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doesn’t shock me either. I don’t see it happen and think, ‘Oh, what was that?’ I know exactly what it is, and, to a certain extent, I understand it.

CHAPTER 4
    THE ODEON, EAST HAM
    When we first arrived there, in the late fifties, Plaistow was in Essex, which used to reach as far into London as Stratford. But from the day they changed all the boundaries around (1 April 1965, and I think we know who the April Fools were – us), the Essex border got pushed back to Ilford, and Plaistow was bundled up with East and West Ham to become part of the Frankenstein London borough of Newham. Why? What did they want to go and do that for?
    Essex is one of the great counties of England. You just have to say the name to know what sense it makes: Wessex was to the west and Essex is to the east, with Middlesex somewhere in the middle. But some soppy cunt who sits in a council office somewhere has a bright idea, and all of a sudden something which has worked very well for hundreds of years has got to change, just so he or she can pat themselves on the back for inventing ‘Newham’.
    Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always been really interested in the mythology of East London – the kind of stories which might or might not be true, but which help to define the character ofthe place either way. One of my mum and dad’s best friends was a Merchant Navy man who we called Uncle Tony. I learnt a lot from him – he told me all about his voyages round the world as a young man, which probably helped encourage me to want to travel, as that wasn’t something people in my family had tended to do much before. He also had a lot of great stories about the games they used to play in the docks.
    For instance, there was one fella whose party piece was to bite the head off a rat. Everyone would bet on whether he could do it or not, then he’d get the rat and put his mouth all around its neck . . . apparently the secret was that you had to do it cleanly, just pull it by the tail and the backbone would come out. Now I’m not recommending anyone try that at home, but being a kid of six or seven and listening to a story like that is certainly going to have an impact on you. As I grew older I loved all the tales about ‘spillage’ – for some reason, the closer you got to Christmas, crates of whisky would get harder to keep a firm hold of – and the canniness of the docklands characters.
    There was one about a geezer who owned a pub that used to do lock-ins for the dockers. They’d stay in there all night and then when it got light the next morning they’d go out and go to work. Obviously he didn’t want them to leave, so first he took all the clocks out and then he painted the windows black. They’re all in there having a booze up and since it never gets light, he’s got them in there forever. Looking at that written down, it seems more like a fairy tale than something which actually happened, but I love the dividing line where something would be on the edge of being made up for the sake of the story.
    When I was a bit older and started going to Spitalfields Market with my dad, people used to tell me how all the bollards around GunStreet and through the old city of London were made from the old cannon that had helped us win the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Now I don’t know if that was true or not, but either way it gave me a sense of the history of the place. And if we had any reason to be down in the Shadwell or Wapping areas – where the Ratcliff Highway murders took place more than 200 years ago – I’d usually get told how if you’d gone down there at that time it was like some kind of zoo, because sailors would bring back baby giraffes or lions or monkeys as pets, and by the time they’d get them home they’d be fully grown.
    Even as a small boy, I was never averse to a bit of make-believe. I had two little girlfriends called Kim and Tracey who lived just up the road from me. They were twins, and we used to play