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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
All in all, Hannah Durham was an amazing old girl, and I could see a lot of the characteristics of my sister Laura and my auntie Irene, my dad’s sister, in her. Not that either of them have ever had syphilis, but I’ve got a lot of strong women in my family. Obviously my mum’s is a different line, but it’s the same on her side as well. We’ll get to my maternal grandma and her three husbands in the next chapter . . .
In the meantime, the long and the short of it is that the men in my family seem to like marrying strong women, probably because we need them to keep us in line. But the other thing I realised standing in that old Hawksmoor church – and I know this might sound overly romantic, a bit pony even – was the depth of my family’s connection to the area.
My dad was born in Hoxton. You could definitely hear the bells of St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside from there, so that makes him a proper cockney. And as I’ve said, the family had been basically there or thereabouts since the 1700s, until his generation started to move away in the late sixties. Yet now, just a few decades later, I’ve got cousins in Dunmow, Braintree, Watford, Bushey, but there’s none of us left inside the M25: we’ve all got let out for good behaviour. How and why that change came about, and what it meant to us and to others, is one of the main subjects of this book.
I still think of myself as an East Londoner rather than a Londoner. And as I was driving in to do that filming in Spitalfields from where I live now, out in Essex, I seemed to pass places that had some relevance to mine or my family’s lives every few hundred yards from Whipps Cross onwards. None of the actual people are there any more, but that doesn’t make the memories any less vivid. It might even bring them through more strongly – after all, you don’t need to remember things that are still happening.
We were a big old tribe, and when I was a kid we used to have a big get-together more or less every Sunday, but now we’re much more dispersed, and the unit has kind of contracted much more to immediate family. My cousins all keep in touch, but I’ve been guilty of letting that go a bit in recent years. The way people perceive you is part of it as well. You start living in a bigger house and they’ll tell you, ‘Oh, we went past yours the other day’, so you’ll say, ‘Well, why didn’t you fucking knock on the door?’ But if the door’s behind a security gate, then the fact that they don’t knock on it is as much your fault as anyone else’s, isn’t it?
Looking back now, I can clearly see the staging posts by which the old closeness started to leave us. When my mum and dad brought me back from Hackney Hospital in the winter of 1957 (the building’s still there, up on Homerton High Street – I think it was the tall Victorian-looking wing to the east, not the lower section where the entrance is – but last time I looked they’d turned it into a nuthouse in my honour), they didn’t have a home of their own yet. From what I’ve gathered, there was never any question but that the three of us would stay in the flat in Shore Place with my dad’s parents for a little while after my birth.
At a time when families would generally stay in the same place, nans and granddads were the nucleus of everything – everyone else would circulate around them. Now they just tend to get left where they are when everyone moves away, and then you see ’em when you can. It’s no wonder they get a bit grumpy. I feel lucky to have grown up at the tail-end of the old way of doing things, because the world of my childhood could not have wished for a better focus than my granddad Charles – Toffy they called him, I suppose because he was a bit of a toff – and Nanny Maud.
He was a real one-off, my grandfather; an old-fashioned gentleman. I’m sure a lot of people say that about their grandparents, but in this case it was definitely true. Toffy was a short, wiry man who always dressed immaculately and never forgot to lift his hat to the ladies as he walked down the road. By all accounts – at least, all accounts of his own – he was the man behind the modernisation of tic-tacking (the complex sign language for communicating bookmakers’ odds which you used to see John McCririck doing on the telly, until Channel 4 Racing gave him the Spanish – as in Spanish Archer, the El Bow). I think he definitely simplified it, him and another fella . . . there’s always another fella.
Nanny Maud was a similarly upright individual. I think she’d run a café as a younger woman, but by the time I came along everyone called her ‘The Schoolteacher’, because she had a lovely proper way of talking. She wasn’t all gorblimey, she was much more ‘telephone voice’. Even nowadays, when you meet the really old East London boys and girls, I find they have that almost Dickensian style of speaking which is nothing like how I sound. There’s still an accent, but it’s all very clipped and correct, and it’s a beautiful thing to hear.
I don’t have any specific recollections of sharing a home with Toffy and Maud as a child, because we moved out of there when I was about a year old. But some of my happiest early childhood memories are of the days when Maud would take me to the toy shop in Mile End – just by the junction where they’ve put that silly grass roof over the main road – and buy me Airfix kits, or the Batmobile with a Bat-boat that fired little rockets out the back. And in my teens I’d actually end up living with my granddad for a year, which would turn out to be one of the most influential, as well as the funniest, times in my life.
Hospitals take away as well as giving, and in my early teens Nanny Maud would die in the same place I’d been born. She had a fall and never quite got over it, and I don’t think the family could ever forgive Hackney Hospital for the feeling that a bit more could’ve been done. I was a kid on the cusp of being a young man by that stage, and I remember the sombre, grown-up mood of the family gathering in the Jackdaw & Stump – the pub just along the high street from the hospital – when everyone had come up to visit Nan together after her fall.
We were all worried about her, and at times like that you obviously feel an atmosphere of foreboding in the air, but I don’t think any of us realised how big a change was coming. People often think of the granddad as being the head of a family, but I think it’s the nan, really. Obviously once she’s gone, you still go and see him – and Toffy did a pretty good job of managing by himself, he even got himself a nice girlfriend after a while – but you can see how lost the men in the family are once the maternal mainstay is gone. From then on, there’s less and less reason for everyone to get together, and the whole family starts to break up.
It was probably a good job I didn’t know all that on the day of her funeral, because I was upset enough already. This was the first loss I was old enough to really feel properly. I remember being outside the flats where all the flowers were laid out ready to be taken to the cemetery, when I heard some local kid ask ‘Who’s dead?’ quite rudely and I lost the plot. I couldn’t cope with that at all – it seemed very disrespectful – and things went pear-shaped for a few seconds, before I was told in no uncertain terms to keep quiet and have a little bit of dignity about myself.
‘Who’s dead?’ is never the right question to ask, though, is it? If someone says, ‘Who’s passed?’ you can tell they’re making an effort, but ‘Who’s dead?’ is just too brutal. That’s not to say there’s no room for levity when someone’s died. Quite the reverse. I remember it used to be a big event for my dad and his mates – and we still do it today – when someone would say, ‘There’s a bit of underground sports on Thursday.’ What that means is there’s a funeral, and a funeral means a wake, which means a blinding party.
The funny thing about ‘underground sports’ is, it’s OK for us to talk about them, but we’d still reserve the right to take it amiss if someone else did it at the wrong moment. I love that kind of hypocritical cockney morality. That is very much the tradition I was brought up in, like with the old boys off the docks, they’d be telling you some great stories and effing and blinding all the way through (the expression ‘swear like a docker’ doesn’t come from nowhere), but heaven help you if you swore in front of their wife on the bus: ‘’Scuse me. . . ’scuse me. . . oi! ’Scuse me! Not in front of the wife.’ I do