Young Winstone (12 page)

Although as I said I was really pleased to be working at the market again, sometimes I used to moan about getting up early for work – especially if I’d got a bit of a hiding in the boxing ring the night before – but once we got there I loved getting to grips with the various personalities of the different markets we used to go to. Roman Road in Bow, for instance, was a funny old market, because it was only on Thursdays and Saturdays, not Fridays. It could be desolate there sometimes on a Thursday, especially because we were stuck at the Old Ford end, which is quieter than the Bethnal Green end.

We had a yard there just round the back of a little kids’ clothes shop called ‘Trendy’, and there was a blinding old boy who used to work with us called Sammy Keyworth. I think he was Jewish and he’d make this kind of ehhh noise when he spoke, a bit like Blakey
from
On the Buses.
One of my jobs at Roman Road was to take the orders to the other stalls. I’d have a big bag to carry with potatoes, carrots and cauliflowers on the bottom, softer fruit and veg higher up, and grapes on the top.

One time I’d taken them all up the road and delivered them when I saw from the look on my dad’s face as I returned that I must’ve taken them to the wrong people. As I turned to walk away and give him a chance to cool down, a cauliflower hit me full bore on the back of the head. I was laid out sprawled across the middle of Roman Road – I know cauliflowers aren’t normally thought of as weapons of mass destruction, but you know about it when one of those fuckers hits you on the canister. It was a bit harsh, but I never made the same mistake again, and I’ll always have these two cauliflower ears to remember it by.

There was a nice girl who worked on one of the other stalls. Our eyes used to meet across the Roman on a regular basis, but I was a bit too shy to talk to her. Then I met her one night out and about somewhere and we had a lovely little evening together. It was weird though, because the next time I saw her on her stall we both went back to being exactly how we had been before. We liked each other too much to actually have a conversation.

Rathbone Market in Canning Town was a rough old place – not much chance of romance there, especially as our pitch was opposite the fish stall. Luckily we didn’t hang around for too long, although I used to like the fact that we still knew a few people in that manor, because it was just down the road from Plaistow.

Chrisp Street in Poplar was a bit further from where we used to live, but that didn’t stop it becoming my gateway to Upton Park. We used to work there quite regularly with Terry Brown, who was one of my granddad’s tic-tac mates. All those families knew each
other, and me and Terry’s son Billy would take it in turns to go up to the Boleyn Ground for West Ham home games. I’ll save that for the next chapter though, to give fans of lesser teams a chance to prepare themselves for the thrill of another visit to the Academy of Football.

This market offered a further exciting diversion in the form of a stall where I bought my first ever records. ‘Speed King’ by Deep Purple was one of them. I don’t know why, ’cos I was never really into heavy metal. I just thought the song was alright. Then there was ‘The Resurrection Shuffle’ by Ashton, Gardner and Dyke – I still love that to this day – and ‘Banner Man’ by Blue Mink, whose singer was that black girl with big teeth, what was her name? Madeline. I think that was the other side of ‘Melting Pot’.

While we’re on the subject of melting pots, I’m not a Catholic – although my wife Elaine is – but there was a young priest who used to walk through the market wearing a West Ham scarf. He used to have a rabbit with everyone, he was a real character. The thing about working on markets is, even when you’ve had to get up at two or three in the morning at the end of a week of school with a couple of nights of boxing training thrown in, you can’t help noticing people. You’re in a unique position in a way. It’s very much a man’s world, but at the same time you’re having a lot of conversations with women, because they’re the ones buying your produce.

You’ve got to learn how to talk to people the right way, or you’re never going to sell anything. So when it got towards the end of the day and I’d have to ‘bang up’ some cauliflowers – which basically means shouting and screaming to let everyone know you’re taking the price down – the pressure would really be on. You know you’ve got cauliflowers left that will go pear-shaped before you get another chance to sell ’em, and no one wants a pear-shaped cauliflower, so
you’ve got to holler, ‘Come on, girls, lovely big juicy ones, two bob a time’, and you’ve got to make it sound convincing.

If you’re ever on a market and you hear people doing this, you’ll probably notice the way their voice sounds, which is usually like they’ve just taken a deep breath, even if you know they haven’t. That’s because you need to puff out your chest like it’s full of air as a way of showing confidence, the same way a robin does if it’s having a fight in your garden.

Banging up is not an easy thing to do as a teenage boy, especially if you’re at that age when you’re not exactly sure which way your voice is going to go at any given moment, and you’ve got all these girls looking at you waiting for you to make a mistake. You know what they’re like, women. ‘Ooh look, he’s made a mug of ’isself’ – they love that ’cos it gives them one up on you. Once you know you can do it, though, it gives you confidence in other areas of your life. I suppose it’s a bit like boxing in that way, or at least it was for me.

When I was fourteen, there was a girl I really fancied at school, a lovely little Jewish bird. I won’t name her, because she’ll know who she is and it’ll be embarrassing for her, but when I found out she was doing a school play I thought, ‘I’ll have a go at that – get in there.’ The play was
Emil and the Detectives,
and I played the newspaper boy. On paper, this was a nothing part, but it turned out to be a first step down a happy path of doing exactly what I’d normally do and calling it acting. I’m not saying I’m still on that path today, but it certainly took me a fair way in the right direction.

All I had to do was walk through the audience acting like I was selling them papers. This gave me the perfect opportunity to have a pop at the headmaster, Mr Hudson. I could dig him out by saying that he looked like Hitler dressed in his baggy suit – ‘You wanna sort
yourself out, son’, something a bit saucy like that – and he couldn’t do anything but pretend to find it as funny as everyone else did.

The whole place was laughing and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I like this.’ My mum and dad came as well, and I think it was probably seeing how much I was into it that gave them the idea of me going to drama college. But I still had another year or so of banging up, doing the markets two or three times a week and generally being up and down the A10 like a whore’s drawers before that would happen.

CHAPTER 11

THE BOLEYN GROUND, UPTON PARK

The first football match I went to that wasn’t the 1966 World Cup was to see Southend play at Roots Hall with my uncle Len. I was always mad for West Ham – still am – but I look for Southend’s results to this day, and not just because I live in Essex.

I don’t have any specific recollection of the earliest times I went to Upton Park (or the Boleyn Ground in Upton Park, as it’s officially called). I suppose it’s like with a car or train journey that you’ve done your whole life – all the repetitions blur the edges of the pathway to the memory in your brain. I used to love the atmosphere of the night games, though. There was always a real buzz about the place. And the time I started going regularly, or at least to every other home game, was when me and my mate Billy Brown would take turns on the Saturday afternoons we worked at Chrisp Street Market.

It was only a bus-ride up the road, and I’d sit on the step on the side of the South Bank. Sometimes if it was quiet our dads would let me and Billy go together, and later on I started going with my mate Tony Yeates from boxing. But I never minded going on my own
either. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, and you were part of a big crowd, anyway.

There was much more of a fun atmosphere at the Boleyn Ground in the early seventies than you get today. I find football fans in general nowadays are much more cynical and angry than they used to be. I don’t know why, but I presume it’s something to do with the Premier League, because it’s only happened over the last twenty years or so. West Ham used to get beat a lot in the past as well, but then some of the abuse you’d hear them getting would make you laugh, whereas now there’s a rage in it that makes you catch your breath.

I remember when Alan Curbishley was manager a few years back. He’d been a great player for us, and was a West Ham boy through and through. He comes from a big Canning Town family and his brother Bill was manager of The Who and producer of
Quadrophenia.
There was no reason for people not to like him. OK, Alan had been at Charlton before, but that’s not exactly the crime of the century and he’d done a good job there. And yet the coating he’d get off the crowd used to stop you in your tracks. I remember thinking, ‘Fucking hell! That’s a bit strong’, and it wasn’t just me. It got to a point where one guy was giving him so much abuse that all his mates had to tell him to sit down and shut his fucking noise.

You never really got that at football years ago. People would make the odd funny remark and everyone would be laughing, and then you’d get all the firms having little rows, but that would be it. Maybe it’s stopping the violence at football that’s made it more miserable, because the anger’s got to come out somehow.

Even though I was going to Upton Park regularly throughout the seventies and eighties – what you’d probably consider the ‘golden age’ of football violence, if football violence could have a golden age – the hooligans and all that never really interested me. I suppose
the ideal thing would’ve been the Inter City Firm (ICF), but I didn’t know anyone who was in it because I didn’t live round there any more – a lot of them were Canning Town boys too – and I don’t think I’d have been involved, anyway. I had too many other things I wanted to do.

The funny thing is, I do know a couple of those old ICFers now. They’re wealthy businessmen, because they got in on the rave scene in the early days and made a lot of money. I think they’re mostly in clothing these days, so at least something good came out of it all in terms of economic benefits for the area, and there’s no denying they were a proper firm in their prime – better than Tottenham, anyway.

The main thing about football violence is that it’s very territorial, and I never really saw things that way. Maybe if we’d stayed in Plaistow it might’ve been different, but by the time I was in my early teens I was so used to bombing around London on trains or Red Bus Rovers that the idea of defending one bit of turf against another didn’t really make much sense to me. I was never really one for being part of a gang, either in or out of school. Obviously there were gangs about, but I tended to knock about with two or three geezers, and if we were going somewhere, it was usually because we knew someone, so I never remember thinking we’d better watch ourselves in this place or that place, because there might be trouble (except in South London, obviously).

I suppose in a way – although I never saw it like that at the time – my parents did me a favour by moving us out to Enfield, because that stopped me putting my roots down so deep in one part of East London that I couldn’t go anywhere else. Me and my mates didn’t really have any boundaries we wouldn’t cross over. It was never like that with us. We weren’t really affiliated with anyone except each other, so we were at liberty to come and go as we pleased.

Tony Yeates was a good example of how freely we moved around, because when I first met him he was boxing for the Fitzroy Lodge club in South London, but then he moved over to the Repton because that was the place to be. He’s going to be cropping up a lot in this book from now on, because he’s one of my best mates. In day-to-day life I usually call him Yeatesie, but that looks a bit pony written down – if he was Yates instead of Yeates it would look better – so in print I’m going to refer to him by his full name for the purpose of guaranteeing him literary immortality.

Anyway, Tony Yeates came from Bow Common, which is between Bow and Poplar. They had a famous battle there once where a firm came out of the station carrying pick-axe handles and a load of Old Bill were waiting there with shooters – I think it was one of the first few times police had been armed like that on the British mainland. They shot one of the guys in the head and the bullet went between his skull and his skin and came out the back. It was all kept very quiet at the time. The official line was that the robbers had the guns, but I’ve spoken to people who were there and that’s not how it went down.

Obviously, none of this had anything to do with Tony, who was every bit as squeaky clean as I was. One of the great things about boxing was that it didn’t just give you a legitimate outlet for any tendency towards physical aggression which might have got you into trouble otherwise, it also gave you discipline, which stopped you doing the things that make teenage kids more likely to get into strife, like taking drugs or drinking heavily before you’re old enough.

Tony and I made up for lost time later of course, but when we were in our mid-teens we were too dedicated to our training to be falling over drunk or getting into fights outside the minicab office like a lot of the kids we knew from school would’ve been. Even a
few years later when the boxing had dropped off a bit and the lure of other distractions had begun to get a bit more powerful, we’d still meet up at West Ham gym for an hour before going out for a drink.

Looking after yourself is a habit that’s hard to break, and so is getting out and about. Boxing meant we had mates from all over the East End. A lot of people have their one precise patch they’ll hang around in – whether that be their street, their estate, or just a particular area or neighbourhood – but we used to go everywhere. West Ham, Stratford, Bethnal Green, Hackney; it was all the same to us. We’d even go somewhere like the Isle of Dogs (which should in theory have been totally off our plot, because it was Millwall) to see my mates Billy Jobling or Russell True.