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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
Whoever she ended up marrying, mason or otherwise, Nanny Rich never stopped being her own boss. I believe she made fur coats for the Royal Family, although that is the sort of thing that sometimes gets said without too much evidence to back it up. She definitely made them for Donald Campbell, though – the Bluebird man who held the land and water speed records simultaneously and died in that terrible crash on Coniston Water – which is no less impressive in a way, as Campbell was renowned for enjoying the good things in life, and no doubt knew a nice bit of fur when he saw it.
This is probably as good a moment as any to tell the story of my childhood brush with another snappy dresser: Ronnie Kray. I think how my dad knew the twins was that when they were kids they’d all boxed at the New Lansdowne, a club on Mare Street in Hackney which my granddad Toffy was on the board of. Reg and Ron were actually pretty good boxers before other more nefarious activities began to take precedence.
I was still a baby the day Ronnie Kray came round to Caistor Park Road to see my dad, but I’ve been told this story so many times that I can see it unfolding in my head. Obviously everyone’s on their best behaviour, but then Ronnie picks me up, and by all accounts I’ve pissed all over him. He’s got a new Mac on, which has probably cost a few bob, and I’ve absolutely covered it. Everyone’s laughing. Well, not at first. At first they’re all thinking, ‘Fucking hell, he’s pissed on Ronnie Kray!’ But then Ronnie cracks up, so everyone else knows it’s safe to join in.
Cups of tea get drunk, and him and my dad have a talk about whatever it is they need to talk about, and then everyone breathes a sigh of relief when Ronnie leaves. The Kray brothers hadn’t yet reached the peak of their notoriety by that time, but people still knew who they were. The funny thing was that earlier on the same day my dad had got in a row with a bloke who lived up the road, and after Ronnie fucked off to get his coat dry-cleaned, this guy came round going, ‘Look, we’ve only had an argument – there’s no need to bring them into it.’ Obviously there was no way my dad would ever have done that. If he needed to have a fight with a bloke up the road, he was quite capable of doing that on his own initiative, without calling in the Krays for back-up.
Readers are entitled to a measure of curiosity about what mutually advantageous business Ron and Ray might have been discussing. There was a time while I was still very young when my dad was possibly up to all sorts, with or without Ron and Reg, but I think something happened that he didn’t like when he was out with them in Walthamstow once. He only told me this years later – and even then in quite a cryptic, Edwardian kind of way – but I think my dad saw someone get stabbed, fairly brutally, and he just thought it was unnecessary. When is that kind of violence ever anything else? But for my dad I think that was the moment he thought, ‘Not only is this wrong, but also it ain’t for me.’
He wasn’t going to be joining the Salvation Army any time soon, but from the time I was old enough to remember, he was mostly working on the markets. Not only my dad’s two brothers but also most of his friends seemed to work in either the meat market, the fish market or the fruit market, so we never went hungry. My dad started off on the meat at Smithfield Market, but then moved to fruit and veg. Either he got caught nicking something, or they were trying to guarantee the family a balanced diet (given that his brother Kenny already had a butcher’s).
There was a fair bit of ducking and diving going on in those days. It still wasn’t long since the end of the war, and people needed a bit of a lift – especially as even though we’d won, we seemed to be rebuilding places like Berlin and Munich (which had admittedly been smashed to pieces) before we got started on our own cities. At that time people reckoned that the best job was the bread round, because you’d get your wage and pay your little bit of tax – whatever that was at the time – but you’d also have your own bread. That was your bunce. It was allowed. The company knew it went on but turned a blind eye, and the bread-man lived a good life.
It was the same on the docks, where a few of my dad’s friends who didn’t work on the markets seemed to earn a crust. There they even had a name for it: ‘spillage’. A box would get dropped, and whatever the contents were, the people working there were allowed to keep. I suppose that kind of thing would be looked upon as theft today, but I prefer to think of it as ‘garnish’ – that little something extra which meant we didn’t go hungry and always had a shirt on our back and shoes on our feet.
My dad’s eldest brother Charlie was doing a little bit better than that. He’d got a job in the print when he was younger. Those jobs were so well paid that what they used to do was sub them out – some geezer would give you half his wage if you let him take over from you, and that gave you money to go and do something else. Charlie went on to own his own factory which upholstered settees. He was very generous and would always give us a ten-bob note every time we saw him. He usually had nice cars as well – often those big old Rovers that look like Bristols – and he’d let my dad borrow them sometimes if we were going somewhere nice.
I think Maud and Toffy might’ve lost as many as three kids (ages ranging from infant to young child, and at least one of them to whooping cough, which was rife at the time) to leave them with just the three boys and my auntie Irene. That was the main reason people had bigger families in those days – to cover themselves, because you were probably going to lose a few.
Laura and I had plenty of other ‘uncles’ who weren’t genetically our uncles to make up the numbers. A lot of them worked in the fish market at Billingsgate, like Frankie Tovey, who was a Catholic, and Ronnie Jacobs, who was Jewish. We were Church of England, but people’s religious denomination was something you only tended to find out about later in life. Like with my best mate Tony Yeates: even though we basically grew up together from my mid-teens onwards, I only found out he was a Catholic when he got married. No one ever knew, and I think London’s always been a bit like that. It’s one of the great things about it in a way. Basically, who gives a fuck?
It was the same with my dad’s mate Lenny Appleton – ‘Apples’ everyone called him – who was gay. He was a terrific guy, always immaculately turned out, and all the girls loved him, but no one ever worried about who he was having sex with. I’m talking about a load of hairy-arsed geezers here who didn’t give a fuck for anyone. They were the chaps – out pulling birds and doing what they were doing – and what Lenny got up to on his own time just wasn’t a problem for them. When someone’s your mate, they’re your mate, and that’s all there is to it.
I found out some interesting things about the situation with homosexuality in old London – and sexuality in general – when I was making that TV show about Hannah Durham. It turned out that people in those times were much less prudish than we tend to think of them as being, and than we are now. It was only towards the end of the Victorian era that everyone started to get more buttoned up.
In terms of public life, everything was still pretty much under wraps by the fifties, but looking back at the way Apples was accepted by my dad and his mates, it gives you a fresh perspective on people who weren’t necessarily highly educated. They weren’t moving in the supposedly enlightened circles of the art or literary worlds. These were geezers who worked in markets and had their own street education and would often be presented as quite brutal – shouting ‘Fucking poof’ at Quentin Crisp in TV dramas or whatever – so it’s quite refreshing to realise that they weren’t always like that. In fact, it was a shame the people who actually had power in the country weren’t as tolerant as my dad and his mates. People who come from where I come from don’t get to make the laws, we just get to break them.
There was a tradition on my dad’s side of our family of naming eldest sons after their father, so my uncle Charlie’s son got called Charlie-boy. My dad – as those of you who are on the ball will already have noticed – was Ray, so a lot of my relatives used to (and still do sometimes) call me ‘Ray-Ray’ to differentiate between us. When I got a bit older, my dad’s mates also used to know me as ‘Little Sugs’, because his nickname was ‘Sugar’, in honour of the great