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Young Winstone. Ray Winstone
Читать онлайн.Название Young Winstone
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782112440
Автор произведения Ray Winstone
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
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.
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