Young Winstone (11 page)

Amateur fights last for three rounds of three minutes each, which might not sound like much, but believe me it’s long enough when someone’s trying to hit you in the face from start to finish. Nowadays they force you to wear head-protectors, but I never did and I still wouldn’t want to if I was starting out now. I think they make boxing more dangerous, rather than less. Head-protectors are there predominantly to stop you getting cuts, but the cuts aren’t really the problem in terms of the long-term damage people sustain from boxing. It’s the shaking of the head and thence the brain which is the worst thing.

If you haven’t got a head-guard on, you can see everything. The most fundamental technique in boxing as far as I’m concerned is the slip and miss, which is the way you pull your head inside or outside your opponent’s punches. Once you’ve put your head-guard on, you may have covered your brow and your chin, but at the same time you’re a bigger target, so even when you slip, you’re still getting hit. What that does is shake your head, which is the one thing you really don’t want to happen. I’ve thought this for a long time and a lot of people agree with me, but unfortunately not the ones who make the rules. If it was down to me, I wouldn’t even use head-guards for sparring. I think they do more harm than good even then.

A lot of the boys who started at the Repton around the same time as me I still see to this day. Among my group were: Billy Jobling, a great fighter who came out of the Isle of Dogs; Glenn Murphy,
who became an actor on
London’s Burning;
my mate Tony Yeates, who came over to the Repton from the Fitzroy Lodge club, which is south of the river; and a guy called Tony Marchant, who ended up as a writer. We had some brilliant moments together, and you don’t keep people as friends for forty-odd years unless you have a special bond with them. For me it’s a kind of moral code that they all share – boxing taught them to be old-fashioned gentlemen.

When the club was originally founded, in 1884, it was more or less a missionary outpost for the Derbyshire public school it was named after. The idea was to come to the East End, which at that point was considered a dangerous slum, and impart Victorian discipline to the lawless inhabitants by teaching them the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules. Obviously there’s a paternalistic element to that, but paternalism is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially when it gives you tools you can use any way you want. It was no coincidence that so many of my mates from the Repton went on to succeed in other fields, because our time there gave us psychological resources we could fall back on for the rest of our lives.

In a way, the impact the Repton had on us was very similar to the one Anna Scher’s children’s theatre (which she started up the road in Islington in the late sixties) was having at around the same time on another bunch of unruly Londoners – Ray Burdis, Pauline Quirke, Phil Daniels, Perry Benson, Tony London, Kathy Burke – many of whom are still my mates to this day. Anna would take kids who were maybe lacking a direction in life and getting in a little bit of trouble and give them something creative to focus on. The only difference was that she was doing it from a left-wing political perspective, which wouldn’t have got you very far in the fight game.

Obviously people tend to think of a boxing club as a violent place, and the Repton’s Latin motto, ‘Non Viscera, Non Gloria’ (‘No
Guts, No Glory’), would do nothing to change their mind. But the club crest doesn’t have a dove of peace with an olive branch in its mouth by accident, because one of the main things going there taught me was how to mix with a group of people as a unit, even as a community. Those who try to put boxing down as more brutal and less evolved than other pastimes have a hard time explaining away the fact that it was probably the first sport where there was no colour bar.

That’s not to say Jack Johnson aka ‘the Galveston Giant’ had an easy time of it after becoming the first African-American world heavyweight champion in 1908. Obviously his marrying a white woman went down like a sack of shit, but no one could take away from him the fact that he had been World Champion. And when I think back to being fourteen years old in London in the early seventies – how things had changed over the course of a decade or so from the first time I saw a black man in the street who wasn’t Kenny Lynch, to maybe a bit of a feeling of ‘them and us’ developing – I know how much I’ve got to thank boxing for. Because once you’re mixing with people on the same wavelength, what used to be ‘them and us’ suddenly just becomes ‘us’.

Boxing certainly showed football the way in terms of being the first truly integrated sport. In fact I think it’s only just about catching up now. To say West Ham crowds did not always extend the friendliest of welcomes to visiting black players in the seventies would be putting it mildly, but at least we were the first British team ever to field three black players at the same time, when Clyde Best, Clive Charles and Ade Coker all played against Spurs in 1972.

I was at Upton Park a few years later to see West Brom’s more celebrated black trio – Brendon Batson, Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis – who the Baggies’ then manager Ron Atkinson
famously, if perhaps unhelpfully, dubbed ‘The Three Degrees’. That day I saw one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of someone defusing a situation, which is not a skill I’ve always – if ever – had. Brendon Batson was down in the corner at the South Bank end when someone chucked a load of bananas on the pitch. He simply picked one up, peeled it, and ate it, and the whole stand clapped him.

That sort of thing used to happen all over the country, but Chelsea was the worst place I ever went for it – I suppose they’ve always been a bit less cosmopolitan in West London. Their fans used to call it 0–0 if one of their black players scored, ’cos a black geezer shouldn’t be playing for them. His own fans! I remember going there with a mate of mine once when they were playing Leicester and a whole stand stood up and Sieg-Heiled. There were grown men of fifty doing it who were old enough to have fought in the war. It was fucking disgraceful.

Boxing was the first sport that, I believe, dealt with the problem of racism without even consciously approaching it; it approached itself, in a way. No one ever said, ‘There will be no discrimination in boxing’, it just kind of happened. I suppose because people were constantly in a one-on-one situation, or just training together in the gym, they couldn’t help finding out, ‘Hey, you’re just like me.’ Maurice Hope was older than me, but he was someone I really looked up to, and boxing opened up all our minds by sending us out into the world with a common identity to take with us.

CHAPTER 10

CHRISP STREET MARKET, POPLAR

When my dad had his grocer’s shops – first in Enfield, and then in Watford – my mum used to come in and work with him. I’m pretty sure she lost a couple of kids during that time – not because she was working so hard, it was just bad luck. There was definitely one morning when she had to be taken home from the shop in Bush Hill Park because she’d miscarried, and I had a sense of it happening another time as well, even though it was never talked about. Dwelling on such things was not encouraged in those days, and even though she must have felt sadness about this loss, she never shared it with us.

The Old Man had a good spell with the shops and we lived well for a few years, but the fruit game was changing, with the supermarkets squeezing out everyone else. I was still only a kid but I think what made his business start to go tits up at the shop in Watford was when they put a new one-way system in so no one could park nearby any more. My dad probably hung in there for a bit longer than he should’ve done, because that shop was his pride and joy and
he’d got a good living out of it. So in the end it totally ironed him out. He had no option but to go back out on the markets.

He had some mates who still had stalls so he started off working for them on various different markets – which wasn’t something he’d had to do much before – until he got back on his feet. Me and Laura never went hungry, but there must’ve been a couple of years when the family was a bit financially challenged. My mum put a shift in too. She got a job collecting the money from fruit machines – not in a strong-arm kind of way, she was meant to be doing it – and inadvertently she taught me a useful scam.

On the old big machines, when you got a ‘hold’ you could fuse them out by pouring your Coca-Cola or lemonade over the buttons, and then they’d just carry on paying out until the machine was empty. This was something else I never looked upon as thieving. It’s not as if the fruit-machine business is run on principles of good will to all men, anyway – it was just another kind of spillage. The money did come in handy, but you couldn’t do it too often in the same pub, and sadly it doesn’t work on the new machines.  . . not that I’ve ever tried it, obviously.

The areas my mum was working in, mainly Hoxton and the bottom end of Islington, were quite rough at the time, so someone from the pub would usually escort her to the car. The sort of woman my mum was, if someone had come up to her and demanded the money, she wouldn’t have been the one to risk her life by not giving them the bag. She’d probably have said, ‘Here you go, son, take it’, because money’s not that important – at least, it’s not when it’s not yours. I guess there’s always an element of danger any time you’re collecting cash, but it’s the cash that makes it dangerous, not the place you’re picking it up. That said, in somewhere like Hoxton, life might actually be more dangerous for the person who’s
trying to nick it, because they don’t know whose fucking place they’re ripping off.

Returning to the markets was obviously a bit of a needs must for my dad. It wasn’t a world he’d totally left behind, but he’d got pretty respectable with his shop in Watford and now he was having to go all over the place just to make a crust. Chrisp Street in Poplar is not necessarily somewhere you’d be setting up if you had any choice. But I was delighted, because I was old enough to go and help him now – on Saturdays, and maybe a day or two in the week sometimes as well – and as far as I was concerned, we were going home.

Obviously, you’ve got fewer overheads in that situation because you’re just buying daily and selling what you can. Well, usually you’re buying daily. If things are really tight, you might have to nick a bit of stock here and there to make up a deficit. I remember once we were a bit short of cash so we had to steal some tomatoes at Spitalfields Market. We had to have them away or we’d have had nothing to sell.

My dad kept the guy busy while I loaded the big old barrow with Canary tomatoes. Unfortunately I piled it too heavy at the back – I was only about fourteen at the time, and I suppose my eyes might’ve been bigger than my arm muscles. When the time came for me to have it on my toes, I came out of the market at top speed with the barrow behind me, hit the cobbled street, and the weight of it threw me what felt like twenty or thirty feet in the air. I seemed to be up there for ages – I was waving to the man in the moon – and by the time I finally landed in a heap with tomatoes splatting on the ground all around me I was lucky I hadn’t burnt up on re-entry.

There would have been murders if we’d been caught, so we made as rapid an exit as possible, and I probably got a clip round the ear for my foolishness afterwards: ‘If you’re not any good at it, son, don’t do it.’ The way I was brought up was that if you owe someone some
money and you’re too skint to pay ’em back, you should usually front up and go and talk to them, but I suppose there were times when you have to find a way of earning the money to pay off the debt and you just have to do what you have to do. I remember us going to Covent Garden instead of Spitalfields to buy stock once or twice, which seemed perfectly natural at the time, but looking back it probably meant there were people on our usual plot we didn’t want to run into.

These occasional incidents of ducking and diving probably gave me a head-start when the time came for me to play a gullible mechanic in
Minder
a few years later, but as a general rule my dad was no Arthur Daley. He was a grafter and he expected me to be the same, so when we arrived at Spitalfields at four in the morning there was a strict rule that we’d have to buy all our bits and get the lorry packed and tied up before we could stop for a nice cup of tea and a bacon roll.

Then we would head off to Chrisp Street or Roman Road or wherever we had a pitch and we’d have to pull the stall out and dress it. Cutting the cauliflowers was the worst job, especially in the winter. It used to get so cold that to this day I find I can’t wear gloves in normal life, because if I put them on, my hands just start sweating.

Obviously, working on markets is no picnic. Sometimes you can stand around freezing your arse off all morning and come home with absolutely nothing. When I used to go to work with my dad, I knew that if we had a bad day I wouldn’t get paid. Those were the rules of the job and I had no qualms about them. Well, I say that now – at the time I probably thought, ‘Fuck it, I was going out tonight’, but I knew that was the way things were done when you were part of a family business, and every now and then when you had a blinding day you would definitely get looked after.

The principle of ‘fair’s fair’ also covered giving my mum housekeeping. ‘Raymond, you’ve gotta do the right thing’ were words drummed into me from an early age. Even if sometimes you borrowed it back by the end of the week, it was the gesture that counted – showing you knew you shouldn’t take your food and lodging for granted, just because it was your parents who were giving it to you. My mum and dad shared that work ethic, and they’ve passed it on to me.

I remember falling back to sleep once after my dad had woken me up early to go to the market and getting a bucket of cold water thrown over me to make sure it didn’t happen again. That gets you out of bed pretty sharpish, I can tell you, and it’s another one of those childhood lessons that’s stayed with me. I’m a stickler for timekeeping to this day. If I’m going anywhere I have to be punctual, if not early – it’s almost an illness. And even if I’ve not gone to bed till four in the morning, I’ll still be up with the sun. It’s unheard-of for me to be asleep after nine in the morning.