LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER 2

      CAISTOR PARK ROAD, PLAISTOW

      When I started writing this book the first thing I did was go back to the street I lived on as a kid. I wanted to have a look around to see if people or incidents I’d forgotten would come flooding back to me. What I couldn’t get over was how much smaller everything was than the way I remembered it. Obviously when you’re little you’re down at hedge and gate level, so the world looks massive to you, but there was more to it than that. Going back to Plaistow now, it feels very quiet and suburban, whereas in my childhood there seemed to be people everywhere, and something was always happening.

      Of course at that time – in the late fifties – the London docks were still working at full speed and strength. The southern end of our road wasn’t far away from the Royal Victoria and Royal Albert Docks, so a lot of the hustle and bustle of the neighbourhood (not to mention the odd bit of unofficial bounty from shipping crates that had accidentally on purpose fallen open in transit) could be traced back to there.

      The docks are long gone now, or at least the idea that anyone would use them for unloading stuff from boats is. But my home from the age of one to the age of eight – 82 Caistor Park Road, Plaistow – is still very much there, looking more or less unchanged over the intervening half century.

      It’s a boxy, two-storey house near the end of a terrace. When we first moved in, we lived upstairs while an old lady and her sister kept the ground floor. Then after my sister Laura came along – in February 1959 – the Winstones took over the downstairs as well. There was never a bathroom (I’m assuming they’ve got one now). We had an outside toilet in the small back garden, and a tin bath would come out in the front room when it was time for a scrub-up.

      In my early years my mum had to keep me on reins, because as soon as I saw daylight, I’d be off like a greyhound out of the trap (my eldest girl Lois was the same). But from pretty much the moment Laura and I were old enough to walk around unaided, we played outside in the street all day. There were very few cars about in those times, and we still had a milkman with a horse-drawn cart. He’d come round the corner at a set time every morning, and since all the kids knew he was coming we’d have plenty of time to put bricks in the middle of the road so he’d have to go round them like he was doing a slalom, shouting, ‘You little bastards!’ as he went.

      At the north end of Caistor Park Road was, and is, the main drag down to Stratford, and beyond that thoroughfare stretches the wide open space of West Ham Park, which is still a lovely bit of grass to have a walk around. Returning to the area now, I can see that the houses at the top of the road tend to be much better finished off, whereas our bit is more of a khazi. Don’t go down my end – it’s a shithole.

      I don’t recall it being that way when I was a kid, but then again, in my memories the sun has always got his hat on. Even though my rational mind knows Londoners were still afflicted by deadly pea-souper fogs at that time, all I can remember is clear skies and long days of unbroken sunshine.

      In my mind, Plaistow in the early sixties is like one of those adverts filmed in New York where it’s a hot day and someone knocks the top of the fire hydrant off, except done the English way – with a hosepipe. Over the years you do colour your memories in a bit (at least, I have done), but I’m going to try and keep them as toned down and close to reality as possible. Obviously you’re only going to be seeing things from my point of view, because that’s what an autobiography is all about. But I realise there’s at least one other side to a lot of these stories – just ask Matthew McConaughey – and if someone’s given me another perspective, I’m not going to hold back on it.

      For instance, I look back on myself as a little boy and I think I was alright, but my aunties always tell me I was a right little fucker. I’ll insist I was a nice kid and they’ll say, ‘No, you were an absolute fucker – always up to something.’

      Now that must be true, because it’s not the sort of thing they’re gonna make up, so I have to start thinking about how they might’ve got that idea. I do remember there was a little parade of shops round the corner from our house where I used to sing for the greengrocer and he would give me a banana – well, every showbiz career has got to start somewhere, hasn’t it? I was still in the pram, so I couldn’t have been that old, but one day I sang for him and he didn’t give me one and I told him to fuck off. My mum would laugh telling me that story years later, but she was embarrassed at the time because she very rarely swore, so wherever I’d picked that word up from, it hadn’t been from her. And ‘No, you’ll have no banana’ was my first bad review. There’ve been a few more since . . .

      In Plaistow in the fifties and sixties, there used to be a shop on every corner, and the one change to my immediate childhood surroundings which I really couldn’t get my head round when I went back on my fact-finding mission was that the old corner shop is now just a normal house. The shopkeeper’s name was Mr Custard, which was obviously a gift to us as kids. He had a big shock of unruly white hair and looked a bit like Mr Pastry. We used to terrorise him, going in there and shouting ‘Cowardy, cowardy Custard, can’t eat mustard!’ You know what kids are like. I feel quite sorry for him now, as he was probably a nice old boy.

      A lot of good people lived on Caistor Park Road. A couple of doors up from us was a girl called Sylvie who lived with her mum – I don’t remember a dad, and there might not have been one. She must have been in her mid-teens and she used to babysit for us and take me up the park. One day, before my sister was born, she was pushing me to the swings in my stroller when a geezer jumped out in front of us and flashed her. I was only a baby, so I don’t seem to have accrued any deep psychological scars, but when my parents told me the story they were still really impressed that she hadn’t just fucked off and left me. She was a lovely girl, Sylvie, and it was very sad that a few years later she committed suicide. I always hoped it wasn’t what happened in the park that day that upset her.

      Everyone living on Caistor Park Road knew everyone else, and all the stuff you always hear about windows being left open and it being OK to leave a key hanging behind the door was still true. There was even an old girl living on her own over the way who my mum used to cook dinner for. She had no connection with our family, other than that she lived near us. I know this sounds corny, but people looked after people. They really did. Every time you went out of the house in the morning you’d see women doing their steps and their windows. I know that sounds a bit chauvinistic now, but how can it be a bad thing for people to have taken pride in themselves and in their community?

      Our home was always spotless, inside and out. My mum made sure everything was in its place and everything was done properly. She’d learnt that from her mother, who was not a woman to be trifled with.

      My nan on my mum’s side was called Dolly Richardson, but she was always Nanny Rich to me. We called her Nanny Rich because she was . . . rich. By the time I was born, she owned a fair bit of property in the Plaistow, Manor Park and Forest Gate areas, and I think it was down to her that we ended up living where we did. She was a furrier by trade – not a farrier shoeing horses, a furrier making coats – and she’d done well enough to move out of East London to Shoeburyness, just along the Essex Riviera from Southend, after the war. There are a few fur coats left in the family somewhere, but obviously you can’t wear ’em any more because someone will throw paint over you. I presume there must have been a few quid poking around when Nanny Rich – God rest her soul – eventually went away in the early eighties, but I never saw any of it.

      Nanny Rich was married three times – once more than old Hannah Durham – and she outlived all of her husbands. We’d started to look at her in a different way by the end. Her short-lived first husband, my auntie Olive’s father, wasn’t my grandfather. That was Husband Number Two. My mum’s dad was Mr Richardson (no relation to the notorious South London clan), but he died before I was old enough to really get to know him. By all accounts he was a very tall man, and the only one in the family who ever fought in the First World War. True to form for my family he came out of it in one piece, but it’s possible his death in the late fifties may have been caused by the lingering effects of mustard gas forty years before. I remember being in bed one night and hearing my mum distressed

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