Young Winstone (21 page)

I’d done most of my learning to drive in a knackered Ford Anglia van with a big long gear-stick. I used to have a problem going round corners in it because there was something about the layout of the pedals which encouraged you to put your foot on the accelerator rather than the brake. That’s never a good idea, especially when it nearly turns the whole thing on its side, and even more so when that happens on the rare occasion when you’ve persuaded your dad to take you for a driving lesson (admittedly I had already driven the car around on my own or with mates a fair bit before it was strictly legal). This mistake got me thrown out of the driver’s seat with a clump round the side of the head as a bonus and my dad drove home saying, ‘I ain’t getting in a bloody car with you again.’

The leafy suburbs of Winchmore Hill was where I took my driving tests. One of the times I failed, the examiner did me on driving too close to parked vehicles. I asked him, ‘Did I hit any?’ He answered, ‘No’, so I said, ‘Well, how can I have been too fucking close then?’ And yet still I failed – where was the justice? There might have been a bit of an altercation after that – I was going through a bit of a hot-headed phase – and I eventually passed at the third time of asking. I don’t know how because that was probably the worst I’d ever driven in my life. Maybe the examiners just wanted to get rid of me.

Their plan worked, because as soon as I could get out of Enfield under my own steam, that place didn’t see me for dust. I’d had a few trial runs down to Whitechapel and Stratford on my dad’s moped. He was in the process of giving up on the fruit and veg game by that point because the big supermarket chains had killed it, and was doing the Knowledge to become a black-cab driver.

He already knew London like the back of his hand, so he passed the test really quickly, but while he was going round studying his little clipboard with a map on it in the daylight hours, I used to sneak into the garden of an evening and borrow his bike to head off to the East End. It was best not to get caught, because he still wasn’t the biggest fan of two-wheeled transportation, but he couldn’t really say too much about it now he was off out on a bike all day himself.

Once I started to get my hands on vehicles of my own, I loved the sense of freedom I felt bombing back home through Hackney and then up the A10. I had an old claret Cortina for a while (all it needed was some blue trim and the colour scheme would’ve been perfect). There was a side-window missing which I’d had to replace with some plastic, and one wing was all bent back where I’d hit something. Overall that car was a total rust-bucket, but it did used to go. Then there was the Triumph Herald estate which got us out of
the sticky DJing situation, and last but not least was a black Triumph Herald convertible which I borrowed for a long time. That one only started with a screwdriver as well, but it was so worn you had to physically turn the whole ignition. I think in the end only the wires were left.

The places I’d be going to would be Moro’s or the Two Puddings in Stratford, or a pub called the Charleston further over towards Maryland Point. Obviously it was the height of the disco era, but although I’d loved Motown and early seventies soul, I wasn’t so into disco. I still learnt how to use the music to my advantage. If John Travolta and The Bee Gees could, then why shouldn’t I? But I wasn’t having the fashion. When the big round collars and the stack-heeled shoes came in I wore them once. That night I slipped on some ice on the platform of Bruce Grove station and to my embarrassment fell down onto the track – fucking stack-heels! No, thank you very much – it was back to the old straight jeans and winkle-pickers for me.

Our status as nightlife apprentices on Martin Nash and Neville Cole’s firm broadened our range of places to go out as well. I remember hearing an enormous crash outside Tipples once. We ran into the street to see a car more or less cut in half and Neville getting out of it with one of the Hariths, who were a big family from another area. They were both all bruised and cut up, but they just walked into the pub and said, ‘Come on, we’re going to Beirut.’

That’s what we called the Old Kent Road in South London, because when you went down there at the weekend, all you’d hear was sirens. On the night in question we got in another motor and drove to Le Connoisseur, which was a Greek restaurant but with a club above it. I remember going to use the toilet in this bar and looking up to see a camera pointing at me. I suppose it was there to
stop people snorting Charlie, but that wasn’t the purpose of my visit. I went back out there and told everyone, ‘There’s a camera in the khazi’, and they all went, ‘No!’

The number of stabbings on the Old Kent Road was outrageous in those days. Someone would say, ‘We’re going over Beirut on Saturday’, and you’d just think, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’You’d want to come back to Bethnal Green for a bit of peace and quiet . . . yeah, right.

It was buzzing on the weekends in E2 at that time too. There were a lot of good pubs, and if you’d pulled and you wanted to take a bird out on your own, the place me and Tony Yeates would always go to was the Venus steakhouse in Bethnal Green Road. I’d always have the same meal in there: start with a prawn cocktail (it was the seventies after all), then T-bone steak, obviously, and a bottle of that Portuguese fizzy rosé to help it go down.

I know what you’re thinking – ‘That’s a well-oiled seduction machine’ – and, to be honest, it was. But things didn’t always go to plan in that department, especially when you went off your usual manor. And even more so if you couldn’t get hold of a car, so public transport had to be factored in.

The incident I’m about to describe definitely took place between the two
Scums
, because I was going to a party with Ray Burdis and some of the other Anna Scher guys I’d got to know on the first one, and by the time the second one came out I’d met my Elaine and was safely off the market. At this particular point in time I’d just split up with a bird, so I wasn’t going out with anyone, but I’d met this beautiful-looking girl through a family connection with my auntie Jeanie.

I’m not going to say what her name was, because she’s a married woman now and it’ll be embarrassing for her, but she lived in the flats round the back of the Londoner pub in Limehouse. I went
round there to pick her up and knocked on her parents’ door: ‘Hello, Mr and Mrs —, I’m Raymond’ – all very polite and wanting to make a good impression.

They were the same way: ‘Hello, Raymond, come in.’ Unfortunately, there was a telephone on the floor of the hallway which I didn’t see, and as I walked towards the front room I accidentally kicked it – still on its cord – straight through the plate-glass door to the lounge.

At this point, obviously, I’m mortified. The door is smashed to smithereens, there’s little bits of glass everywhere, and I’m saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t see the phone’, and trying to help them clear up the mess. The girl I’m waiting to go out with is still upstairs getting ready, but her mum and dad are being really nice about it: ‘Don’t worry, Raymond. Sit yourself down and we’ll make you up a nice cup of tea.’ They show me to a seat and go off to the kitchen to put the kettle on, but as I lean back on the sofa, the arm splits and falls off. I’m desperately trying to get it back on while they’re still out of the room but it just won’t hold, so when they come back I just have to say, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve broken your settee.’

Of course, by this time they’re looking at me like I’m some sort of nutter. Fucking hell, it’s embarrassing. Luckily, at that point their daughter’s finally got herself ready, and we set off to get a bus up to the tube at Mile End (normally I’d have got a cab, so I must have been skint). We get on the old 277 and go upstairs, and now the pain of what’s happened is starting to fade a bit – I’m not completely over it, but we’re having a nice chat.

At this point a Russian sailor comes up the stairs – in full uniform, that’s how I can see he’s a Ruskie. He walks over and starts talking to us in broken English, but it’s clear enough that his intentions aren’t honourable.

‘You and your girlfriend come with me and we’ll have a good night,’ he says. I go, ‘We’ll have a what?’ There’s no other way this is going to go after that than with the two of us having a fight, and I end up giving the Russian a good fucking hiding right there, on the top deck.

The bus driver’s going potty, so we have to get off the bus and walk the rest of the way up to Mile End. Now that’s three really bad things that have happened in the space of twenty minutes. We should have quit while we were behind, but we didn’t, and for a little while things started to run a bit more smoothly again. We got the tube over to where the party was – in one of those big three-storey houses in Cloudesley Square, on the posh side of Islington.

I’ve bought a bottle of something. They’ve let us in fine and we’ve gone straight upstairs to the front room. I’m having a quick word with my mates. My date doesn’t know anyone, but she’s having a nice chat with the girls, and I’m keeping half an eye on her the whole time to make sure she’s doing alright. Then I look up to see her walking towards me and everything goes into slow motion – always a bad sign with me.

The reason everything goes into slow motion on this occasion is because she’s tripped on the carpet, and I can see she’s falling towards the marble fireplace. I stick my arm out to grab her, and in that fraction of a second, just as I’m sighing with relief because I’ve saved the day, my elbow knocks into this huge cut-glass chandelier which for some reason is sitting on the table. First, it rocks – but I can’t catch it because I’ve still got Lucky in my arms – then it falls. And then it hits the marble fireplace and shatters into even more pieces than the door into her lounge did about an hour before.

The host of the party is screaming at me, understandably enough, and I’m trying to explain that I’m very, very sorry, but my friend was
falling and I couldn’t let her hit her head. We’ve only been there ten minutes and we’ve hardly had a drink, but I’m telling her I’ll pay for the damage – even though I don’t know how, ’cos I’ve not got more than a tenner on me. By this time the lady of the house is right up in my face shouting, ‘Son, if you work from now till Doomsday, you won’t be able to afford that fucking light’, and I’m saying, ‘I think we’d better leave’, because now I’m starting to get angry.

Me and the Typhoid Mary of Limehouse had quite a good chat on the tube home, but we never went out together again. She was a lovely girl and everything, but I think on balance we realised that it probably wasn’t meant to be.

Not all of my misadventures when it came to girls were quite so much like something out of a romantic comedy. Once we had wheels Tony Yeates and I would go all over East London and Essex in pursuit of a bird, and there was one time in Southend when we both caught crabs at the seaside. We’d nicked the bouncers’ girlfriends at a club called the Zero 6, which got its name from the runway at Southend airport that it was sitting right at the end of. They used to play Donald Byrd and the Blackbyrds’ ‘Flight Time’ as their theme song at that place, because it had some great plane noise sound-effects in it. They should’ve handed out some peanuts and a face towel as you came in to complete the effect, really.

Naturally, the bouncers weren’t too happy about what we were up to, and they had a little go at us outside, but we had it away a bit lively and everything was sweet. The two girls took us back to their place and we did what we done – boom boom boom boom. The next day they cooked us Sunday dinner. The two bob went in the gas, then it went off again after we’d eaten and we had a swoppo – which is the opposite of a stoppo.

A week after returning home, we’d both got crabs. There was no way of knowing which of the girls had given them to us – it could’ve been both of them. Either way, we had no idea what to fucking do about it.

I shaved all the hair off my bollocks, but that didn’t do any good and the stubble growing back is the worse thing in the world – worse even than the crabs themselves. Then Tony did some research and got us some blue ointment – ‘unction’ I think it was called – and they all jumped off, pyong . . . job done.

One night not long after that we were standing in a club at the Seven Kings. It was one of those places where the UV lights give everyone a blue tinge, and this geezer we were talking to had a crab crawling across his eyebrows. They’ve got a kind of black dot in them – almost like a pin head – and once you’ve had a visitation you’re not going to have any trouble recognising one, especially when it’s floodlit by ultra-violet. We both looked at this geezer with his unwanted guest on his face and we both looked at each other and we were out of there before he’d finished his sentence.

Although I was out and about a lot at this time, I’d still usually be back in Enfield for Sunday dinner (unless I had a better offer on the Essex Riviera, of course). Even now I like to get the family together for a big meal at least once a week if everyone’s about. If we’ve got guests I have to warn them that we don’t stand on ceremony. Don’t blink at the wrong moment or everyone else will have had all the best roast potatoes.

Of course, bringing people together to eat can cause friction as well as harmony, especially when you’re dealing with a family who all have quick tempers. We did have our moments around that Church Street dinner table. Mum and Dad would be sat at either end with me and Laura bickering across the table. Once she got the
hump so badly over something I’d said that she threw her knife at me across the table. It stuck right in my sternum and kind of wobbled a bit like a knife-thrower’s in a cartoon would. I remember looking down in disbelief to see it fall to the table and a little trickle of blood flowing down my white shirt.

I went garrity and dived at her across the table, then she dived back at me and we’re strangling each other, and by the time my mum and dad have got their arms round our necks trying to stop us, we look like one of those Tasmanian Devil cartoons where a fight almost becomes a cloud. Even the dog’s going mental. Brandy’s gone to the big kennel in the sky by that point, so it’s a little Jack Russell called Ben who’s barking his head off. In the ensuing melee one of my legs goes through the French windows and gets quite badly cut, but there’s no sulking in my house. Something happens and then it’s over – done. Twenty minutes later, we’re all sitting on the sofa holding hands and watching the Sunday film together.