Young Winstone Read Online Free PDF

a little bottle, you got orange juice as well. The only other thing I remember really clearly was that every kid was allocated their own special decorated peg for putting your coat on, and mine was a camel – probably because I always had the hump.

CHAPTER 3
    PORTWAY SCHOOL
    Our house was a happy house, and it was also a loud house – in good times and in bad. Sometimes there’d be rows, and sometimes there’d be parties, but Sunday mornings were always the same. Dad would go out and get the bagels, and then Laura and I would get into his and mum’s bed while she did the breakfast. We had a little pink-and-white Pye record player, and we’d listen to some Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones or Judy Garland on it while Dad read the papers. Then after breakfast we’d get smartened up in our best clothes and head over to Hackney to see the grandparents.
    At other times, the family would come to us. When we were in Plaistow, we always used to have a big party on Bonfire Night. My dad’s brothers and sister would come round with their kids and we’d make a load of noise in the garden. All the fireworks would be kept in the outside toilet to keep them dry and warm. One time, Uncle Charlie went in there for a more traditional purpose and a Jumping Jack went under the door. We heard a kerfuffle inside and everyone was laughing, then out came Uncle Charlie swearing and running round the garden. The Jumping Jack was in his trousers. He was lucky he’d come out the door because you wouldn’t want that blowing up in a confined space.
    Another evening – I want to think of it as the same night but it would almost certainly have been a different one – the party was in full flow when a policeman turned up, on a motorbike, wearing one of the old strap helmets like in The Blue Lamp. He knocked on the door and asked for Sugar – all the local coppers knew my dad’s nickname, not least because about nine out of ten Old Bill in those days came from the area they policed – then told him there’d been a complaint about the noise. This was unusual so it must’ve been loud. My dad was very polite about it, and invited the copper in and gave him a drink, and by the end of the night he was giving all the girls rides up and down the street on his motorbike.
    They were good times, but it was one law for the law and another for me, as my dad would never let me ride a pushbike, let alone a motorbike. I’ve been a bit the same with my girls – I’ll let them ride a bicycle in the garden, but not outside. (Obviously Lois and Jaime are all grown up now, so I can’t stop them going out into the world without stabilisers, but Ellie-Rae is only twelve, so she still has to do things my way.) It wasn’t an irrational fear on my dad’s part – he’d seen a guy on a bike get his wheel stuck in a tram line on Stratford Broadway once, and the tram had done him.
    I remember one tricky moment when my dad came out of the house and saw me riding a mate’s bike round the corner. I jumped off it and came charging back up the road, vaulting over everyone’s fences to come out behind him on our front path, but I still got a clip round the ear to send me back inside. Those little patches out the front of the houses in Caistor Park Road are nearly all gravelled over now, but in the early sixties there were a lot more postage stamp-sized patches of grass.
    Once The Beatles had come along, you’d find us standing between the hedges with our plastic guitars and Beatle wigs on,singing ‘She Loves You’ and making out we were John, Paul, George or Ringo. Another one of my favourite activities was watching the mods and rockers go roaring down the road like the Lancaster Bombers I used to make Airfix kits of.
    All the mods seemed to live on our street, and all the rockers came from the next one down (close enough for me to know how wide of the mark my wardrobe of leathers and Liberace haircut was in Quadrophenia fifteen years or so later). They were all mates