The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [140]
Not only were the flats tiny, but the blocks were accessed by the most dangerous and threatening entrances, exits, stairs and lifts you could imagine. The only conclusion I could draw was that the architects who had designed these monstrosities had complete contempt for the people who would be living there. Still, I thought, at least they were being pulled down. The whole area is now being gentrified and I asked an official I met where they had re-housed the tenants. ‘As far away from each other as possible,’ was his rather enigmatic reply. But not everyone was pleased to be getting out. While we were there, we came across a small BBC team filming the last few residents. To my astonishment they said that their documentary was about the terrible loss of community spirit the tenants suffered when they began to pull down the estate. I looked from them and then back at this eyesore. It was hard to believe . . .
The last time I’d been back to the area I grew up in for professional reasons was in autumn 1985 when Bob Hoskins asked me to take a cameo role in his film Mona Lisa. I’d first got to know Bob when we were in Mexico together on The Honorary Consul and we’d become great friends – a friendship that had flourished in the slightly less testing surroundings of The Hamptons on America’s East Coast, filming Sweet Liberty with Alan Alda earlier that summer. Bob had invited me to his production office to discuss the part but as I sat in the car getting further and further into the depths of the south London streets I’d grown up in, I began to wonder what I was letting myself in for. I knew it was a small-budget movie, but Bob’s office – a huge, dark run-down Victorian building – didn’t bode well. ‘It was a hospital years ago,’ he said cheerfully as he led me through the maze of corridors, ‘before it became a lunatic asylum, St Olave’s.’ I remember stopping dead in my tracks. ‘But I was born here!’ I said. There can’t be many movie actors who end up discussing their role in a film in the very hospital they were born in.
I know only too well how tough it is to grow up in an environment like the Elephant and I’m aware that I, too, could easily have gone bad – but I took a different course, and the longer we spent in the neighbourhood, the more I wanted to find out why. Quite a bit of Harry Brown was shot at night and that gave me the opportunity to talk to some of the gangs of youths – black, white, British-born and immigrant – who were hanging about. I got to know them and began to win their trust a bit and I was first astonished and then pleased that they were prepared to talk to an old white man on an equal basis. As they opened up, it dawned on me that although we’d had nothing as kids, I had had a life of luxury compared to the young men I was talking to. Our pre-fab house was small, but it was self-contained: it had a twenty-foot-square garden, a garden fence, a front door and a garden gate. It was the first house I’d ever lived in with electricity and hot water taps and an inside toilet and a bathroom. And this house was only a thousand yards from the monstrous blocks where these boys had grown up.
But the house was only part of it. I had a loving family with a father who stayed with us and a mother who cared for us. Most of these boys came from one-parent families – or none. It’s not that single parents can’t do a great job raising their children – after all, there were many kids in my generation whose fathers had been killed in the war – but it makes it much harder, and if they are poor as well, it’s an extra handicap. I was lucky, too, because I had a good education