Young Winstone (14 page)

Apart from the Tottenham Royal, another venue with a bit of potential as far as girls were concerned was Victoria Park Lido. You didn’t just go there to swim. I’d be down there all the time in the
summer when I was fourteen or fifteen – in the morning in the school holidays, or later on for a bit of a lounge about if I’d done a hard morning on the market. There was nowhere better to have a laugh with the chaps or chat to some girls. There used to be a bit of peacocking going on, but I never really had the physique to be swaggering round the fucking pool with my budgie-smugglers on.

The lido’s gone now – it was closed in 1986 and demolished a few years later – but Victoria Park is still one of the great parks of London. It used to be called ‘The People’s Park’ because of its strong tradition of political protest, and even though it’s not so much talked about as the more well-connected green spaces of West London, the avenues are so grand you could be in Regent’s Park, and the boating lake’s like the Serpentine, only with fewer tourists.

Everywhere else around it got bombed really badly in the war, but Victoria Park stayed pretty much intact – either because a load of ack-ack batteries were stationed there, or because the Germans wanted to keep it nice just in case they won. The feel of the place goes further back than that, though, at least it does to me. It’s a real bit of old London whose bandstands and deer-park reek of the age of Empire (although the deer themselves have their own distinctive aroma).

Part of the reason I associate Victoria Park so strongly with military conquests gone by is the stories my uncle Flabby used to tell me when I’d visit him as a younger kid. Old Flabs wasn’t a blood relative – I think my dad had gone out with his daughter before he met my mum – but I used to love going round to his house and listening to his tall tales of when he was in India with the British Army back in the day.

He told me some terrible stories – which are always the kind you’re most interested when you’re little – about how all the British
soldiers in India were given an order that if they were ever in a car accident with a local they had to back up and run them over again to save on the insurance payouts. How true that is I don’t know, and the same goes for the story about soldiers going over ravines on trains and deliberately pushing people off the bridges with their boots, but knowing people’s inhumanity to people in occupation or wartime situations, they both kind of read as true. And maybe they give you a bit of the historical backdrop to some of the tensions between people of white and Asian backgrounds in the East End in recent years.

Apart from Britain’s imperial past, the other thing Victoria Park always made me think of was armed robbery. And not just because of the time some blaggers stole my dad’s black Ford Zephyr and drove it into the pond – hardly the best way to avoid drawing attention to yourself. There used to be a lot of talk locally about how many bank robbers used to train in the park. They’d jog around it planning their next blag secure in the knowledge that they were out of the range of flapping ears.

The thing about armed robbers is they’re not always the fittest, but they do have that competitive instinct, so every now and then one of them would get a bit carried away with the old running and just keel over – heart attack. Maybe it’s true what they say: it’s a dangerous life being a blagger, but even more so if you throw a bit of jogging in as well.

Then again, there are a lot of myths surrounding those people. One of them is the idea that they always drive Jags. In fact that’s the worst car to use in a bank robbery, because they’ve got a special switch-off button which kills the engine if you hit a kerb or something. The button is down by your right foot apparently, but you don’t really want to be scrabbling around down there to restart the engine if you’ve gone over a level crossing too fast with the Flying
Squad on your tail. ‘No Jags in blags’ – that’s probably the best way to remember this.

I was always fascinated by stories about the old-school London underworld. I’m not saying I was old before my years, because I wasn’t. I was basically a little kid inside for a long time, probably till I was about forty (and Elaine might question whether my passport was properly stamped for the land of adulthood even then). But working on the markets and training and fighting at the Repton gave me a sense of myself as someone who could be accepted in grown-up situations from quite an early age. I was always comfortable in the company of people from older generations – whether it was my nan and granddad, or Uncle Flabs, or even the actors whose films I loved the best, who often tended to be men from earlier times like Jimmy Cagney, James Stewart or John Wayne.

There was something about those three where their flaws were also their strengths. Like in that John Wayne film where he’s a bigot who hates Indians because they raped his niece –
The Searchers
– for someone like him to do a film like that was quite shocking. And obviously it’s a bit later – I was doing the first
Scum
by then – but John Wayne gives an amazing performance in his last film,
The Shootist,
where he’s dying of cancer and he knows it. He’s just so naked and open about what his illness is doing to him, and he’s not usually an actor you think of as making himself vulnerable.

Alan Hewitt was still sneaking us into the Florida in Tottenham to see X-rated films throughout my early teenage years. I remember seeing a great Italian B-movie there – probably with
Frankenstein
(the film: I wasn’t dating the monster) – called
Four Flies on Grey Velvet,
where the last thing the murderer saw was these four flies on a swinging pendant. I think it’s the only film I’ve ever seen that starts with a drum solo.

The idea that I might end up being an actor myself in films of that quality or even higher one day still wouldn’t have occurred to me. Even once my mum and dad came up with the idea of me going to drama college, it wasn’t something that really connected in my mind with what happened up on the big screen – I just thought of it as something to do.

What with boxing, early-morning starts for the markets, and the girls of the Tottenham Royal and the Victoria Park Lido all competing for my attention, it was no wonder there wasn’t much time left for homework. Getting up for school in the morning had already begun to feel like a waste of energy that would be better put to other uses. When you meet the careers adviser and they ask what you want to do, and you say, ‘I’m thinking of going to drama college’, and they laugh in your face, that does give you a bit of extra motivation. You might not know exactly what your long-term goal is, but you know it’s not to sit behind a fucking desk trying to crush kids’ dreams.

I held the record for the highest number of detentions at Edmonton County. Detention was a pointless punishment by my way of thinking – I’d choose the cane over detention any day, and did so on a number of occasions. As far as me and school were concerned, the straw that broke the camel’s back (or in this case the three-year-old thoroughbred’s back) was when my dad took me off for the day to the 1972 Derby to help him sell a load of umbrellas. When the teacher asked where I’d been afterwards I was honest about it, and we got in trouble for telling the truth. My dad explained that he’d thought going to the Derby would be an education for me, but they didn’t like that, so they suspended me, and I never really went back.

Whether it actually was an education is debatable – he probably just wanted somebody to carry his umbrellas for him – but it was certainly a blinding day out. At first it looked like we were on a
hiding to nothing because it was a lovely sunny morning, but then it pissed down in the early afternoon and so we sold all the brollies. But that was where my dad’s luck ran out, as the horse he’d put a nice few quid on in the big one that day got pushed out wide coming round Tattenham corner and Piggott said, ‘See you later’ on Roberto, timing his run like the master he was.

We still had a great day, though. Granddad got us into Tattersalls and Lester came walking really close to us through the enclosure. It was funny with Piggott – he was the king of Epsom, but people took the mick out of him a bit as well. He was much taller than normal for a jockey, which was why they called him ‘The Long Fellow’. The two things everyone knows about him are that he was famous for his love of a pound note, and he talked the way he talked because he was deaf. Someone in the crowd put those two facts together by shouting out, ‘Oi! You dropped a tenner, Lester’, as he walked past us. Of course the great man turned round to pick it up, and my granddad said, ‘Well, he heard that.’

When the school suspended me for taking one day off I just thought, ‘Fuck ’em, I don’t really need this. I’m not the brightest of sparks and I could probably stay here for the rest of my life without becoming an intellectual, so I might as well go out into the world and find something I can do that’s actually going to benefit me.’ It wasn’t like I was a problem kid – I was doing well with the boxing, and I was always up to something. Maybe that was part of it. My mum and dad saw me in that school play and thought acting might be a way of occupying my mind and keeping me out of trouble.

I know how strange the idea of my parents sending me to a £900-a-term drama college will probably seem, because I still can’t believe it happened, and I was there. Money was less tight than it had been by then, but we weren’t rolling in it on any level. Maybe it was
a bit of Nanny Rich’s speculate-to-accumulate mentality coming in – and maybe a bit of her money as well. Or maybe that was just what was going on in my head, and my mum and dad had a different agenda. For all I know, they might’ve thought I was gay and the boxing was just a cover, so they wanted to get me doing some fencing and ballet to help me find myself.

Either way, at the time I don’t remember thinking my dad in particular thought I was ever going to amount to anything very much, but the fact that he and my mum enrolled me in drama college says differently. OK, the Corona Academy in Ravenscourt Park didn’t have that great a reputation. It wasn’t exactly RADA – although ex-students did include Dennis Waterman – so you didn’t really have to do too much to get in: a willingness to keep stumping up that £900 was all it took. But thinking about it now, I can see that my parents were backing me to do something different. And I owe them a lot for having that confidence in me when I might not have had it in myself.

In the long gap between me leaving school prematurely at fifteen and starting at Corona in 1973, they even got a nice Scottish drama teacher to give me some elocution lessons. Mrs McNair’s daughter went to my school – I’d done an amateur play in Enfield with her – and she was a really good teacher who helped me build up confidence in my voice before I went to drama school. It was all about being able to speak clearly and with crisp enunciation – qualities for which I am now of course renowned throughout the world (and you should’ve heard me before I had the elocution lessons!)

CHAPTER 13

THE THEATRE ROYAL, STRATFORD EAST

When I’d left school it had been very much in a fuck-you-I’m-off kind of way, but that probably made starting at Corona more daunting, not less. It felt like a very grown-up place, more of a college than a school. I was walking into this different world without having really done anything to earn the right to be there. It’s not like I’d won a scholarship for acting or gone through a gruelling audition process. My mum and dad applied on my behalf and all they had to do for me to get in was come up with £900 three times a year.

I was probably a bit embarrassed about that. I knew I was now growing up to a point where I was going to have to take responsibility for how I was living, and I couldn’t rely on my mum and dad to look after me for much longer. I enjoyed my day-to-day existence, but beyond the odd little scam here and there, taking a bird out and saving up for a nice holiday every now and then, I didn’t have much idea of what I wanted to do with my life.

None of the experience I’d gained being out in the big wide world – either boxing or working for my dad – seemed to count for
very much at Corona. It couldn’t have been much further off my usual manor without me needing a passport to get there. I had to catch the train from Lower Edmonton, change at Seven Sisters onto the Victoria Line tube to Victoria and then get the district line to Ravenscourt Park. That was a funny old journey. It took at least an hour even on a good day. On the upside, John Le Mesurier did get on my train once. I still love
Dad’s Army
now, but it was a huge show then. He boarded a carriage full of schoolkids and signed autographs for all of them – what a lovely man!

There were other compensations to hold on to in my first few weeks at Corona. All the girls were beautiful and there were probably three other boys in my class who were straight, so I had a field day in that department – it was a bit of a fox-in-the-chicken-coop situation. I also had two really good teachers, Bill Happer and Vernon Morris, who both did their best to encourage me even when I was refusing to play the game.

Vernon Morris was a very good actor in his own right. He’d played the Polish traitor – the one who ends up getting hanged – in
Colditz.
What he did for me was help me get over any problem I might otherwise have had with three quarters of the geezers in the class being gay. His methods were unconventional but effective. First he sat me next to a guy called Paul, who as a child actor had been the kid who offers a cigarette to the parachuted airman in the
Battle of Britain
film, but was now the same age as me and as gay as they come.

I didn’t know this at the time, but Mr Morris had told Paul to put his hand on my leg. Now, I’d never been approached like that before, and being a bit of a chap it wasn’t really what I was expecting, so I just went really cold on him and said, ‘Get your fucking hand off my leg!’ At that point I looked up to see the whole class starting
to laugh and I realised Mr Morris had set me up. ‘That’s what it’s all about, Raymond,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the world of theatre.’ I knew he’d done it to put me in my place a little bit, and his strategy worked. Mainly because it was for my own benefit – it wasn’t like a drama-school version of
Scum
where Mr Morris was trying to break my spirit so I would succumb to the power of musical theatre.