Authors: Ray Winstone
Granddad and me are laughing as we follow them into the nick because we can see what the geezer’s up to. Visiting time at Maidstone
is set up almost like a stage, with all the cons sitting there as the audience. You can imagine the reaction when he walks in there to visit his mate or his brother or whatever with the two birds in hot-pants – the whole place stands up and starts clapping, even the screws.
The other funny thing about prison visiting for me is that I’ll always see someone else I know in there. This time it was Sammy McCarthy, the old boxer who used to spar with me when I first used to go to Spitalfields Market. It turned out he’d got done for bank robbery. I had a lot of time for this man – he was one of those guys you could talk to all day long – and I’ve seen Sammy since at dos for old boxers (he’s retired from the robbery business too now).
It was only when I was writing this book that I found out he’d been both British Flyweight and Lightweight champion in the fifties. In those days he was known as ‘Smilin’ Sammy’ aka ‘The Stepney Feather’. He was also the first boxer ever to appear on
This Is Your Life.
You don’t want Eamonn Andrews or Michael Aspel bringing you the big red book when you’re banged up, do you?
On the day of the hot-pants girls’ visit, I said hello to Sammy then waited for the place to quieten down a bit before slipping Charlie-boy a tenner, which was still worth having in the seventies. You folded it up and gave it to them and then the con who does the teas comes along and collects it on the tea-tray. I think they did this on the great old Ronnie Barker show
Porridge
once, so someone must’ve done their research. I suppose he’d pass it on to Charlie later on, so as to avoid it being found in the search at the end of visiting. I don’t know, I ain’t been in prison.
The tactic backfired this time, though, because when Granddad saw me do it he got up and said, ‘I didn’t know you could hand over money here, son.’ Then he got out his money to give Charlie-boy a score and the whole place fell about – even the screws were laughing.
The sad end to the Charlie-boy story was that years later he got heavily into drugs and they gave him a life sentence in Mauritius for smuggling heroin, even though I know for a fact it was only for personal use. The British government got him sent back home, so he was a lucky boy really to get banged up here rather than out there. After about five years he was released and started trying to get his life together, but by that time the heroin had got to him to the extent where there was no way back. The heroin had done his lungs, and his other internal organs weren’t shaping up too well either. That fucking drug doesn’t just mess your brain up, it kills your body as well. We lost Charlie-boy a few years ago, which was a great shame when I think about what a lovely kid he was.
One thing I’ve noticed while visiting mates who’ve been banged up over the years is how much the vibe in prisons has changed. On that trip to Maidstone and other visits in the late seventies I always registered how many of the cons would get themselves all smartened up – partly out of pride and partly because you’ve got your family or friends visiting and you want to look good so people don’t worry about you – but as time went on you didn’t see that nearly so much. More and more of the prisoners would come slouching in looking like shit, not caring what anyone else thought about them. It was definitely the drug culture that did that. Whether people are just smoking a lot of dope or they’re actual skag-heads, that basic pride in yourself seems to be one of the first things to go.
The way my granddad lived his life was the opposite of that. He’d had really bad bronchial problems all his life, and in his later years he had no option but to connect himself up to this great big pump inhaler with a bowl at the bottom – almost like a hubbly-bubbly or some kind of giant home-made bong, only he was using it to stay alive, not to get out of his head. And if you saw him out
and about he always looked dapper, however bad he might’ve been feeling.
You’d never hear him complain. Even the prospect of his own death was contemplated with good-humoured resignation: ‘I’m up, son, I’m up’ – that was his favourite saying. I really loved my granddad, and when he passed on a few years later it was one of the biggest losses I’ve had in my life. The doctors had told him he was going to die way back when he was just twenty-eight, so he did pretty well to live as long as he did. When he was on his death bed he looked up at me with a broad smile and said, ‘I’m eighty-two. They got the numbers the wrong way round.’
CHAPTER 20
THE ALEXANDRA TAVERN
I’ll tell you a good trick for getting the best seat on a plane if you can only afford economy class. Get yourself a cast made and strap it on under your trousers like you’ve got a broken leg – I was lucky, I had a mate whose mum worked in a hospital so I got her to make it up for me. Then borrow a couple of crutches to hobble onto the plane with, and they’ll have to upgrade you somewhere with a bit more legroom. Obviously, your leg’s got to be straight, so if there’s any seats free in business class they’ll put you in there. Otherwise it’ll be an aisle or (before they stopped allowing you to sit there) somewhere by the emergency exit.
This might seem like a lot of trouble to go to, not least because you’ve got to lug the cast around with you for the whole holiday if you want to do the same thing again on the way home, but there was a phase in my life when I did it three or four times in quick succession. OK, so you’ll get funny looks if anyone who was on the same flight as you (never mind if it’s one of the cabin crew) happens to catch you water-skiing, but that didn’t bother me at the time.
The flipside of the masterclass in morality and general manners I was getting from my granddad was an overlapping period of several years – probably from the time I left school onwards – when I was a bit of a scammer. I can see the contradiction between those two things now, but again, at the time it never really bothered me. I suppose in my own mind I was keeping alive the heritage of East End fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry culture. The docks might’ve been shutting up shop, but that was no reason the proud tradition of spillage had to die.
You never looked at yourself as doing anything criminal – at least, I didn’t. But from stolen tax discs that would come to you through a dodgy postman, to starting a motor with a screwdriver when it wasn’t even technically ours, to the odd bit of sleight of hand with a credit card, there was a fair amount of low-level illegality going on. When you’re a teenager who ain’t got much money the prospect of living like a king in a hotel for the weekend at someone else’s expense can look quite tempting, especially once you’re caught up in the dubious mystique of the gentleman conman.
Looking back on all this now, my reaction is, ‘Fucking hell, what was I thinking?’ Not so much in a moralistic way, although that is part of it, but more in terms of my misplaced confidence that if I got caught I wouldn’t go to prison. I did some stupid things at that time which I was lucky not to get done for. OK, I enjoyed some of them, but they were still stupid.
There were a couple of pubs down near where my dad went to school – just north of Victoria Park – where I got away with murders. Not literally murders, but certainly stuff that crossed the thin line that separates a misdemeanour from a felony. It’s all getting a bit chi-chi in those parts these days, but both the pubs concerned – the Empress and the Alexandra Tavern – are actually still there (albeit
under new management), which is quite unusual given how many East End boozers have gone under over the last few decades. Having so many people coming into the area who are Muslims certainly hasn’t helped the area’s pub trade, and that’s before you even factor in the invasion of the white middle classes.
Now, I don’t smoke spliff, and I’ve never really been able to – it just helicopters me, and I don’t really like that feeling. But the air was so thick with it in the Alex in the late seventies that walking in there was like opening curtains. One time we decided we could make the heady atmosphere work for us. I had a mate in those days who had access to a big colour photocopier at his place of work, and I got him to take photographs of a ten-pound note and copy them onto both sides of a piece of paper. They came out a bit grey at first but we fucked about with them for a while and got it as close as it was ever gonna get. In normal daylight you could see the colour wasn’t right, but in the kind of brothel-red glow they had at the Alex, with a cloud of marijuana smoke to help you, they could just about pass muster. Bosh! Two drinks and we’ll keep the change, thanks – no bother.
We absolutely caned it that night. Obviously, we should’ve just done it once and moved on somewhere else, but I’m not a great one for relocating. If I’m in a pub I like, I prefer to stay there for the duration. How we avoided getting caught and being sentenced to transportation to Australia for forging the tenners of the realm I will never know, but it must’ve been a bit of a sickener for the poor sod who had to cash up. And the fact that we never did it again suggested that we knew a destiny as Britain’s greatest counterfeiters did not lie ahead of us.
Another time in the Empress we had a load of dodgy lighters that were meant to be Ronsons that we were knocking out for fivers or
two quid. I remember a funny little geezer who bought one tried to use it straight away and it set his hair alight. We moved so fast to put him out it must’ve been like watching Red Adair. Luckily he was OK, but it was another deathblow to the idea of a victimless crime.
I mentioned earlier in this book that there was sometimes an element of hypocrisy about the moral environment I grew up in. This was particularly true when it came to fraud. If you get away with it, you’re a lovable rogue, but if someone else does it to you, they’re a wanker. The same applies when you get a bit higher up the criminal scale to proper white-collar scams.
People who earn their living on the wrong side of the law tend to see those as their equivalent of getting promoted at work, but the idea that ‘it only affects the banks and insurance companies’ is total bollocks. I’ve got as much dislike for the banks and insurance companies as the next man – probably more than most – but anyone can see that’s just an excuse, because fraud affects everyone. And when it’s focused on an individual victim it can be a terrible thing which absolutely destroys people’s lives.
Of course, I didn’t see things that way then. In my late teens and early twenties I wouldn’t have thought of fraud as something that was really hurting anyone. But luckily before my career as a fraudster could really get off the ground, the movie remake of
Scum
came along to save me from myself. Mary Whitehouse might not have thought that film was a good influence on impressionable young minds, but it certainly worked that way for me. Once you become an actor who might be recognised at any time, you can’t really afford to get involved in fraud any more (unless people want to look at your acting and say that it’s fraudulent – there’s nothing you can do to stop that). So being in a successful film changes your life in that way if no other.
There was no road-to-Damascus moment where someone sold me a dodgy timeshare and I realised it was wrong – apart from anything else, there was no way I would ever buy a timeshare in Damascus. But I do understand the implications of fraud now in a way I didn’t as a kid. Everyone seemed to be at it in one form or another when I was growing up. From little things like working cash in hand or dodgy tax discs to the boxes of booze or clothes that would mysteriously appear in people’s front rooms around Christmas. This was the grease that made the wheels move. But you only need to go up a gear or two and suddenly those wheels are taking you somewhere you don’t really want to go.
If you ask me now if I have any regrets about this, in a way I don’t because I learnt from it – as well as earning from it – but on the other hand it’s a time in your life that you look back on and think, ‘I wasn’t a very nice person.’ You tell yourself you’re not hurting anyone, but you know you are really. I don’t know if my parents knew what was going on. I don’t suppose my dad would’ve been too bothered, but then again maybe that was what the whole drama school thing was about. They might’ve been trying to give me something else to focus on.
I’d like to get one more story from the Empress in before I get onto how the second
Scum
put me back on the straight and narrow. We had some great nights in those pubs, and this one was from a few years earlier – a more innocent time, when I was maybe sixteen or seventeen.
I was seeing a barmaid at the time, and her brother was a big lump who came out of the house once when I’d walked her home. ‘What are you doing with my sister?’ he demanded, before chasing me off down the road. A few years later I saw him on the TV and recognised him immediately. He wasn’t on
Crimewatch;
he was
Tommy, the geezer from
Ground Force
(not Alan Titchmarsh – I don’t think I’d have run away if he’d chased me). I met him again a short while after and said, ‘You probably won’t remember me’, to which he replied, ‘Oh yes, I do.’
When I was stacking up the fruit and veg for that year in Muswell Hill, I never saw myself being a greengrocer for the rest of my life. Not because there was anything wrong with it as a job, just because the example of what had happened to my dad’s shop in Watford had showed me how hard it was getting to compete with the supermarkets. I had no idea what else I’d end up doing. I wasn’t really thinking about being an actor any more after
Scum
got banned. So I was lucky to get a break out of the blue which led me down a career path I really enjoyed. I do believe there probably is something like that out there for everyone, but a lot of people just never get the chance to find it.
I was at home at my granddad’s one day and happened to answer the phone.
‘Hello.’
‘Is that Ray?’
‘Yeah.’
‘We’re thinking of making the film
Scum
again.’
‘Oh, are you? Well done.’
They asked me if I’d like to do it and told me the fee would be £1,800, so I thought about it for a minute and said, ‘OK, alright.’ In my mind I still didn’t particularly want to be an actor, I just thought of it as work. Then they offered me another film for the same money, which they were going to shoot just before. It was called
That Summer!,
and doing it would mean going down to Torquay and living in a hotel for eight weeks over the summer of 1978. I didn’t hesitate so long over that one. I thought, ‘Blinding, I can have some mates down – it’ll be like a holiday.’