Free Young Winstone by Ray Winstone Page B

into these fucking great big concrete tower blocks.
    Not only did these new high-rise buildings split up communities and separate people from the neighbours they’d lived with all their lives, they also – as the Ronan Point disaster demonstrated – weren’t very well built. However idealistic some of the original plans might have been, a lot of the good intentions got lost in the transition from two-dimensional drawings to three-dimensional reality. It wasn’t just government cost-cutting that did the damage, there was a lot of skulduggery going on as well, with a lot of the money going into the wrong people’s pockets via the old secret handshake.
    Obviously this wasn’t bothering the Winstone family too much in our nice new house in Enfield, but when I’d go back to Plaistow to visit my old mates, I could feel the landscape changing. My memories of growing up there were very much low-rise – you could see the sky, it wasn’t all huge blocks looming up over you, and there was much more of a village mentality. But once they started turfing people out of their old terraced houses and moving them into these new flats, no one knew who lived next door to them any more. Sometimes it almost felt like a divide-and-conquer thing.
    Going back there started to get depressing as more and more people moved on. The last time I went back there on a Red Bus Rover I was probably thirteen. By that time I only had one mate leftliving on Caistor Park Road. His name – and I’m not making this up – was Micky Ghostfield. A field of ghosts was what that place was starting to feel like to me, and when I went back to knock for him, the fucker lived up to his name by blanking me. He might as well have answered the door with a white sheet over his head. I guess he hadn’t seen me for a while and didn’t want to know. I suppose I can understand it in a way, but then again, if you’re reading this, Micky, fuck you.
    One place out East I never got tired of going was Shoeburyness. In the summer holidays we would basically be shipped off there for six weeks. My mum would come with us and then my dad would drive down for the odd weekend because he’d be working. I remember going up the OAPs’ club with my nan quite a lot. Sometimes me and my sister would get up and do a song to entertain the troops. You’ve got to have your party piece, and we had some great parties at home and at our aunties’ and uncles’ houses at that time, when everyone would get up and sing.
    After a few years in Bush Hill Parade, my Old Man progressed to a bigger shop up in Watford. My dad was always known for having a great flash. I’m not being personal, that’s what they called the display of produce you’d use to entice the punters into your shop. The apples would all be beautifully polished, and he found a way of putting mirrors in at the back of the shelves to make the fruit look massive, so people would come in just to look at it. It was like fruit and veg CGI.
    As his operation got bigger his overheads would’ve gone up too, but as kids we never felt we were going without anything. He must’ve felt pressure to pay the bills and put food on the table, and we could tell by the way he walked up the front path if he’d had a bad day. He didn’t get the hump with us as much as with himself, but I remember one night when he came home and we’d already got themessage that he was in a bad mood. Then Mum put his dinner on the table and he just threw it straight out the window.
    There is an anger in our family, which for my part I like to think I’ve learnt to control much better these days, but it’s taken me a long time. We’re argumentative and stubborn and tend to have short fuses. My mum was the exception to that – she was very good at letting Dad have his tantrum while never letting there be too much doubt about who the real boss was. They did have rows, but it never got physical or violent.
    Well, I suppose it depends on how you define