Young Winstone by Ray Winstone Read Free Book Online Page B

cinemas in Britain. They’d have all the dancing films on, and I’d often go past it on the way to and from West Ham games. But when I went back there specially to have a nose around for this book, I saw it had closed down again. Who knows what’ll happen next? Maybe someone will buy the place up and re-open it screening Polish art films . . . you never know.
    Going back to the Plaistow area in 2014, there’s no doubt about what the biggest change is: it’s the shift in the ethnic backgrounds of the people who live there. In the space of a couple of generations, it’s gone from being the almost entirely white neighbourhood my family moved into, to having the predominantly Asian feel that it undeniably does today. Anyone who thinks a population shift of that magnitude in that short a space of time isn’t going to cause a few problems has probably never lived in a place where it’s actually happened.
    I remember the first black man who came to live on Caistor Park Road. He was a very smart old Jamaican gent who always wore a zoot suit and a hat with a little turn in it. In truth he probably wasn’t all that old, he just seemed that way. But he was so novel to us that we just used to stare at him and sometimes even (and I realise this isn’t something you’d encourage kids to do today) touch him for luck. He’d just smile and say, ‘Hallo, children’, in a broad Caribbean accent. He knew we didn’t mean any harm by it – we were just kids who hadn’t seen a black man before.
    I say that, but in fact we had, in the familiar form of Kenny Lynch, who knew my dad. Lynchy had been on the fringes of my dad’s world for a while – he was a regimental champion boxer in the Army and went on to have a few hit singles (as well as writing ‘Sha La La La Lee’ for Newham local heroes the Small Faces) and sing in the kinds of clubs that the Krays used to run – but I’m not sure if he really booked himself as a black man, or wanted anyone else to for that matter.
    When the first West Indian and then Asian people moved in, people weren’t worried about them; they were a novelty. But as more and more came, a feeling began to develop – particularly with regard to the new arrivals from Bangladesh and Pakistan – that they wanted to just stay in their own community rather than joining in with ours. That was what caused the problems: people sticking with their own.
    In a way, you couldn’t blame them. They tended to come more from rural areas and maybe had more of an adjustment to make to living in London – if someone from your village goes and lives halfway across the world and they’re your mate, then if you do the same thing, it’s inevitable you’re going to want to join them. And under the pressure of trying to establish yourself in a new environment – especially when what makes you different is visible to all – it’s onlynatural to close ranks. Looking back now, I can understand the fears they must have had, but there were fears on both sides – fear of losing jobs to people who would work longer hours for less money, fear of the manor you’d lived in all your life being taken away.
    Going back to East and West Ham now, they’re not just ‘cosmopolitan’, they’re probably more Bangladeshi and Indian and Pakistani than they are anything else. The positive thing I can see happening in the playground of my old school is that maybe the younger generation are kind of educating us. Whether one side is becoming more Anglicised or the other is becoming less so – or most likely a bit of both – what they’ve got to do is learn to meet in the middle.
    Whatever happens, it’s probably not going to be anything that hasn’t happened along the banks of the River Thames plenty of times before. The other side of all those dockyard traditions that have always given the inner London section of the East End its exotic edge is that it’s also always been the place that immigrants have come to first, whether