Read Online Young Winstone by Ray Winstone - Free Book Online Page B

for breath, because when one of them knocked the other down, he’d stand and wait for his adversary to get back up. Every time someone got knocked over it was almost like the end of the round. There was no kicking anyone in the head or anything like that – it was all very courteous and old-fashioned. All the guys were standing round watching, and I was there with them, a small boy with a bacon roll.
    By the time those two were done it didn’t even seem to matter who won any more. At the end they both shook hands and went in the café to have a nice cup of tea, and everyone was clapping them and saying, ‘Blinding fight.’ Obviously this is a very romantic notion of what violence should be like, but that only made it more impressive to see it actually happen. In a strange way it was a beautiful thing to watch – two men just being men – but it was also pretty scary. I wasn’t much more than ten years old at the time, and they were really going at it: I mean, this was a severe tear-up, but it was still some way short of being the most unnerving thing I saw happen in that market.
    Across the way from the Blue Café was a place called ‘the Cage’, which was where all the big lorries pulled up to load in and load out. That was also where the methers – the tramps – used to burn the bushel boxes to keep warm. They’d all be sleeping around thefire in the winter with big old coats on. You don’t see meths drinkers so much now – it’s like it’s gone out of fashion. I suppose they’d be crystal methers now. Maybe the news has finally broken that drinking methylated spirits is bad for you – I think the clue was in the way they coloured it blue and purple.
    The meths drinkers used to have their own hierarchy, with different pitches and guv’nors who sometimes used to fall out among themselves and have a ruck. I don’t know if it’s still like that among the homeless today, but you’re going to get that kind of thing going on wherever people are under pressure, and I don’t suppose changing the intoxicant of choice will have ushered in a new era of peace and harmony.
    My dad used to bring them in old coats and shoes sometimes, but you could guarantee that the next week they wouldn’t have them any more, because they’d have sold them to buy meths. He wasn’t the only one on the market who used to do this, either. Other people would bring them out a bacon sandwich or an egg roll. The methers did get looked after, they just didn’t look after themselves.
    I remember standing by the Cage once with my dad and Billy and Johnny Cambridge. They were two of his mates from over the water – not the Irish Sea, the Thames – and they used to have a painted cab with horseshoes on it. Quite a few of the South London greengrocers were a bit gypsy-ish, and the Cambridges were wealthy fellas and grafters with it. I remember Billy having a row with a one-armed mether once – the geezer pointed to the stump where his arm used to be and said, ‘If I still had that, boy, I’d put it on ya!’
    Anyway, Billy and Johnny were nice guys, from a really good family. And we were just standing there having a fag (well, the men were – I’m not sure I’d’ve been allowed one at that age) when an articulated lorry drove into the Cage without looking carefullyenough and ran straight over one of the tramp’s legs in his sleeping bag. The worst part of it was, this old boy was so cold and rotten with meths that he never even woke up. Hopefully that meant he didn’t feel the impact, but it was a horrible thing to see – never mind hear. He was still alive when they took him away in the ambulance, but he was in for a nasty surprise when he eventually woke up. I’ve had some pretty serious hangovers in my time, but nothing on quite that level.
    Spitalfields in the late sixties and early seventies was a rough, noisy old place, but it was definitely alive. When I first started going there I was only a kid, so I wasn’t really