Young Winstone (13 page)

Once we’d got a bit older, in our late teens, and were young men knocking about having a drink, Moro’s and the Two Puddings in Stratford and the Charleston out towards Maryland Point would become our main haunts. But sometimes we’d go further afield – even as far east as Southend or Canvey Island – to nick a bird. I know this sounds ridiculous, but at that age it felt like travelling the world. And once we came back to town, the whole of East London felt like home to us.

Back at school in Enfield I still wasn’t one of those kids who knocks around in a gang – I don’t mean big horrible gangs like the Crips or the Bloods, I just mean a big load of mates. It’s not for me to say whether that’s because I didn’t want to be, or because there was no larger group that would have me. But even when it came to school trips, it’d usually just be me and a couple of mates hanging around together. I suppose because I was always off training and had my own mates from boxing, I must’ve seemed like I didn’t really want to be part of the normal social life of the school.

I remember one skiing holiday, which my parents had kindly got the money together to pay for, when I looked around and saw that, well, it’s a little bit unfair to say it was me and the nerds, but I can’t think of another word that sums ’em up. All the kids who wanted to be off drinking and getting in trouble, which wasn’t really my cup of tea yet, were back at home doing whatever it was they were doing. I suppose going somewhere with a load of teachers didn’t seem cool to them any more. Luckily for me there was a rather nice girl called Suzanne who hadn’t got that memo either, so she’d come on the trip too and all the real competition had stayed at home.

The whole lone-wolf thing would stay with me once I became an actor too. Obviously there are people in the business I’m mates with, but from the moment I got cast as Carlin in the TV version of
Scum
with all the Anna Scher boys ranged against me, I don’t think I’d ever be thought of as being in a gang of actors. I think the reason why is that – without sounding too Californian about it – I kind of know who I am. I’ve never really reinvented myself, so I don’t need the reassurance of a lot of other people being like me to tell me that I’ve made the right (or the wrong) decisions.

No disrespect to ’em, but a hell of a lot of actors choose to go down this particular career path because they don’t like who they actually are. This isn’t something I’ve deduced, it’s something they’ve told me. I speak to many of them who feel that way. Don’t get me wrong, they’re nice kids, but they’ve got no history from before they became an actor, or if they have got history, it’s not something they want to take with them. They’re only interested in where they’re going or where they are now, not where they started out.

Life’s never been like that for me, because I’m proud of where I come from. But that doesn’t mean I never want things to change. For instance, on the controversial subject of West Ham moving to the
Olympic Stadium in Stratford in 2016, a lot of people who ask me about it expect me to get really upset, but I don’t think it’s a shame at all. I will miss Upton Park, but it’s always been hard work to get to. And if we want the club to progress, we’ve got to take the chance of a proper stadium with better transport links and parking facilities, as that’s the only way to attract better players. On top of that, to be honest, the whole thing has probably been worth doing just for how much it’s pissed Tottenham off.

Obviously, it was a bit of a touch for West Ham’s owners, Sullivan and Gold, because they got the government to pay for the transformation of the Olympic stadium to stop it becoming a white elephant, and then sold off Upton Park to property developers. But that’s business, and they’re entitled to prosper so long as the club benefits in the long term.

The 2012 Olympics certainly changed the view from the end of Caistor Park Road, but the building of the actual stadium was a complete fucking con. I got myself in a lot of trouble at the time because I was asked to carry one of the flags round in front of the Coldstream Guards at the opening ceremony and I said no. I was gutted to have to do that, because obviously it was a huge event and it would’ve been great to be a part of it, but I’m a bit trappy sometimes. I get these bees in my bonnet and I have to let them buzz.

It wasn’t the Olympics themselves I objected to – I really admire the athletes and the effort and dedication they put in – I just looked around at East London and thought, ‘When we’ve built the hospitals and paid the teachers to be teachers and stopped closing all the fire-stations down, maybe then we can afford this, but at the moment it’s an outrageous fucking liberty.’

The Olympic organisation isn’t really about the sport, it’s about the building, and when I see the people who run the Committee – not
so much Lord Coe, but he’s a puppet, anyway – they look like white-collar gangsters to me. The corruption isn’t just a side issue, it’s at the heart of the whole enterprise. And FIFA are even worse.

They’re a law unto themselves, and the government allow them to come in and basically rape the country that’s hosting, then move on somewhere else four years later and leave the people who live there to clean up the mess. I went to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010 and had an amazing time (that was actually the biggest group I’ve ever been away in – we went forty-handed and stayed in Mauritius). But I also saw the way they built walls around the shanty towns and tried to sweep all the poverty under the carpet. I love sport as much as anyone, but to me there are things which are more important. It would’ve been an honour to carry the flag in front of the Coldstream Guards, who I love to pieces, but I had to say no, otherwise I’d have been a hypocrite for supporting something I didn’t believe in.

I think you owe it to yourself to be true to your own moral code, however much flak it brings you. It’s like with the Bet 365 adverts I do. People ask me why I do them. And I tell them: number one, it’s very, very good money, and number two, it’s for gambling which people have a choice about whether they do it or not. If you wanna gamble, you gamble; if you don’t, you don’t. I like gambling – I have a little flutter myself every now and again – so I have no qualms whatsoever about advertising it. But I’d never do a bank commercial or something for an insurance company, because that’s something you’re forced to do and it’s a rip-off. They fucking slaughter you and I don’t agree with that. No doubt there are plenty of people who’d see this completely the other way round – they’d be happy to take the banks’ money, but wouldn’t touch Bet 365 with a barge
pole – but good for them if that’s how they feel. It takes all sorts to make a world.

When it comes to West Ham leaving Upton Park behind, I say bring it on. If you look at the magnificent World Cup heroes’ statue, just across the Barking Road from the Boleyn Cinema, it kind of makes sense that the team who won us those medals in 1966 should move to the stadium where Britain did so well in 2012. None of us live round that way any more – at least, no one I know does – and unless the younger generation of Bangladeshi kids who live there now are really into football, I don’t see what good it does them to have a match there on Saturday afternoons when they’re trying to run a business.

You do see a lot of the sari shops on Plashet Road will have saris in claret and blue at the right-hand end of the window (the one nearest the Boleyn Ground), but I’m not sure that’s to support the team. I think that’s more to stop a passing thug smashing their window. Now, I’m not saying I won’t ever turn up to watch West Ham in a sari, because you never know where the tide of fashion is going to carry you. Obviously, David Beckham’s tried it, but I did beat him to the punch by wearing one out in the Maldives years ago, although to be honest it probably looked a bit better on him than it did on me.

CHAPTER 12

VICTORIA PARK LIDO

I lost my virginity when I was fourteen years old. I was staying at Nanny Rich’s in Shoeburyness and I met a girl on the beach. She must’ve been a raving lunatic because it was a freezing cold winter’s day and she only had a bikini on.

There was no one else about. One minute I was just having a chat with her, and the next thing I knew I was in the woods by the mini-golf, losing my virginity standing up. I thought I’d done myself some damage afterwards.

I think she was eighteen, and I wasn’t one of those kids who look older than they are. When I was fourteen, I looked it, maybe even younger. Bearing in mind our ages I suppose I was less a sexual partner and more a (willing) victim of abuse, but it didn’t feel that way at the time, God bless her! I don’t remember the girl’s name – if I ever knew it – but I know her initials were ‘GG’, because she had them on a gold chain around her neck. Of course, I’ve loved the gee-gees ever since.

There’d always been girlfriends in my life, right back to when I was a little kid in Plaistow playing ‘put a big bandage on the war hero’ with the twins Kim and Tracy and Jeanie Green from down the
end. Obviously the sexuality part of it is new from twelve or thirteen onwards, and it was different in those times – kids didn’t mature as early as they do today.

Bikini-clad lunatics aside, the first port of call in the courtship process would usually be taking a bird up the pictures. The trouble was – aficionado of the big screen that I was even then – I always wanted to watch the film. If it was more a cuddle and a handful that you were after, you were better off taking them to a poxy movie you weren’t interested in. It would probably be
Love Story
with Ryan O’Neal, and there’s only one reason any heterosexual teenage boy would go and see that.

I’m not sure if it was
Love Story
(although the dates are about right, as I was thirteen when it came out) but I remember being sat in the cinema once with my arm round a girl and thinking my hand was on her threepenny when it was actually on her shoulder. She must have thought I was very sensitive to be paying so much attention to that particular area of her body – a shoulder massage would’ve been considered wildly metrosexual in Enfield in 1970.

By the time I got properly into my mid-teens, I’d probably be going out to a club once a week. I couldn’t afford to do it more often than that, but it was possible to go up the Tottenham Royal and pull a bird on a fiver in those days. The bus-fare alone wouldn’t be far off that now.

I still looked young, so I was always being asked my age on the door, but I overcame that obstacle with the same strategy which worked so well when it came to getting in to X-rated films. I used to say I was a jockey up at the Crews Hill country gallops at Enfield. It worked every time, probably because it had the element of surprise about it, as it didn’t seem like the sort of story anyone would bother to make up. Even once I’d grown quite tall this ruse didn’t stop doing the
job for me. The only time I ever got turned away from anywhere was a few years later when I actually was eighteen. At that point I parked the jockey story, and they refused to believe I was old enough, even after they’d seen my driving licence. Sometimes it’s easier to look like you’re in the right when you’re guilty than when you haven’t actually done anything wrong, because that way your mind is properly focused on what you need to do, and innocence can breed complacency.

Once inside the Tottenham Royal, what we were all looking to do was get on the last-dance express. We weren’t really much for dancing, we just used to chat with the birds and have a look about, then, when the night started to wind down, we’d be in like Flint.

I remember ‘Love Train’ by The O’Jays was a song that was very good to me. ‘Slow one?’, ‘Alright, then’, ‘Where d’you live?’, ‘Stamford Hill’, ‘Sorry, wrong way’. If there was someone going back towards Enfield, that was perfecto, but you might consider the other direction if she was a really good sort. That’s terrible, isn’t it? But you know what boys are like.  . . and girls ain’t too far behind when it comes to being unmerciful.

My way around that was always to start off going for the ones where it looked like you didn’t have a chance, because if that didn’t work out you could always work your way down the scale a bit. At least that way the other girls would be impressed that you’d had the balls to give it a go and they might think they’d got a catch. It’s no good starting at the bottom and trying to work your way up. Sometimes you’d get yourself in trouble by having three or four girls on the go at once and end up with nothing. But that would serve you right for getting too greedy, and next time you’d know that a bird in the hand is worth three in Shepherd’s Bush.

A lot of people who get into acting or music do it for the girls (or the boys) they wouldn’t have a shot at otherwise. I’m not being
flash when I say that this was never what it was about for me. I already knew how to talk to a girl – or pull a bird, or whatever way you want to put it – so I never had that problem.

I’m not saying it was easy, because it wasn’t. In fact, it was hard work. Looks weren’t my forte. No girl worth having was just gonna see me on the dance floor of the Tottenham Royal and think, ‘Oh, he’s lovely.’ We’d have to have a talk if I was going to get anywhere. That’s why going to gigs never appealed to me, because the music was so loud you couldn’t talk to anyone, and you (or at least I) couldn’t pull a bird if she couldn’t hear what you were saying. Me and Tony Yeates or whoever else it was would be more likely to give the big-band night at the Southgate Royalty a try, which was like a throwback to the forties. Or when we were a little bit older, we’d go to the Goldmine on Canvey Island, where they did all the Glenn Miller stuff.

Luckily, I was a bit of a past master at that thing where you and the girl are both looking across the room and you time it perfectly so that just as she catches your eye, you duck your head and look shy. It’s the show of vulnerability that’s the key. I used to practise on our dog, Brandy. Everyone loved him ’cos he had sad eyes, even though he was vicious. I used to watch him and think, ‘Blindin’! That’ll do it.’ (Anthony Hopkins was the same; he had those big, watery puppy eyes too, especially when he was drinking.) Of course, this tactical approach – Brandy-eyes instead of beer-goggles, or maybe with a beer-goggle chaser – wouldn’t always pay off, but I’ve got to tell you, the old ‘Who, me . . . with all my hidden complexities?’ routine worked ninety-nine times out of a hundred.