Young Winstone (30 page)

The thing I’ll never forget about that Salzburg trip were these Hare Krishna geezers who were talking to me in this park where I was waiting to see the concierge. I’ll have a chat with anyone when I’m bored, and they were nice enough people. They were trying to sell me their way of life – saying I’d never want for anything if I joined them – and I was smiling to myself thinking, ‘I’ve got twenty large in my pockets. How much cash can that robe hold?’

I don’t know if what they were telling me about reincarnation got in my head – the same way that thing my mate at school told me about the tape rewinding did – but I had a really strange moment of
déja vu
as I walked around the corner out of that park. It was almost like I knew where everything was going to be before I’d even got there . . . This clock on the right, that shop on the left . . . I’d never visited the place, but I knew exactly where everything was. The only rational explanation I could come up with afterwards was that it was a location I remembered from
The Sound of Music.

When I was a kid watching films like that one or
Lawrence of Arabia
or
Bridge on the River Kwai
on the big screen, I never dreamed I’d be up there myself one day. Sometimes it can be disappointing when you come across the people who’ve made the movies you’ve loved in real life. I met the director David Lean (the man behind
those last two films) early on in my career when he was gonna do
Mutiny on the Bounty.
I normally get on well with directors, but he was quite a rude man.

You know as soon as you walk into the room whether they want you or not, and it was plain he didn’t like the cut of my jib, but I persisted because I was such a fan of the things he’d done in the past. I asked him, ‘What’s this one all about then, David?’ He said, ‘Why do you want to know?’ So I told him how much I’d loved his work and that I was really interested in what he was going to do this time round, but he just didn’t want anything to do with me.

The only thing that made me feel better about it was a few years later when I went to a talk Alec Guinness gave in a small room at the Young Vic. Guinness had been in a lot of Lean’s films so I asked him what he thought of him and he said, ‘A wonderful film-maker, but what a horrible nasty man!’ So it wasn’t just me then . . .

If you’ve grown up watching films starring the Alec Guinnesses and the Richard Burtons and the Peter O Toole’s of this world, you can’t help seeing that as the gold standard everyone should aim for. But then you look at yourself and you know you can’t even speak the Queen’s English. So you think, ‘Well, how is that gonna work?’ In the phase of my life when I was one of The Unobtainables, it still wasn’t really working yet. In fact, I don’t think I’d look at a performance I’d done and think it was good enough until
Nil by Mouth
more than fifteen years later.

But I was learning, however slowly. I saw a lot of things go down in those two years I worked for Alex Steene. That guy Alan Lake, who used to knock about with Diana Dors – he came in a lot. They really loved each other those two, and Alan was a blinding bloke – a bit of a nut-nut, but I did like him. He used to come in the office and do handstands. Anyway, a terrible thing happened one night when
we all went down the Lyceum together. Diana was there – she knew all the chaps and she was good friends with Alex. But when Alan walked in the room, the whole audience booed him. I never knew why – there must have been something in the papers – but those are the kind of things that stay with you.

It’s weird the way people think at times. I was indoors at the maisonette in Enfield once (it did happen sometimes) when a policeman came round. He told me that a guy who’d attacked an old car-park attendant on the King’s Road in Chelsea had claimed as part of his defence that he wasn’t there because he was having a drink with Ray Winstone. I didn’t even know the guy – he must’ve seen me in a film or on TV and thought, ‘Oh, he’ll vouch for me.’ Like you’re gonna vouch for a geezer who’s beaten up some old car-park attendant, anyway!

It was a fucking joke – even the copper was laughing. I think he knew it was all cobblers. He was a nice copper, actually – I could accept that they existed now, thanks to Sergeant Alan. This was just one of those shock realisations which were dragging me kicking and screaming into the world of the adult. It’s hard to look back and pick out one moment when you really started growing up. But I’ve got to do it, otherwise I can’t really justify calling this book
Young Winstone
and finishing it before I become the international Hollywood love god who Matthew McConaughey knows and envies today.

I’m not one of those dads who’ll tell you that they suddenly understood everything about the world the moment they had their first child. As I’ve said already, my approach to parenting as a younger man – certainly with my first daughter Lois, hopefully a bit less with Jaime – was more in line with that of an earlier generation. Mum’s job is to be at home with the kids, while geezers go out and get the bread and butter then go to the pub because they’ve been working
all week and they deserve it. The catch is, sometimes even if they haven’t been working all week, they still go to the pub anyway.

I was still out and about a lot in East London. My eating place of choice – where I’d now go with Tony Yeates or some of the other boys – had graduated two stops down the Central Line from the Venus steakhouse in Bethnal Green to the Apollo in Stratford. Steakhouses often have classical-sounding names because they’re usually run by Greek fellas, and Panny and Gilly, the two geezers who owned the Apollo, kept a blinding gaff. They did great grills and made lovely margaritas. You’d see all the East End glamour in the Venus over the years: Page 3 girls and West Ham’s Frank McAvennie – old Mackers – he was a good mate of mine. There was a party atmosphere and the grub was great – we took Phil Daniels in there a few times, and Perry Fenwick who plays Billy Mitchell in
EastEnders.

Given how keen I always was to be back in the East End as a teenager, I suppose it’s strange I wasn’t moving heaven and earth to persuade Elaine that we needed to live there. I’m not going to say East London had become a state of mind for me, because that would sound a bit poncey, but the sense of belonging which endured from my childhood there was definitely something I carried with me – off-screen and on: a kind of happiness, in a way.

It was important for me to have that, given that I was working in a business where I didn’t always feel I belonged. And the sense of me being someone who knew who they were was probably something casting directors were picking up on once I started to get a bit more work. The ability to fully inhabit a place you don’t actually live in is what acting’s all about, after all.

I came out of the job with The Unobtainables to another regular gig, this time as Will Scarlett in the ITV series
Robin of Sherwood.
It lasted three years and was a big breakthrough in terms of knowing
what I was doing and all-round professionalism. But some very serious things happened while I was going back and forth to Bristol playing one of Robin’s Merrie Men, the kind of things that don’t really leave you any other option than to grow up.

The first sucker punch was my mum getting cancer. She had it for two years before finally dying when she was fifty-two and I was twenty-eight. The reason cancer is such a very cruel disease is because it leads you down an alley of thinking, ‘Oh, you look alright today, you look good – maybe you’ve turned a corner’, but then you go round that corner and there the cancer is waiting for you again. I was looking at all these special diets for her and places she could go to maybe have another chance – even fucking faith-healing starts getting into your head because you will grab at any old twig in the hope that it might turn into an olive branch.

To be honest with you, I don’t think I’ve ever got over my mum’s death. You’ve got your five basic senses in life – smell, taste and the other three – but on top of that there’s a more general sense of yourself and the place you occupy in the world. Some people get that from religion, but as far as I’m concerned it comes from the people you love and the people who love you. And that higher sense kind of went from me a bit for a few years after my mum died. I lost it, and I’m not sure I’ve fully got it back, even now, because the connection a person has with their mum is like no other. You’re from your mum, you’ve come out of her; two thirds of our bodies are water, and it all flows in the same direction.

One thing that did help at the time was a great conversation I was able to have with Mum just before she died. We all hoped she was going to get better, but I think everyone knew deep down how unlikely that was, especially once she’d gone into a coma. I was away in Bristol at the time doing
Robin of Sherwood
and there was a
big fight scene with Jason Connery coming up the next day. We’d designed it a bit like the one in
The Quiet Man
with John Wayne, and we were just going through the final preparations the night before when I had the thought that I needed to go home.

The producers were great about it – I’d told them this moment was going to come. So I raced back to London for the next day and found that my mum had come out of her coma. I sat and talked to her all day long. We had a great chat about my dad, about life in general. It was all the conversations you often end up wishing you could have but don’t get the chance to.

My mum had always been very proud of me and backed me to do what I wanted in life (as did my dad, who might not have been easily impressed by musical theatre, but only ever wanted the best for me and my sister). She used to sit around with the aunties and watch me in
Scum,
which can’t have been an easy thing for a mum in a way, but she always used to say, ‘If that’s what you want to do with your life, son, you go and do it.’ Still, I think she’d realised that we needed to have a talk. It wasn’t all in the past tense as if she knew she was about to die. She made the whole thing feel more natural than that, just like a general reassurance that everything was in place: ‘Don’t worry about your father, he’ll be alright.’ Lois can’t have been more than eighteen months old at the time, so we talked about how much Mum loved her, and Elaine was pregnant with Jaime, so that was another good topic. And shortly after the conversation ended, Mum passed away.

We’d lost another child in between those two happy births, and Mum had still been alive when the baby boy died, so those two deaths came quite close together. Elaine was about seven months pregnant and the baby wasn’t right, but she had to give birth, anyway. I was there with her through the delivery, and I can tell you it was
hard. Those are the kinds of experiences that can destroy you if you let them.

I think what helped us through the aftermath was knowing that my mum and dad had been through the same experience. Their attitude was: ‘It happens. You’re not the only people in the world who have had to go through this, so the best thing is just to get on with it.’ Now, while that’s not necessarily what you want to hear at the time, it does liven you up a bit. It’s like having Jackie Bowers in your corner.

We weren’t really the sort of people who would sit down and talk to a counsellor or a psychiatrist. In a way, maybe we needed to, but they’d probably have fucked us up even more. So, following my mum and dad’s stoic example was probably our best bet in the end, and the fact that Elaine fell pregnant again quite quickly afterwards with Jaime definitely helped.

It was a tough thing, but when a little bit of time has passed you’ve got to try and take positives out of those situations, and the way I’ve always looked at it is that if the other child had lived, we might not have had our Jaime, who we love. The upshot of all this is that I’m the last of the male line, as far as the Winstones are concerned. Lois and Jaime tell me they’ll go double-barrelled when the time comes for them to get married, which is very decent of them, but they don’t have to do it.

It was funny when all my three daughters were born. I was so caught up in the moment that I didn’t even know if they were boys or girls for the first half-hour. It didn’t worry me. I just had ’em in my arms and that was all that mattered. Of course, I would have liked to have had a boy – a son to carry on the family name. That would’ve been wonderful, but I suppose I did have one in a way, if only for a small amount of time.

Elaine and I would have loved to have held him in our arms too – just for a moment – but he was taken away before we got the chance. To be honest with you, I think two Young Winstones died that day. I’ll never forget the one who didn’t make it, and the pain of my son’s passing marked the end of the person this book is about, and the beginning of whoever the older and maybe slightly wiser version was going to be.

PICTURE CREDITS

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologies for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. Page numbers refer to the plate sections in this book.

Plate section 1
: p.1 Images author’s own; p.2 Images author’s own; p.3 Images author’s own; p.4 Top: © Huw Davies/Mark Jackson; p.5 Top: Author’s own, Bottom: © David Secombe 1990; p.6 Top: © Topfoto, Bottom: author’s own; p.7 Images author’s own; p.8 Top and bottom: © Fremantle Ltd/REX

Plate section 2
: p.1 Top left and right: Author’s own; p.2 Top left: © 1979 Who Films, Inc. Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC, Top right and bottom: Author’s own; p.3 Top and bottom: ©Euro London Films; p.4 Images author’s own; p.5 Top, middle, and bottom left: Author’s own; p.6 Top left and right: Author’s own, Bottom: © ITV/REX; p.7 Images author’s own; p.8 Image author’s own