Free Young Winstone by Ray Winstone

old enough to understand the politics of it all. Everyone would make a fuss of you, but sometimes you’d get a sense that there was a bit of an edge to it when someone from a different firm came over.
    I was walking down the market with my dad one day when a fella went to doff his cap to us. Bosh! My dad knocked him out. My jaw was on the floor – just like the other geezer’s was, but for different reasons. I was thinking, ‘What’s he done that for?’ But it turned out a lot of the lorry drivers from up North used to carry a razor blade in their cap, and if you crossed ’em they’d whip it out and cut you with it. Obviously something had gone on between them before and my dad needed to get his retaliation in first.
    Apparently they used to hide razors in their lapels as well, so if you grabbed their jacket and went to nut them, the blade would cut your hands to pieces. I think it’s an old Teddy Boy thing, but the lorry drivers used to do it too. All sorts of nasty things could happen if you got on the wrong side of the wrong people in that market. I never saw this done myself but I heard about people getting their legs held down across the kerb and broken the wrong way, orsomeone getting a pencil through their eardrum. It wasn’t like there was any reason for that to be happening to me, but the fact that some real tough guys worked on that market was definitely a big part of the character of the place.
    If you go to Spitalfields now, the atmosphere could hardly be more different. There are new shops, which certainly don’t take triangular tokens, where A. Mays and the Cage used to be, and while there’s still a market, it now sells clothes to tourists on one day and antiques or artworks on another. The basic layout of the whole covered section is pretty much unchanged, but it’s all been tidied up so much that it’s hard to believe it’s the same place. It’s kind of recognisable and unrecognisable at the same time – like a big crab shell that a smaller sea creature has moved into after the former resident has departed.
    The same thing’s happened at Covent Garden, the old fish market at Billingsgate was moved out to the Isle of Dogs years ago, and it won’t be long till the meat market at Smithfield follows. Sometimes it’s a shame things have to change. Many of those men I met at Spitalfields as a kid were members of families who’d passed stalls down from father to son since the time of Henry Mayhew’s coster-mongers and before, and yet now all those traditions which have come down across the generations have disappeared.
    I’m not one of those people who believe nothing new should ever be allowed to happen, though. And some of what went on in that place we’re probably better off without. I never actually saw my dad come off worse in any of the tussles he had, but everyone does some time, and it’s much better to be coming home from work without lumps and bumps all over you. I wouldn’t want to paint a picture of him as someone who was constantly having rows, but those are the stories you tend to remember.
    When my mind turns to happier times, there’s a holiday in Bournemouth that always comes back to me, for some reason. One day – I think it was a bank holiday Monday – we got the boat across to the Isle of Wight. Dad was never great on boat trips and when we got to the other side where there was a coach waiting to take everyone round the island, he said, ‘We’re not getting on a coach, let’s walk round the island.’ He had no comprehension of how big it was – I think he thought it was like the Isle of Dogs – ‘Of course we can walk round the Isle of Wight. It’s a dot on the map to us. You get on your coach and we’ll have a little bit of proper . . .’
    We were only kids at the time, and the minute the coach drove off, the realisation hit us that this place was not only huge, it was also pretty desolate. What’s more, nothing was open ’cos it was a bank holiday, so