Young Winstone (24 page)

It was like that too, and without me coming home empty-handed and with a sore head like I normally would, either. Not only did I have a great time down there, I also met my wife-to-be Elaine, and before I’d even come back to London, she’d already helped me start to heal the breach with my parents.

That Summer!
was a film for young teenagers. You can guess the kind of thing it was from the title. I was in some kind of round-the-bay swimming competition and these three Glasgow sweaties kept having a pop at me so I had to sort them out. The same people who did
Scum
produced it – Davina Belling and Clive Parsons – but I wasn’t actually meant to be playing the same character again. I’ve heard this suggested a few times, but the film certainly wasn’t scripted that way. I probably just acted like that because I didn’t know how to do anything else. I didn’t have the ability to find another character yet, so I just played me every time.

This film is rarely seen these days, although it was shown on TV late at night in the Granada region once, when someone was kind enough to make me a copy of it on video. For some reason I got a BAFTA best newcomer nomination for it, even though I didn’t deserve it because I didn’t really have the first idea of what I was doing. Julie Shipley, who played the girl in it, was good, though.

When I eventually went to the BAFTAs, eighteen months or so later, I knew I wasn’t going to be in luck from the moment I got there. We were sitting way back in the cheap seats, and the iron rule of award ceremonies is: ‘If you ain’t down the front, you ain’t gonna win.’ Even if you are down the front, you still probably won’t win – they might just have got you there so the cameras can catch the pissed-off look on your face.

That Summer!
didn’t win me my first piece of acting silverware, but it did bring me the ultimate prize, which was my Elaine. She
lived in Manchester at the time, but she was down in Torquay on holiday with her mum and dad and a mate called Carol, who we still see sometimes to this day.

My mate – the actor Tony London, who was in the film with me – went after Elaine at first, but she didn’t want to know. I’ve never really got into competition with friends over women – if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is – but I couldn’t help holding Elaine’s gaze and doing the old puppy-eye thing every now and again. I’d been going out with Julie Shipley for a while, but even though she was a good girl, we weren’t really getting along. So me and Elaine met up again on our own the next day and that was that. Tally-ho, chaps, bandits at three o’clock.

Brandy’s legacy had served me well. To be honest, I think Elaine had also tapped into it, because she did me with the eye thing too. All of which goes to show that there is such a thing as eyes meeting across a room, and the buzz is even better when you both catch each other looking away and then back at the same time.

Before we met, Elaine had gone to college doing art and design and then got jobs window-dressing for a chain of department stores. But by the time we got together she was working as a Bunny Girl at the Playboy Club in Manchester, although she wasn’t wearing her costume when we first met. I soon put paid to that once we got together – I told that bunny costume to hop it.

It’s not like Elaine was short of rivals for my attention in Torquay that summer – and the same applied the other way round. All of which made the strength of the instant bond between us even more obvious.

I was certainly a bit of a handful in those days. It was my first time away from home working with a film crew, and it wasn’t so much the other actors who were the problem, it was the sparks. This
mob were murder – their motto when they went away was ‘Drink, fight and fuck’ – although obviously they weren’t all like that, and I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, so if you’re still married to one of them, it wasn’t him. But the fact that when the film was finally finished I would drive back to London with the electricians rather than my fellow performers shows you who I felt most at home with.

At the end of her holiday Elaine went home with her parents, but pretty much as soon as she got to Manchester I was asking her to come and see me again. She borrowed a car to drive back to Torquay, but she turned the wrong way onto the motorway and headed north instead of south. A psychologist might see this as evidence of her subconscious mind trying to protect her by taking her as far away from me as possible, but really it was the opposite. What made this mistake a good omen was the fact that she carried on driving until she got to Gretna Green, which was where couples used to run off to if they eloped.

When she got there, she asked a policeman if she was ‘anywhere near Torquay’, and he told her (and feel free to read this in your worst
Braveheart
accent), ‘Sorry, love, you’re in Gretna Green.’ So she turned around and drove all the way back to Devon.

Elaine made it down to Torquay eventually, but obviously her mum was worried as to why it had taken her a whole day. ‘Don’t you know where the sun goes down?’ I enquired respectfully when she finally turned up at my hotel. ‘It goes down in the west, babe. So all you’ve got to do is look at the sun and you might have some idea of where you are.’

A sense of direction has never been my Elaine’s strongest suit, but she knows how to put people on the right road when it comes to the things that matter. She was showing this quality already in the first weeks we were together in Torquay. My parents had wanted to
make peace for ages but my dad’s as stubborn as I am – we were like two rams butting their heads together (and we still are). He wouldn’t just say, ‘Come home,’ he wanted me to ask, but I wasn’t having it. So when the two of them made the gesture of bringing my granddad down to Torquay on holiday at the same time as I was working there, that was quite a major concession on their part. I don’t think my dad would have come up with that on his own – Mum probably nagged him.

They stayed in a suite at the Imperial Hotel, so they must’ve been doing alright for money at the time. And Elaine was with me when I got the call to tell me that they were there, so she came along too to have dinner at the hotel. Things could still have gone either way at that stage, as I hadn’t seen much of them over the last eighteen months or so, and there were still issues that needed to be sorted out. But it was all kind of cool – Elaine met ’em and then she danced with my granddad, and by the time we parted company at the end of the night, we were all on friendly terms and she’d made a really good impression on them.

It went so well that before
That Summer!
was even finished I’d hired a car to drive her back to London to see them all again. There’s a big street in Winchmore Hill near where our house was that all the rich people used to live on. It was sort of like a lower-key version of Bishop’s Avenue, just off the North Circular, where all the millionaires have mansions that are going to rack and ruin because they never get around to actually living in them.

I turned down this road saying, ‘Nearly there, babe’, and I could see the pound-note signs lighting up in Elaine’s eyes. Once I’d taken it that far I thought, ‘I’ve got to follow through with this’, so I pulled into one of the driveways and went up and knocked on the door. An old boy came out who she probably thought was the butler, so
I spun him a line about being lost or some other bollocks and went back to the car. She’d got out of the passenger seat by that time and was looking a bit confused. Luckily I was able to put her mind at rest by telling her, ‘I fucking had you there, didn’t I? You thought we were cake-o bake-o!’

She still married me within about a year of seeing where I actually lived, though. So she can’t have been in it for the money, which subsequent events would confirm was definitely for the best.

CHAPTER 21

THE TATE & LYLE SUGAR FACTORY, SILVERTOWN

There was one thing I came back from Torquay with that I could’ve done without, and that was a charge of marijuana possession for a bit of wacky baccy that wasn’t even mine. One night I had a party in my room in the Grand Hotel – just for a few of the boys in the crew. Unfortunately, there were two of the make-up women staying downstairs who were not very nice. I usually get on really well with the make-up girls, but I didn’t with these two – not in a nasty way, I just didn’t have ’em in the company because they were horrible gossips.

Anyway, I had this party, and they complained about the noise. Maybe they were just pissed off that they hadn’t been invited, I don’t know. Either way, that was fair enough. The bad part was that they told the concierge I had drugs in the room – which I didn’t because that’s not my game. So I came back from the set the next day to be met by a police detective who had already been in there (which I thought was a fucking liberty, but obviously I don’t own the room, the hotel does).

He told me they’d found a small quantity of marijuana. I said, ‘It ain’t mine – you can give me a drugs test if you like’, but that didn’t stop them taking me down the station. I knew who it belonged to – a mate of mine who did like a smoke – but just because he’d dropped me in it with some grass didn’t mean I had to become one. Maybe he should’ve come forward and held his hands up, but he didn’t. The whole thing was a bigger deal then legally than it would be now, but my main concern was that I didn’t want my dad thinking I was on drugs – especially when I wasn’t. Relations with my parents were just starting to get back on track, and this was the first time I’d been away working on a film, so I didn’t want them thinking I was on the slippery slope to reefer madness.

When I went back to Torquay to appear in court in December of 1978 I decided to plead guilty. I’d been brought up never to do that, but in this case there was fuck all else I could do. I just wanted this one out of the way with nothing in the papers to upset the family.

Not long before my court appearance, the producers Davina and Clive phoned me up and said, ‘Since you’re going back, anyway, could we do some pick-up shots?’ They’d been really good about sorting out the legal side of things, so I couldn’t say no. Next thing I knew I had to swim out into Torquay bay in the middle of winter, which was a bonus – especially when my ankle got snagged by a fishing hook that dragged me under the sea. I just about managed to pull the hook out of my leg and get home in one piece. Then I got found guilty and paid the fine without my Old Man finding out, so that was more good news.

Fast-forward thirty-five years, and having this conviction on my record still causes me problems getting into America. Every time I go there, which I do a lot, I get pulled out of the line and have to sit
in a room and be investigated (not intimately, but it’s still a pain in the arse). When you get off a plane after an eleven-hour flight the last thing you want to do is spend another four hours being asked pointless questions in a brightly lit room, especially when you’re a smoker like I am. And all because someone who was a mate of yours – bless him – smoked a joint in your hotel room and left a bit of gear there. The worst thing is that at the end of the interrogation they always say, ‘You shouldn’t have to come here any more, this will clear off your record now’, but it never does. I always tell them, ‘You say that every time.’

I often see Frank Roddam when I’m on those flights back and forth to LA, either that or hanging about in the Chateau Marmont. He’s the guy who got me to be a rocker in
Quadrophenia
between the two films for Belling and Parsons, and he’s still got those little-boy looks he always had – I suppose the millions he must’ve earned for inventing
Masterchef
can’t have done any harm in that area.

I wish he’d let me have a haircut like his in
Quadrophenia,
instead of sending round Danny La Rue to give me Liberace’s old barnet. I was happy to pay tribute to my childhood memories of mods and rockers roaring through Plaistow, and I didn’t even mind sharing a bath with the lovely Phil Daniels, although I’d have rather not done it with hair that looked like it’d just got back from a three-month residency in Vegas.

The funny thing about my performances in the two films I did with Phil at that time –
Quadrophenia
and
Scum
– is that I wasn’t either capable or interested enough to have a say in how I looked on the screen yet. I didn’t realise I could have a say in the development of the character – I just turned up, listened to what the director had to say and did the lines as best I could. If I’d played those parts a few years later I would have done them very differently, but they might
not have turned out nearly so well, because how little I knew about what I was doing probably fed into the rawness of the characters.

A lot of the Anna Scher boys were in both films too, and they knew the ropes a lot better than I did. They were winding me up a bit on
Quadrophenia.
One of them (not Phil) came up behind me in a dressing room and said, ‘’Ere, Ray, I’m doing your part in
Scum
.’ I just held his gaze in the mirror and said, ‘Oh, are you mate? Well, good luck to ya.’ I knew he was digging me out.You do get tested in those situations, especially when you’ve got a load of young fellas together.

When the time came to do the scene in the alley at Shepherd’s Bush Market where they’re chasing me on the bikes, the guy who was needling me about
Scum
was meant to be the first one off and at me. Peter Brayham, who was the stuntman and a great mate of mine, told me what I had to do, which was basically crash into the boxes. I’m not that great on a bike, but all I had in my head was ‘he’s the first one off’.

After I’d crashed the bike, I was supposed to stay there while they all piled into me. Instead, I jumped up and chinned him. All the stunties were going, ‘Stop! Stop!’ but they couldn’t get there in time to stop me giving him a good larrapping. The geezer didn’t bear a grudge afterwards. I think he respected me for it, because he knew he’d been out of order. Either way, we’re still mates a quarter of a century later.

When you’re doing these films – the second
Scum
was the same – you don’t know whether they’re going to end up being any good or not. One of the things I was beginning to learn at this time was that the scenes which work the best tend to be the ones that are done in a very simple way. The billiard-balls scene in
Scum
was a good example.