Young Winstone by Ray Winstone Read Free Book Online Page A

when I was a youngster was Mary Poppins. Where else do you think I got the accent from?
    The Sound of Music was good as well – that was definitely one for the West End.
    The only small dampener on going to the cinema with the whole family was Laura saying, ‘I wanna go toilet.’ Sometimes she wouldn’t even last till halfway through, and because Mum would have to take her, we’d all have to stand up so they could make their way out into the aisle.
    Even though we went up West regularly, sometimes it felt like people there would dig us out a bit. The first time we saw Zulu was one of those occasions. It’s probably the best film ever, and I know it more or less off by heart now, but the day we went up to Leicester Square to see it has stuck in my mind for a different reason. It’s one of the earliest memories I have of people trying to make us feel like we weren’t good enough to be somewhere.
    We’re all sat down, we’ve got our popcorn, sweets and drinks, and the music’s playing. The film hasn’t started – I don’t think the trailers have even started – and obviously there are a few crackling noises as the bags are opening. But this woman sitting behind us with her Old Man almost barks at us, ‘Could you keep the noise down, please?’ My mum twists round with a polite half-shrug and explains, ‘The film hasn’t started yet, darlin’ – we’re just opening the popcorn and some sweets for the kids.’
    Obviously a few more sweet-wrappers get rustled over the next couple of minutes, but no one’s making a noise deliberately, and it’s still a while before the film’s due to start. But the woman can’t help herself – she decides to have another go. This time she practically hisses, ‘Keep the noise down’, and the ‘please’ is nowhere to be heard. Now my mum’s had enough. She stands up, turns round to look the woman straight in the eye and says, ‘Do yourself a favour, love, or you’ll be wearing it.’
    At that point, the pair of them got up and moved. My dad hadn’t even said anything – because it was a woman causing the trouble and he would never have a go at a woman. He was probably waiting for the bloke to start and then it would really have gone off. I clearly remember the feeling of ‘Oh, sorry, are we not allowed to be here?’ Just because we’re off our manor, suddenly everyone’s going to have something to say about it. This was a feeling I would grow quite familiar with over the years, not just in day-to-day life, but once I started acting as well.
    As a small child looking up at that big screen, the idea that I might one day be up there myself would have seemed completely ridiculous. Of course a kid might say they’d ‘like to be in a film’, in the same way they might want to fly a space rocket or captain England at Wembley, but it wasn’t something that was ever going tohappen. One of the big differences in those days was you didn’t have the Parkinsons or the Wossies – let alone the internet – so film stars were fantasy figures. That was your two hours of escape, and you believed who they were on the screen was who they were in real life.
    That said, we did have one film star in the family already. My cousin Maureen, Charlie-boy’s sister, was an extra in a Charlie Drake film once. It was set in the Barbican, which was where they lived at that time, and when the film came out we all had to go to the pictures to see Maureen in a big crowd of local kids chasing Charlie Drake down the road at the end. Good luck to anyone trying to get a load of local kids together for a crowd scene in the Barbican these days – you’d have to contact their agents first.
    The Odeon East Ham’s been through a few changes over the years as well – which one of us hasn’t? The last film they showed with the place as an Odeon was Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in 1981, but then fourteen years later it reopened as the Boleyn Cinema, which was one of the biggest Bollywood