Young Winstone Read Online Free PDF Page A

nice.
    I think Maud and Toffy might’ve lost as many as three kids (ages ranging from infant to young child, and at least one of them to whooping cough, which was rife at the time) to leave them with just the three boys and my auntie Irene. That was the main reason people had bigger families in those days – to cover themselves, because you were probably going to lose a few.
    Laura and I had plenty of other ‘uncles’ who weren’t genetically our uncles to make up the numbers. A lot of them worked in the fish market at Billingsgate, like Frankie Tovey, who was a Catholic, and Ronnie Jacobs, who was Jewish. We were Church of England, but people’s religious denomination was something you only tended to find out about later in life. Like with my best mate Tony Yeates: even though we basically grew up together from my mid-teens onwards, I only found out he was a Catholic when he got married. No one ever knew, and I think London’s always been a bit like that. It’s one of the great things about it in a way. Basically, who gives a fuck?
    It was the same with my dad’s mate Lenny Appleton – ‘Apples’ everyone called him – who was gay. He was a terrific guy, always immaculately turned out, and all the girls loved him, but no one ever worried about who he was having sex with. I’m talking about a load of hairy-arsed geezers here who didn’t give a fuck for anyone. They were the chaps – out pulling birds and doing what they were doing – and what Lenny got up to on his own time just wasn’t a problem for them. When someone’s your mate, they’re your mate, and that’s all there is to it.
    I found out some interesting things about the situation with homosexuality in old London – and sexuality in general – when I was making that TV show about Hannah Durham. It turned out thatpeople in those times were much less prudish than we tend to think of them as being, and than we are now. It was only towards the end of the Victorian era that everyone started to get more buttoned up.
    In terms of public life, everything was still pretty much under wraps by the fifties, but looking back at the way Apples was accepted by my dad and his mates, it gives you a fresh perspective on people who weren’t necessarily highly educated. They weren’t moving in the supposedly enlightened circles of the art or literary worlds. These were geezers who worked in markets and had their own street education and would often be presented as quite brutal – shouting ‘Fucking poof’ at Quentin Crisp in TV dramas or whatever – so it’s quite refreshing to realise that they weren’t always like that. In fact, it was a shame the people who actually had power in the country weren’t as tolerant as my dad and his mates. People who come from where I come from don’t get to make the laws, we just get to break them.
    There was a tradition on my dad’s side of our family of naming eldest sons after their father, so my uncle Charlie’s son got called Charlie-boy. My dad – as those of you who are on the ball will already have noticed – was Ray, so a lot of my relatives used to (and still do sometimes) call me ‘Ray-Ray’ to differentiate between us. When I got a bit older, my dad’s mates also used to know me as ‘Little Sugs’, because his nickname was ‘Sugar’, in honour of the great Sugar Ray Robinson.
    There were signs from very early on that I was going to carry on the family’s pugilistic tradition. The nursery school I went to was up on the main road on the way to Stratford. I got suspended from it once for having a fight with another kid on a climbing frame. It was only a skirmish, and I don’t think I was a generally disruptive presence, although you probably won’t be surprised to hear that this wasnot to be the last educational establishment I would be suspended or expelled from.
    I loved that place, though. They used to get us all to lie down and have a kip in the afternoon, and you didn’t just get free milk in