’d jump in the car (whichever one it was) all suited up and looking nice to go off and meet the cousins while Mum would stay at home and cook the dinner. Even the mums who wore the trousers had to miss out on a lot of fun in those days, on account of their place still being in the home. My aunties Irene, Barbara (Charlie’s wife) and Joycie (Kenny’s wife) would all be back in their kitchens cooking up a storm, while their kids Scott, Spencer and Becky, Charlie and Maureen, and Tracey and Melanie came down to Hackney to meet us.

      We’d go up to the flats first to see Granddad and Nanny. Obviously she’d have to stay at home to cook the dinner as well, so it would just be Toffy who came down to the New Lansdowne Club with us. It was a proper old East End gaff – a working men’s club with a snooker table and a boxing gym. My granddad had been on the committee so he had a lot of mates there, like Archie who could hit you with either hand. A few of them and maybe some of Charlie’s pals would come and join us until there was quite a gathering.

      All the fellas would have a drink and a chat and the kids’d be fucking about and getting up to mischief, messing around on the drumkit. Someone might even get up and sing a song – me and my sister would do ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ or Sonny and Cher’s ‘I Got You, Babe’, and one of the uncles might give us a bit of Sinatra. Then we’d all head home in time for our separate Sunday dinners at three or four in the afternoon – there was never too much traffic on the roads on a Sunday.

      I had a few tussles at the Lansdowne with my cousin Charlie’s sister Maureen, who was a couple of years older than us and even trappier than I was. She’s my cousin and I love her to death, but we did used to bicker a lot. That said, I remember one time when we were visiting her mum and dad in the Barbican, and me and Charlie were getting bullied by a gang of older kids, Maureen went and sorted them all out – shut them right up with a couple of swift right-handers. It’s a good job she wasn’t born a geezer because then she’d have been even more dangerous.

      After we’d moved, being in Enfield exile made those weekly trips to the Lansdowne something to look forward to even more. It wasn’t actually much further to bomb down the A10 than it had been to drive over from Plaistow, anyway, and going there to see all the family felt like going home. When I went back to have a look at the old place again recently the building was still there – walk south down Mare Street past the Hackney Empire and the town hall and it’s on your right – but there were boards up all around it.

      I’m hoping someone’s got some Lottery funds to restore it, because I know it had fallen into serious disrepair. There were a load of depressing photos online showing how it had been squatted by some junkies who’d made a horrible mess of the place, but you could still see the beautiful interior underneath. If I had the money, I’d do it up myself.

      CHAPTER 6

      THE CAGE, SPITALFIELDS MARKET

      My new primary school in Enfield was called Raglan, and as I may already have mentioned – probably three or four times – I didn’t like it much there at first. Things only began to look up once I got into the school football team. We were a pretty good little side and managed to get to a regional cup semi-final. We lost 2–1 in that but my mate Colin Bailey scored.

      Even as young as nine or ten, I was already looking for any excuse to get back to East London. So when my dad asked me if I fancied getting up early and going down to Spitalfields Market with him before school, I jumped at the chance. It wasn’t really to work at that age, it was more just to meet his mates – they’d all bring their boys down to see how life was and show them there’s a great big world out there. This was at the time when he had the shop in Bush Hill Parade, so we’d be back for Dad to open it and for me to get to school. The other kids would be at home having their Ready Brek and I’d be down the market, drinking in the local colour – a commodity of which there was not a shortage, in fact ‘colourful’ is the politest word you’d use.

      Spitalfields Market was as formative an educational experience as any boy could hope for. I used to shadow-box down there with a real gentleman called Sammy McCarthy, who had boxed as a pro and will turn up in the story again later on in somewhat less happy circumstances. There were a lot of old fighters around who my dad had known as kids, and I’d have a spar with them all. My dad’s pal Archie Joyce’s older brother Teddy would throw a few imaginary right hands for me to fend off, and that’s when the ‘Little Sugar’ nickname really started to stick.

      Another thing I loved down there was the special market coinage which you could only spend in A. Mays, the big shop on the corner. It came in triangles and 50p shapes, but before the 50p had even come out – I suppose they were tokens more than anything – and I saved loads of them when I was little. Until recently I still had thousands of them in boxes and tins in the garage that I was going to polish up and get framed, but then when I was having some work done at home the fucking geezer threw them on the fire and they all melted. I could’ve killed him.

      The breakfast you’d have on that market early in the morning would taste better than you could get anywhere else on earth. To this day I still love a bacon roll – a good crusty white one with brown sauce in it – and the place we’d get them was the Blue Café. It’s not there any more, but it was just up from Gun Street, along the south side of the market, and it was owned by Vic Andretti’s dad Victor – we called him Uncle Victor. His son, who was a mate of my dad’s, won a European boxing title, and gave me the gloves he wore, which still had the claret on ’em.

      By coincidence it was outside Uncle Victor’s café that I saw the longest street-fight I’ve ever seen in my life. Two fellas had what we used to call a ‘straightener’, which is like a formal stand-up bare-knuckle fight where someone’s got a grievance and everyone backs off to let them sort it out. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating – and I probably am a bit, because I was only a kid – but I swear this fight went on for twenty minutes. Now, that might not seem like a long time to you if you don’t know anything about boxing, but if you think that even a fit professional fighter will be blowing after a three-minute round, then you can imagine that twenty minutes without a break feels like a lifetime.

      Not that they didn’t have the odd pause for breath, because when one of them knocked the other down, he’d stand and wait for his adversary to get back up. Every time someone got knocked over it was almost like the end of the round. There was no kicking anyone in the head or anything like that – it was all very courteous and old-fashioned. All the guys were standing round watching, and I was there with them, a small boy with a bacon roll.

      By the time those two were done it didn’t even seem to matter who won any more. At the end they both shook hands and went in the café to have a nice cup of tea, and everyone was clapping them and saying, ‘Blinding fight.’ Obviously this is a very romantic notion of what violence should be like, but that only made it more impressive to see it actually happen. In a strange way it was a beautiful thing to watch – two men just being men – but it was also pretty scary. I wasn’t much more than ten years old at the time, and they were really going at it: I mean, this was a severe tear-up, but it was still some way short of being the most unnerving thing I saw happen in that market.

      Across the way from the Blue Café was a place called ‘the Cage’, which was where all the big lorries pulled up to load in and load out. That was also where the methers – the tramps – used to burn the bushel boxes to keep warm. They’d all be sleeping around the fire in the winter with big old coats on. You don’t see meths drinkers so much now – it’s like it’s gone out of fashion. I suppose they’d be crystal methers now. Maybe the news has finally broken that drinking methylated spirits is bad for you – I think the clue was in the way they coloured it blue and purple.

      The meths drinkers used to have their own hierarchy, with different pitches and guv’nors who sometimes used to fall out among themselves and have a ruck.

Скачать книгу