Free Young Winstone by Ray Winstone Page A

we were basically going to be stuck there for the next seven hours. As it turned out, we ended up having a blinding day. We found this little hotel which was willing to take us in and give us a bit of dinner. We played football and flew a kite. I think it was that make-the-best-of-it attitude that the English have when we’re not moaning about everything which saw us through.
    All nearly didn’t end so well, though. We had the dog with us, and at one point we were walking along the top of some cliffs when Brandy came to a hole in the sea wall and jumped right through it. I looked over the edge and I could see him disappearing like in a cartoon – sailing through the air to land on his chin with his legs splayed out all around him. I knew he was dead – there was no way he could’ve survived that fall. But just like that indestructible Labrador on the Southend road a few years earlier, he got up, shook himself and found a path to run all the way back to us. It was fucking unbelievable – who did he think he was, Superdog?
    Some other holidays I look back upon really fondly were with my nan and granddad. I was probably nine or ten when they took us to the Ocean Hotel in Brighton, which was like Butlins’ flagship hotel. There was a fancy dress competition and I went as a billboard – it was my first big advertising job – while Laura was the Queen of Hearts. We watched She Wore a Yellow Ribbon at the cinema club in the afternoon (I’ve always loved John Wayne and I still think he’s a very under-rated actor). And I remember Maud and Toffy dancing together in the evening – my granddad was a terrific dancer and loved spinning Nanny Maud round the floor.
    A couple of years later – it must have been right at the end of the sixties – they took us on our first foreign holiday. We went to Arenal in Majorca, and I loved the freedom of being abroad right from the off. You can get the paella, but if you don’t fancy it, they still eat egg and chips just like us. Granddad would still always have a tie on when he was on the beach – they would, the old guys, they always looked immaculate – and he couldn’t pass a woman without lifting his hat, even if she was only wearing a bikini.

CHAPTER 7
    RONAN POINT
    Early on the morning of 16 May 1968, an old lady who’d recently moved into a newly built East London block of flats lit a match to get the stove going for her morning cup of tea. The gas explosion that followed sent her flying across the kitchen and left her shaken but miraculously unharmed. That should’ve been the end of it, but weaknesses in the just-completed building caused the whole southeast side of the block to collapse with a human toll – four dead and seventeen injured – that would have been much higher if most of the flats hadn’t still been unoccupied.
    This disaster made a huge impression on me at the age of eleven because it happened on our old patch – just down the road from Plaistow, on the way to Custom House. Looking back, I can see it also had a wider significance. It was certainly poetic justice that the block concerned had been named after a former chairman of Newham council’s housing committee (I didn’t know that at the time, I just Googled it), because the now infamous Ronan Point became a symbol of the huge mistakes that were made back then in building the new accommodation that East London, and Britain as a whole, so desperately needed.
    We wanted homes building – and quickly – but instead of houses, they gave us prisons in the sky. I realise that some of the architects and town planners responsible were probably quite idealistic people, but it was easy for them to be idealistic when they didn’t actually have to live in these places. Those gaps where the bombsites were should have been filled with the kind of properties that would have enhanced the communities that already existed. Instead, whole streets of perfectly good houses were demolished and everyone was shipped off