Hateland (4 page)

    I sentenced another boy to face the firing squad. Hughie, Stan and I all had pellet-firing air pistols. Without even offering the prisoner a last request, we stood him against a shed and shot him. He informed the police, who arrested Hughie and Stan. Thankfully, the victim hadn't grassed me. I think he feared a charge of contempt of court if he snitched on the judge. The police couldn't find the airguns - they'd been hidden in a secret IRA-style arms dump - so no one was charged. I met our former victim recently in the pub. He almost broke down as he told me how the experience had affected his life. The trauma remained fresh in his mind.

    Our justice system could also devour its defenders. Stan himself used to find himself on trial at least once a fortnight. We used to bully him a bit because he lived in a private house and would come to school with items like a briefcase.

    Our school had only one black pupil. Called Paul, he was two years below us. Fortunately for him, he was the best fighter in his year. So he found himself bullied only by us and not by his own age group. We used to call him 'spade', 'nigger' and 'sooty'. We'd often fine him his dinner money. In truth - and I'm not trying here to mitigate our behaviour as wicked bullies - our treatment of Paul had less to do with his being black than with his being a good fighter. We didn't want him getting above himself.

    On one occasion, Paul won a fight against someone we knew. We decided to charge him with assault. We apprehended him and brought him struggling before the court, clearly terrified. He asked me to let him go. He even tried appealing to my better nature. Sadly, I didn't have one. I asked Stan what defence, if any, he wished to offer on behalf of the defendant. As usual, Stan threw his client to the mercy of the court. He said the crime was so grave, the lawbreaking so monstrous, the offence so flagrant, that he could offer neither defence nor mitigation.

    I found Paul guilty and sentenced him to an 'altogether'. This involved everyone present piling into the prisoner, kicking him, punching him and generally giving him a good beating, while shouting 'altogether, altogether'. Later, I felt a bit guilty about the 'altogether' dished out to Paul. Not so guilty that I said sorry, but I did later befriend him. He then started hanging about with us now and again as a semi-detached part of the gang. That was also better for him financially.

    No one ever seemed to question why I was so unruly. No one witnessed the physical and mental torture I endured at my father's hands. I was just 'bad' and had to be punished. But the special treatment I received, and my reputation for violence, gained me what I thought was the respect of my peers. In fact, it was only deference based on fear. But I liked it. It made me feel powerful - an enjoyable sensation for someone who'd felt powerless for so long. People could only see this aggressive, couldn't-care-less delinquent. They couldn't see the confused and frightened child I knew myself to be.

    I wish I could have broken and poured everything out to someone. Instead, I continued to act out my bad-boy role, because at least that way I could get a bit of adoration and recognition, which is what I craved. I soaked up the attention of my minions. In my mind, I felt I was beginning to win the fight against those who tried to impose their authority on me. In reality, I was systematically destroying myself and my future.

    At home, throughout my early teens, I'd harm myself, gouging my stomach with a craft knife or broken glass. I still bear the scars of this self-mutilation. I didn't want to feel I was being hurt by my father and, when I realised I was, I hated my weakness and wanted to harm myself. Emotion and pain were for weak people. I'd learnt that from my father.

    In November 1974, 4 months before my 15th birthday, the IRA blew up 2 pubs in nearby Birmingham, killing 21 people and injuring 182. The bombing caused an outpouring of anti-Irish feeling throughout the country, but especially in the West Midlands. My father was attacked at the Goodyear tyre factory in Wolverhampton where he worked. Unfortunately, he wasn't badly injured. My mother found people ignoring her in the shops and giving her dirty looks in the street. For years afterwards, she wouldn't leave the house when the IRA committed an atrocity, especially if it had taken place in England.

    I wouldn't be intimidated. I even argued with teachers at school that the IRA bombers had more guts than the RAF airmen who bombed unseen German women and children during the war. That's not to say I was supporting the bombing. On the contrary, it turned me completely against the Provos. The main point I was trying to make was that planting a bomb in a pub - where you'd have to look into the eyes of those around you knowing you might kill every one of them - was not the work of 'cowards', as some teachers tried to suggest. In truth, I just wanted to provoke. I wanted to hit back at society, the Brit society that was always putting me down.

    By the time I was 15, I'd come to regulate myself by my own rules. Laws enforced by police officers as part of what I saw as the no-justice system had become irrelevant. I started getting involved in huge gang fights against rivals from other areas. Our main rivals were from a suburb of Wolverhampton called Tettenhall. Sometimes, there'd be as many as 200 of us battling in parks and on wasteground. When people began to get seriously hurt, the police became involved and numbers dwindled to a hard core of about 30 on each side.

    When I wasn't robbing people, sitting in judgment or waging war with other gangs, I used to enjoy sport, which in particular meant watching Manchester United. My passion for Man U grew to the point where I used to live for Saturdays when I'd follow the team around the country. I loved the football on the pitch, but the hooliganism off the pitch added greatly to my enjoyment.

    I loved the sounds of glass smashing, people screaming, sirens wailing. The uncertainty of the outcome when fighting rival fans would keep me alert and pull me violently through the scale of emotions: euphoria as the hunter, panic as the hunted, but all the time with a constant flow of adrenalin. Mayhem and disorder had become the sources of my joy.

    As we got older, we used to carry craft knives with us to football matches - but with a vicious twist. We'd put two blades in the holder, place a matchstick between them and tighten up the case. When the victim was slashed, he'd suffer two identical wounds only the thickness of a matchstick apart. This meant surgeons would be unable to stitch the wounds and the victim would be left with a horrible thick scar, usually across his face.

    On more than one occasion, we thought we'd beaten or slashed rival football fans to death and we'd switch on the local news praying our worst fears wouldn't be confirmed. Thankfully, they never were.

    When I was 15, the police caught me and Hughie after we'd robbed two teenagers at knifepoint in Birmingham's Queensway subway. We received only 'strict' supervision orders, which meant that once a fortnight we had to go for a meaningless chat with a probation officer. At the end of the summer term of 1976, I left school with few qualifications. Aged 16, I had little fear of, or respect for, anything or anyone. Only my father continued to have the power - physical and psychological - to turn me into a frightened little boy.

    But that wasn't going to last much longer. He must have noticed what he'd turned his sons into - and he must have guessed the day of vengeance was on its way. In fact, it came in August 1976.

    My father came home, drunk as usual, and started beating my mother in the kitchen. My brother Paul and I were in the front room. We heard the familiar sounds. Paul looked at me and I looked at him and we both just got up and ran into the kitchen. Paul shouted at my father, 'Leave her alone, you fucking bastard!' My father lurched towards Paul and punched him. Paul snapped. He grabbed my father by his hair with one hand and with the other began punching him in the face with an unstoppable ferocity.

    I stood and watched as Paul went berserk, punching and kicking until my father lay on the floor, his face a bloody mess. Everything went quiet. The only sound was of Paul breathing heavily from his exertion. I suppose we all expected my father to get to his feet and inflict violent punishment on us for this outrage, but he stayed on the floor. He didn't move for a little while, then slowly pulled himself up. Paul was ready for more, and I was ready to help him, but we could all see something had changed.

    The fight had gone out of my father. He didn't say anything. He just slouched off to bed. As he walked past me, I spat at him. He didn't respond. His face gave nothing away, but he had the air of a tyrant who knew his time had come. He left the house the next day - and never came back. It took us 25 years to find out what had happened to him.

CHAPTER 3

PLASTIC PADDY ON TOUR

Despite my criminal record, zero qualifications and a less than impeccable school reference, I managed to secure a furiously fought-over apprenticeship as a toolmaker. Like all the other boys, I'd been brainwashed into believing life wasn't worth living if I didn't have a trade. I soon came to realise that life shackled to a lathe didn't represent my dream.

    I also found the unions ludicrous. In 1976, they hadn't yet been given the kicking they badly needed. On my first day, I was confronted by a picket line, advised not to cross it and sent home. In the factory, the shop stewards constantly ordered me not to do other people's jobs, such as sweeping up if I dropped something or replacing dirty towels in the washroom. I found this tedious and childish, and said so, which annoyed my adult 'brothers', whose reasons for being seemed to hinge on the existence of clear demarcation lines between them and other 'brothers'. One day, after being called in to head office for a disciplinary hearing, I told the personnel manager he could stuff his poxy job.

    I remember this time in the mid-to-late '70s as being highly politicised, shaped by anger and conflict. In the West Midlands, hatred of immigrants, particularly blacks and Asians, seemed part of the air that many white people breathed. A working men's club near the Wolverhampton Wanderers football ground enforced a strict 'whites only' policy.

    In 1978, a new Indian restaurant opened in Codsall. My friends and I welcomed it with abuse and vandalism. The owner placed outside the entrance a 7 ft statue of a maharajah, an Indian prince. One night, we kidnapped it, drove it in a van several miles away and dumped it in the middle of a paddling pool. Within days, the maharajah had returned to his position outside the restaurant. This time, we snatched him, ran a little way down the street, threw him in the gutter and chopped off his head with a machete. The waiters heard the commotion and gave chase, but we escaped into the night, screaming with laughter and confident we'd destroyed the statue beyond repair.

    To our surprise, the maharajah reappeared a fortnight later, looking like new. We decided to attack again. One of my friends backed his van up to the restaurant. I pushed the statue into the back and we drove away at speed. A few hundred yards down the road, we stopped. We pulled out the prince and, using axes and machetes, chopped off his legs and right arm as the waiters ran towards us, shouting in fury and despair.

    As they got near, we picked up the amputated limbs and waved them above our heads tauntingly. Then we threw them down, jumped in the van and drove off. Victory, we thought, was ours.

    A week later, the local newspaper, the Wolverhampton Express and Star, pictured the owner standing outside the restaurant with his newly repaired statue. The accompanying story, headlined 'Maharajah - no Indian takeaway', read:

    >>>>> The much-aligned Maharajah of Codsall has regained his usual pride of place as living proof that it takes more than a bunch of yobs to keep a good Indian prince down.

    The life-size statue has been subjected to a spate of ordeals since he was bought to stand guard outside the new Indian restaurant in the village near Wolverhampton.

    He has been stolen three times since being installed in January - the first time, he was found in the middle of Tettenhall pool.

    The second time, he was found with his head chopped off and he has just had to undergo major surgery after he was found a third time with both legs and right arm hacked away.

    Now, owners at the Rajput Tandoori restaurant in the

square have decided to keep a closer watch on their Maharajah and have chained him to the spot. <<<<<

    Chained or otherwise, we decided the maharajah had to go. We waited a few weeks, then one evening a friend and I struck. I doused the wire-mesh and fibre-glass statue with petrol and my accomplice tossed a lighted match. Flames engulfed the prince. He was taken away, never to return.

    The late '70s was also the time of punk rock. I used to pogo regularly at Wolverhampton's Lafayette club, where I saw all the major bands of the time, from hard-core punk to the more melodic New Wave. The Sex Pistols, The Clash, X-Ray Spex, The Jam and Blondie all played the Lafayette's tiny stage. I never became a punk - I wasn't one for dressing up, no matter what the cause - but I loved the scene's chaotic anti-authority, 'destroy, destroy' mentality.

    After their early shows and TV appearances, no council in the land would grant the Sex Pistols a licence to play. So they toured a handful of venues undercover as 'The Spots' - the Sex Pistols on Tour. In Wolverhampton, their first gig was cancelled, supposedly because of lead singer Johnny Rotten's laryngitis. It was rearranged for the following week. Rotten's first words to the audience were, 'Disappointed the other night? They told you I had a sore throat, didn't they? They were lying. There was fuck all wrong with my voice. I just couldn't be bothered playing to a load of wankers like you.' Then the band crashed into an extremely anarchic version of 'Anarchy in the UK' and the club went wild.

    Afterwards, a friend called Roy and I saw Pistols' bassist Sid Vicious swaying at the bar, pint glass in hand. Although totally wankered out of his mind, Sid continued slurping down lager, half of which spilt down his front.