Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (9 page)

When I was told that I would have to go, I was terribly, desperately upset. In fact, I felt completely bereft. That might seem strange, but, as horrible as St Leonard’s was, it was still the only home I had known since I was eight years old, and Bill Starling and the other carers were the closest things to parents that I had ever had.

And, although I had thought that I was looking forward to growing up and making my own way in the world, now I felt as though I was being thrown out of my home and into a desperately unfriendly, frightening world.

Leaving the home at seventeen was very tough. The state was a consistent parent figure; I will give it that. It did not give a shit about society’s rejects when we were kids, and it was indifferent to most of us when we left. There was no suggestion of organising an apprenticeship or anything like that. It was a question of: ‘You’re on your own, mate!’ As most of us had no real skills and few if any educational achievements, our chances of getting ahead were very slim, to say the least.

Despite the fact that I had always been so unhappy there, I stayed in the area near where I had grown up. To tell the truth, it did not occur to me to go anywhere else, and nor did I even realise how big the world or even Great Britain was. Young people need a sense of identity. For most of them, this comes from belonging to a family and a community and, knowing that they will always have someone and somewhere to return to, they are free to travel and make their own way in the world. For kids who have grown up in care, those two important sources of identity are not there. Their only identity comes from who they know and where they live. I would have been scared to death at the thought of having to go away from the familiar streets of my home turf. Here, I was a tough little thug who most people disliked – but at least they knew who I was! And that was my sense of identity; being recognised by friends and foe, and having people knowing my name. These were the things that mattered to me.

As always, some of the kids from the home were more equal than others, even on leaving. My erstwhile friend Simon, who had been one of the carers’ special friends since the age of thirteen or so, was given a three-bedroom house for himself and his girlfriend when it was time for him to move on. This relative luxury would not prevent Simon from doing himself in, the slow way, by taking heroin until he died some years later, so the ‘favourable’ attention he received didn’t end up doing him any favours. Of course, I do not know any of the details of what Simon had to endure, but I do know that he spent far too much of his childhood holed up in that man’s apartment and that he was a troubled youth then and when he eventually left St Leonard’s.

Simon and his girlfriend got married when they were still very young and had a family. Throughout their brief married life, right up until Simon died of his heroin habit, his ‘carer’ kept hanging around all the time, acting as grandfather to their children and telling them that he was the best friend Simon could have, even though he must have contributed substantially to or even been the sole cause of the psychological distress that finally killed him. When Simon died, it was because his veins had collapsed – he had just injected one time too many. One can only imagine what it was that Simon was trying so desperately to forget.

As for me, I remember one member of staff who helped me rather half-heartedly to find my own first bedsit to live in, and after that I was almost completely on my own. A pal of mine, Trevor Schofield, who worked in the local building trade, picked me up in his battered car and drove me to my new place. The fact that Trevor was there for me was a real comfort and a reassurance that I had some friends on the outside who would help me to negotiate a new and unfamiliar world. Now that I was on my own, I started to realise how much I didn’t know. I had never had to deal with keys, for instance, and I just could not get used to them. When I was in my first bedsit, I kept losing my keys because I had never had to deal with keys and key rings before.

My first independent home was a grotty room in a young couple’s house, just about five miles away from St Leonard’s. I remember sitting on the sagging bed in that small room looking disconsolately at the bare walls and thinking, What the fuck am I going to do now?

I unrolled a bedraggled Muhammad Ali poster and stuck it on the wall. I looked at it for inspiration. On this particular occasion, Muhammad didn’t come up with the goods. I sat back down again.

I might have been a hard case but I was still only seventeen and there were plenty of moments when I still felt like a little boy in need of more support and help than would ever be forthcoming from a Muhammad Ali poster. Nonetheless, it didn’t occur to me to try to renew contact with my parents, although it would probably have been quite easy to find them. I had not seen either of them for years and I rarely thought about them at all, with the exception of the occasional dreams I had about my mother. They came to me unbidden – visions of pumping my fist into her nose, over and over again until all that was left of her face was a bloody, unrecognisable mask. I had had some girlfriends and even one I had loved, and I still remembered Mary with fondness, but in general my opinion of women was very low indeed. Between my mother, who had left me out with the rubbish, and Coral, who had been such a bitch to me ever since I moved to St Leonard’s, I had not been given the best examples of feminine kindness.

Although it was difficult, I decided there and then that I would never have anything to do with anyone from St Leonard’s again. I would never visit to hear Starling or Auntie Coral telling me what a worthless piece of shit I was, and I would cut myself off completely from all my old friends, including Liam, my oldest and best-loved friend, because even the people I cared about most would remind me of where I had grown up. Although Liam and I had been so close as kids, we drifted apart easily with no backward glances. I left the home before he did and so far as I know he returned to the East End, which must have been where his family came to after they emigrated from Ireland. From the moment we left care, Liam and I didn’t have anything to do with each other; nothing at all. I think it was mostly my doing – wanting to wrench myself away from the cesspit I had grown up in, and not letting myself worry about the fact that this also meant not even bothering to say ‘goodbye’ to my best friend. I will regret the end of our relationship for the rest of my life, far more than any words can express. Perhaps, if I had been in Liam’s life, I might have been able to help when he started falling apart in his twenties. The policewomen who called to my house to tell me what had happened called it ‘schizophrenia’ but that seems like a convenient label to me. Perhaps all Liam needed was someone who understood what he had been through and where he came from. I wish that person could have been me.

As I had a few friends and acquaintances from the boxing club, I did know some people and I quickly found work in the building trade, a traditional area for men who are not afraid of hard work and might not be the best at reading and writing. I was still illiterate and, while my boxing was going well and my trainers assured me that I was full of potential and had what it took to go professional, I wasn’t yet earning enough money for me to survive on. Finding a job was quite easy. I was just walking down the street one day when I passed the offices of a local roofing company, walked in and asked for a job. They took one look at me and my taut muscles and gave me work on the spot. The money was much better than what I had been able to earn on the vegetable market, and I quite liked the work which I found fairly easy, as I was very fit and strong as a result of all my boxing and working out in the gym. My employers could not believe how agile I was; I ran about the roofs just like a monkey. Although I was extremely strong, I was also very light and lean and it was easy for me to move around high above the pavement. I also didn’t particularly care whether or not I fell off, as I felt that I was quite indifferent to trivialities such as pain and injury or even death. That made me fearless, which is a very useful quality in a roofer. I demonstrated my fearlessness on one of my first building sites when I got crushed between a dumper wheel and a scaffold and came within a whisker of death. The guys I was working with had to pick the scaffold off me. I didn’t get put off work though; I didn’t care about little things like that.

Bedsit land was a place where the view changed frequently. All of the bedsits were awful, grim places that nobody in their right mind could designate as ‘home’. A lot of them were in other people’s houses and they didn’t really want me or any tenant there; they just wanted or needed the rent money that I gave them. I moved often, packing up my bits and pieces and rolling up my battered Muhammad Ali posters. A lot of the bedsit landlords didn’t want their tenants to use the kitchen or bathroom, so it was a question of having a room with a bed in it, pissing rights over the toilet and that was it. I lived on take-outs, fish and chips, kebabs and curries, which I ate on the street or perched on the side of my bed, wolfing them down straight from the bag. Fortunately, I worked so hard physically between boxing and roofing that I burned off all the calories very easily.

Because I was working on the building sites, I came home in the evenings covered in dust and had to wash as best I could in cold water in a hand sink. Once in a while, I would call around to a friend’s place for a bath. A better bedsit always seemed to be around the corner, but I never managed to find it. Some people bunked in with each other but I never fancied sharing a house; I wanted to stand on my own two feet. I can’t even begin to describe how lonely it used to get in the evenings, lying on the smelly mattress in whatever shithole I was living, staring at the damp stains on the ceiling and waiting for something to happen. But it still never occurred to me to seek out my old friends, because I had decided that I needed to draw a clear line under my past and move on from it. Once in a while, I bumped into Simon, who lived locally, but after a year or so I didn’t see him any more either.

Apart from boxing, which was still my passion in life, I think that my saving grace was the fact that I stayed in Essex, which is where I still live today. Because of my involvement in the boxing club and the roots that I had begun to put down when I worked on the fruit and vegetable stall, I had the beginnings of a support network that would eventually serve me well. Most of the kids I grew up with drifted back to the East End, where they had come from in the first place. Back on their home turf and in many cases having renewed contact with their dysfunctional families and friends, it proved impossible for them not to become the thugs and ruffians they had been destined to be since birth. Without a dysfunctional family to return to, I had to build my own network for myself. Gradually, despite everything, I started to become a reasonably personable guy with friends and (though I say so myself) quite an attractive prospect for the ladies who liked their bit of rough. As I had been put on the waiting list for a council flat from when I left St Leonard’s, I also had prospects of a limited kind. So, when I wasn’t working or boxing, I had a crowd of mates to hang around with. We were a pretty rough and ready bunch and we were always getting into fights, as we were easily offended and quick to lash out and prove that we were not about to let anyone push us around, but we were also genuinely fond of each other and helped each other out whenever we could. I especially remember Peter and Sam – Psycho Sam as we used to call him, and with good reason. We were all young fellows who worked together, ate packets of chips together, went down the pub together and got into fights and aggro together. Between the mates I had in the boxing club and the friends I met on the building sites who were all from Dagenham, I built up a good crowd. We didn’t necessarily talk about anything deep and meaningful but we became quite close in our rough way.

I was one of the smallest guys in the group, and, because I was so light, it was impossible to tell how strong I was just from looking at me. This was a frequent source of entertainment to the gang, and one of our games was to go round the local pubs and invite all the tough guys to have arm-wrestling matches with me.

‘You’re fucking joking,’ they would say when they saw me, ‘a skinny little runt like you? I’m not going to wrestle you; I don’t want to hurt you! Do yourself a favour and clear off.’

‘Scared, are you?’ I would say. ‘Don’t want to risk it? Bit of a girl, are you?’

Well, they wouldn’t put up with that; not even from a skinny little bloke like me. And then, because I put in so many hours a week training, I beat them all, knocking over the beefy arms of those eighteen-stone men as if they were so many weaklings. We used to make quite a bit of money doing that, and we would always invest it wisely – in more beer.

My boxing career was going famously. I was boxing in competitions and winning everything. Earlier on, I had lost a few matches and had become a little disillusioned but I just started working harder, and then it was as though nothing could stop me. It seemed that I couldn’t stop winning and that no matter what I did I was almost always bound to come out on top. Now everyone was taking me seriously as someone who could really go professional and make it. I even began to respect myself a little. Whenever I got knocked down, I always came back fighting, always with Muhammad Ali in mind – never give up.

My first car was a Cortina which I drove without a licence or insurance. Because I didn’t know how to drive properly, I had an accident and wrote it off and found myself up in front of the local magistrate. It took me a few minutes to realise that the person who was overseeing my case was Alan Prescott. I had not seen him since I left St Leonard’s. He was easy on me; I got a suspended sentence and a small fine.

I finally got a council flat when I was about twenty-four, after six or seven years of moving from one bedsit to another. It was good timing, because the last bedsit I had been in was a right dive. The landlady wouldn’t let me wash in the bath, because she didn’t want me using her precious hot water, and as I was coming home filthy from the building sites. I was very meticulous about my personal hygiene, and I hated not being able to wash every day after work. The new flat was just a simple council affair with no bells and whistles but I kept it very clean and tidy and was extremely house proud for a young man in his twenties. Having grown up in a children’s home where if you left a possession lying around for more than a minute or two someone nicked it, I have always been a very orderly person. I had a place for everything and everything was in its place in my new flat. I also had a knife tucked tidily into every corner so that I would be ready to defend myself in any eventuality. I arranged the furniture so that, wherever I was sitting, I would never have my back to a door or window.