Young Winstone (7 page)

Next up were Argentina. Geoff Hurst played in that one and Antonio Rattín got sent off. We did well to hold our tempers as Argentina were scrapping like animals, but then Bobby Moore put the ball down quickly and flicked it up for Geoff Hurst to nut it in,
and Argentina were history. It was almost like a dress rehearsal for our first goal in the final. By then a measure of optimism had really started to take hold, but Eusébio’s Portugal were still favourites to knock us out in the semis. They were blitzing everyone, but Geoff Hurst and Bobby Charlton both scored and now England were in the final.

When that great day came I had more than a vague idea of what being 1–0 down to the German machine meant, because I could still feel the clip round the earhole I’d got off the copper for playing in one of the bombsites they’d left. There was a lot of historical friction and a real sense of them being the old enemy, so going 2–1 up just set you up for the emotional sucker punch of them equalising. I remember almost crying when they pulled that goal back – which wouldn’t have been the done thing then, although you see dads doing it as well as kids on
Match of the Day
all the time now.

The sense of pride when we finally did them at the end of extra time was amazing (that’s where the voice of Kenneth Wolstenholme butts in, even though I wasn’t listening to him at the time), especially as three of the most important members of the team – the captain Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst who scored a hat-trick and Martin Peters who scored the other goal – were West Ham heroes. To see Bobby Moore holding up the trophy with his chest puffed out at the end of that gruelling game was an experience I’ll never forget.

The funny thing is that when you’re nine years old, the euphoria of actually being World Champions seems perfectly natural. We’re British and we won the war, so it’s sort of expected that we should win the World Cup as well. Forty-eight years later, I can look back on that feeling from a more worldly-wise perspective. I suppose the era I was brought up in was basically the end of the British Empire, but we still felt like a force in the world. We had The Beatles, we had the World Cup. We were kind of alright.

Times were still hard for a lot of people, but the economy was doing pretty well. Our family’s improving situation was probably a good example of the way people from working-class backgrounds could get on in the mid-sixties. Although I was pissed off to have had to leave Plaistow, I had a lot to be thankful for.

We’d moved into a really nice four-bedroom George Reid house. My parents had paid four and a half grand for it, which was a lot of money at a time when the average weekly wage wasn’t much more than £16. It was the equivalent of buying a house for £750,000 today, which was obviously a bit of a stretch, but my mum and dad were, for the moment at least, on a much sounder financial footing than they had been. On top of that, they’d gone thoroughly legit.

Ever since the nasty incident in Walthamstow with the Kray brothers, my dad had backed away from the ducking-and-diving side of things. That can’t have been easy, because there was quite a romantic image to it in those days, but I think there comes a time when you’ve got a family that you don’t want to be shitting yourself every time there’s a knock on the door. He stepped back from all the other bollocks and concentrated on going to work, to the point where he’d been able to step up to running his own grocer’s.

His first shop was in Bush Hill Parade, just outside Enfield, which was why we ended up moving there. The impetus for the move came from Mum. She’d got Nanny Rich’s genes after all. Whereas my dad – no disrespect to him – was quite set in his ways, and if left to his own devices might have been happy staying in a council flat in Hackney all his life. Although I didn’t know this at the time, my sister told me recently that my mum just sold our home in Plaistow without asking him. Some blokes came around making offers on a lot of people’s houses for buy-to-let and she just turned it over to them and went off and picked out the house in Enfield without
saying a word to Dad. Then again, if she had asked him, he probably would’ve said no.

Either way, Mum was the motivator, and even though I wasn’t too happy about the move at the time, there was no denying we’d gone up in the world. We had a nice bit of garden now, and after we’d been in Enfield for a few years we got a bar installed in the front room – the forerunner of Raymondo’s, whose doors are still always open in my house to this day – with one of those Bobby Moore World Cup ice buckets. Everyone had one of those, or at least every West Ham fan did. Bobby was standing on the brown-coloured ball holding the World Cup, then you’d lift him up and all your ice would be in there.

We got a dog as well. He was a Boxer (I suppose that ran in the family) called Brandy. He was soppy as a bag of bollocks with us – you could do what you liked with him – but if anyone else came within range, he’d mullah ’em, even when he got so old he only had one tooth left.

They say your porn name is your first pet and the first street you can remember, which makes mine ‘Brandy Caistor’. I reckon I’d do alright with that, then if I wanted to redefine myself as an actress and go a bit respectable later on in my career, I could always change it to ‘Brandy Caistor-Park’, which sounds much more distinguished. Brandy was a clever old bastard as well. The dustmen used to tease him in the alley where the bins were, so he worked out how to back up and make it look like his lead was tighter than it was, then when the dustman came to torment him, Brandy had him on the penny and gave him a right good biting.

When we’d lived in Plaistow, one of the things I’d liked doing best was driving over to Hackney to see Maud and Toffy on a Sunday. There were all sorts of different cars we’d go in – they
weren’t necessarily ours. In those days if you wanted a car, you just had one. You could do that then – thank God you can’t any more, because I don’t want anyone just taking mine. One of my dad’s cars (well, I say it was his . . . we certainly used it a lot) – a black Ford Zephyr – ended up in a pond at Victoria Park once after someone had nicked it and used it on a blag.

We’d jump in the car (whichever one it was) all suited up and looking nice to go off and meet the cousins while Mum would stay at home and cook the dinner. Even the mums who wore the trousers had to miss out on a lot of fun in those days, on account of their place still being in the home. My aunties Irene, Barbara (Charlie’s wife) and Joycie (Kenny’s wife) would all be back in their kitchens cooking up a storm, while their kids Scott, Spencer and Becky, Charlie and Maureen, and Tracey and Melanie came down to Hackney to meet us.

We’d go up to the flats first to see Granddad and Nanny. Obviously she’d have to stay at home to cook the dinner as well, so it would just be Toffy who came down to the New Lansdowne Club with us. It was a proper old East End gaff – a working men’s club with a snooker table and a boxing gym. My granddad had been on the committee so he had a lot of mates there, like Archie who could hit you with either hand. A few of them and maybe some of Charlie’s pals would come and join us until there was quite a gathering.

All the fellas would have a drink and a chat and the kids’d be fucking about and getting up to mischief, messing around on the drumkit. Someone might even get up and sing a song – me and my sister would do ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ or Sonny and Cher’s ‘I Got You, Babe’, and one of the uncles might give us a bit of Sinatra. Then we’d all head home in time for our separate Sunday dinners at three or four in the afternoon – there was never too much traffic on the roads on a Sunday.

I had a few tussles at the Lansdowne with my cousin Charlie’s sister Maureen, who was a couple of years older than us and even trappier than I was. She’s my cousin and I love her to death, but we did used to bicker a lot. That said, I remember one time when we were visiting her mum and dad in the Barbican, and me and Charlie were getting bullied by a gang of older kids, Maureen went and sorted them all out – shut them right up with a couple of swift right-handers. It’s a good job she wasn’t born a geezer because then she’d have been even more dangerous.

After we’d moved, being in Enfield exile made those weekly trips to the Lansdowne something to look forward to even more. It wasn’t actually much further to bomb down the A10 than it had been to drive over from Plaistow, anyway, and going there to see all the family felt like going home. When I went back to have a look at the old place again recently the building was still there – walk south down Mare Street past the Hackney Empire and the town hall and it’s on your right – but there were boards up all around it.

I’m hoping someone’s got some Lottery funds to restore it, because I know it had fallen into serious disrepair. There were a load of depressing photos online showing how it had been squatted by some junkies who’d made a horrible mess of the place, but you could still see the beautiful interior underneath. If I had the money, I’d do it up myself.

CHAPTER 6

THE CAGE, SPITALFIELDS MARKET

My new primary school in Enfield was called Raglan, and as I may already have mentioned – probably three or four times – I didn’t like it much there at first. Things only began to look up once I got into the school football team. We were a pretty good little side and managed to get to a regional cup semi-final. We lost 2–1 in that but my mate Colin Bailey scored.

Even as young as nine or ten, I was already looking for any excuse to get back to East London. So when my dad asked me if I fancied getting up early and going down to Spitalfields Market with him before school, I jumped at the chance. It wasn’t really to work at that age, it was more just to meet his mates – they’d all bring their boys down to see how life was and show them there’s a great big world out there. This was at the time when he had the shop in Bush Hill Parade, so we’d be back for Dad to open it and for me to get to school. The other kids would be at home having their Ready Brek and I’d be down the market, drinking in the local colour – a commodity of which there was not a shortage, in fact ‘colourful’ is the politest word you’d use.

Spitalfields Market was as formative an educational experience as any boy could hope for. I used to shadow-box down there with a real gentleman called Sammy McCarthy, who had boxed as a pro and will turn up in the story again later on in somewhat less happy circumstances. There were a lot of old fighters around who my dad had known as kids, and I’d have a spar with them all. My dad’s pal Archie Joyce’s older brother Teddy would throw a few imaginary right hands for me to fend off, and that’s when the ‘Little Sugar’ nickname really started to stick.

Another thing I loved down there was the special market coinage which you could only spend in A. Mays, the big shop on the corner. It came in triangles and 50p shapes, but before the 50p had even come out – I suppose they were tokens more than anything – and I saved loads of them when I was little. Until recently I still had thousands of them in boxes and tins in the garage that I was going to polish up and get framed, but then when I was having some work done at home the fucking geezer threw them on the fire and they all melted. I could’ve killed him.

The breakfast you’d have on that market early in the morning would taste better than you could get anywhere else on earth. To this day I still love a bacon roll – a good crusty white one with brown sauce in it – and the place we’d get them was the Blue Café. It’s not there any more, but it was just up from Gun Street, along the south side of the market, and it was owned by Vic Andretti’s dad Victor – we called him Uncle Victor. His son, who was a mate of my dad’s, won a European boxing title, and gave me the gloves he wore, which still had the claret on ’em.

By coincidence it was outside Uncle Victor’s café that I saw the longest street-fight I’ve ever seen in my life. Two fellas had what we used to call a ‘straightener’, which is like a formal stand-up
bare-knuckle fight where someone’s got a grievance and everyone backs off to let them sort it out. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating – and I probably am a bit, because I was only a kid – but I swear this fight went on for twenty minutes. Now, that might not seem like a long time to you if you don’t know anything about boxing, but if you think that even a fit professional fighter will be blowing after a three-minute round, then you can imagine that twenty minutes without a break feels like a lifetime.

Not that they didn’t have the odd pause for breath, because when one of them knocked the other down, he’d stand and wait for his adversary to get back up. Every time someone got knocked over it was almost like the end of the round. There was no kicking anyone in the head or anything like that – it was all very courteous and old-fashioned. All the guys were standing round watching, and I was there with them, a small boy with a bacon roll.

By the time those two were done it didn’t even seem to matter who won any more. At the end they both shook hands and went in the café to have a nice cup of tea, and everyone was clapping them and saying, ‘Blinding fight.’ Obviously this is a very romantic notion of what violence should be like, but that only made it more impressive to see it actually happen. In a strange way it was a beautiful thing to watch – two men just being men – but it was also pretty scary. I wasn’t much more than ten years old at the time, and they were really going at it: I mean, this was a severe tear-up, but it was still some way short of being the most unnerving thing I saw happen in that market.

Across the way from the Blue Café was a place called ‘the Cage’, which was where all the big lorries pulled up to load in and load out. That was also where the methers – the tramps – used to burn the bushel boxes to keep warm. They’d all be sleeping around the
fire in the winter with big old coats on. You don’t see meths drinkers so much now – it’s like it’s gone out of fashion. I suppose they’d be crystal methers now. Maybe the news has finally broken that drinking methylated spirits is bad for you – I think the clue was in the way they coloured it blue and purple.

The meths drinkers used to have their own hierarchy, with different pitches and guv’nors who sometimes used to fall out among themselves and have a ruck. I don’t know if it’s still like that among the homeless today, but you’re going to get that kind of thing going on wherever people are under pressure, and I don’t suppose changing the intoxicant of choice will have ushered in a new era of peace and harmony.