Young Winstone Read Online Free PDF Page B

and they’d all been in the same class at school, but they’d get together to go to Margate or Southend and have a fight on a bank holiday, then for the rest of the year it would all be forgotten.
    In terms of historic events which made an impact on people, the one that springs to mind for me is the one that springs to mind for most people, but maybe not for the same reason. Even though I was only six years old at the time, I can clearly remember what I was doing when the news of John F. Kennedy’s death broke in November 1963 – I was wondering what all the fuss was about.
    Obviously it was sad for him and his family, but I couldn’t understand why grown adults were breaking down in tears in the street over something that didn’t really have too much to do with them, because he was a Yank. For some reason, everyone seemed to see it as being their business. I suppose because he was young and well liked, and people thought of him as more of a celebrity than a politician.
    By then I’d left the afternoon kips and free orange juice of nursery behind for the relatively grown-up world of Portway Primary School. As a kid I never thought of it being ‘Portway’ as in ‘you’re on the way to the port’ – that’s the kind of connection which is lodged so deep in your mind it doesn’t really occur to you. And by the time I would’ve been old enough to get them, those jobs in the docks that might once have been waiting for me had all gone.
    You can’t be hanging around the gates of your old primary school for too long at my age or people will think you’re a nonce. But it made me laugh to retrace the footsteps of my walk to school again all these years later – at the time it felt like miles and miles, but in fact it was only a couple of hundred yards. A little group of us used to assemble on the way down there in the morning, and we’d usually meet up with a mate who had a glass eye. His mum used to let us watch her put it in – you can’t believe how much space there is in the socket at the back of the eye – and it used to roll around all over the place until it settled in position.
    He’d got his real eye poked out by the spoke of an old bicycle wheel on a bombsite on the main road. With the city to the west and the docks to the south, East London had taken a belting during the Blitz – anything the German bombers had left, they unloaded on us on their way home.
    Of course we always won in the endless re-run of the Battle of Britain that was being staged by the Airfix kits hanging from my ceiling, but the fabric of the place I grew up in was definitely holed. If the spaces in the city that the bombsites opened up were the war’s legacy to young Londoners, it was our duty to make the most of them. Everyone knew they could be dangerous places which we weren’t really meant to hang around in, and that was half the appeal.
    A copper caught me messing about in one when I was five or six, and took me straight back to ‘Sugar’s house’, where the punishment for my crime was to be kicked straight upstairs to bed and grounded for a week. It’s not just your family, friends and neighbours keeping an eye on you which helps set you on the right road as a kid. If policemen, teachers and doctors know where everyone lives too, that helps you grow up with a sense of being part of a community, ratherthan just a mass of disconnected individuals. Not that this would stop me getting into a fair amount of mischief, obviously.
    Another time when I was messing around on a bombsite I found this big kind of metal torch. I think I’d just watched Spartacus, so I knew what to do – I got hold of a box of matches and tried to set fire to some straw in it. Nothing’s more interesting to you as a kid than fire, because there’s such a big warning sign over it as far as adults are concerned. Unfortunately on this occasion things got a bit more interesting than I’d intended, as some of the flaming straw fell down and set fire