An Ordinary Man In An Ordinary World
Martin McGregor.
Published by Martin McGregor at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Martin McGregor
Discover other titles by Martin McGregor at Smashwords.com
Discover other titles by Martin McGregor at Smashwords.com:
The town the God forgot
The curse of New Hampshire and the Salem witch trials
2012 Doomsday. The Mayan prophecy
The Collected Poems
No parts of this work may be copied or reproduced without express consent of the author.
Also by the author
The Collected Poems
The town that God forgot
The Curse of New Hampshire and the Salem witch trials.
2012 Doomsday. The Mayan prophecy.
All available in paperback from www.lulu.com. They are all also available for download from www.smashwords.com.
This book is dedicated to my brother
Wayne Michael McGregor
Nice nest.
Also my one time best friends in no particular order and some of you still are.
John Proudfoot
Michael Stevens R.I.P.
Andy Turner
Dean Day
Peter O’Neil
Andrew Fielding
Max Nightingale R.I.P.
Michael Hall R.I P.
Thanks as ever go to my long suffering wife Sarah, my mother, brother and my four sons. I love you all. Also to family and friends and fans who continue to buy my books. I hope this one sheds a little light. To all my family and friends, you know who you are, love to you all too.
Introduction
I am an ordinary man, but is this really an ordinary world? I guess so. We have become used to all the darkness in this world it is now common place, but eventually from all darkness comes light. So when my second wife decided to ask me,
”why are you writing an autobiography, you’re not even famous?”
I didn’t even have to think about giving her an answer as it was already there in my head. Firstly as we get older, we seem to forget a lot of what has happened in our lives. I have seen people with degenerative diseases who can’t remember much about what they have lived through at all, and it is very sad.
I decided, that if I write everything down that I can remember, if anything like that ever happens to me, at least then I can say read my life. The second reason and I think that this is the reason that most people will write autobiographies, is that they think they have a story to tell, and they think other people may well want to read it. Well this is me guilty on both counts. During my life I have seen happiness and sorrow in almost equal measure, but the pain always seems to stay fresh in the memory for longer.
Some people may see this as me being big headed, and not thinking that this story doesn’t in fact tell anything to anyone at all. You just can’t please all of the people all of the time can you? I just hope that maybe someone may read this and think, he survived that, and I can survive too.
I have experienced a lot in my life. Friends that have come and gone, illness, affairs, alcoholism and depression, sickness, health, life, death, rape, football, music, children, marriage, pain, guilt, success, failure, love and laughter. In the end, I have a story that is real. Now I may never ever write a best seller, or indeed ever be famous, but I have things in life I am very proud of.
I have four children and a wife I love dearly. They are my world, and always will be. I have worked hard all my life, and managed to move up the ladder into management. I am the first person in my family to pass a diploma and I have a roof over my head and a comfortable existence. What more could I wish for?
Well, good health would be great. Less things floating round in my head from my past would be nice, and a few more pounds in the bank would be fantastic. In the end, I will settle for what I have, and hope that maybe one person will read and hopefully enjoy this book. If not, at least I will have the reminder of my life if I actually make it to old age.
So please join me on my journey. This is my life, and I will share it openly and honestly with you all, there are moments of darkness and moments of light but they are all mine.
Martin McGregor 2010.
Friends
They say that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family. The trouble is, in life you don’t always get to choose your friends either do you? The fact is, in this life your friends don’t choose to meet you; fate brings them into your path. Then maybe through interaction and possibly even having the same sense of humour or maybe liking the same things, or even fancying the same girl, that’s how you become friends.
There’s one thing about friends, and that is that (and I am sure that most would agree), you have the three types of friends. You have friends you will say hello to just in passing, and then you have friends that you have that maybe you used to work with or hung around with, and then you have the third type, and these are real friends.
The first type, are simply ten a penny. These are people that you randomly chat to on social websites, those that you smile at in the pub, or maybe give a wave to across a street. The second type, are a little closer. These are friends who you will maybe arrange to have dinner with or a pint every now and again. You may have a laugh about the old days, and then forget about them again until fate brings them back once again into your life.
The third type, are the most important type. These are what you call your real friends, mates. These mates would lie for you, and will lend you some cash when you’re flat broke. You may sometimes fight, but you always make it up. You know the type, these are genuine mates. You look out for each other, no matter what. You can probably count your genuine mates on less than five fingers, unless you’re either very lucky or very likeable. Money seems to attract more friends, but never the real ones.
Now the problem for me was that I really didn’t trust any fucker. This was a problem I had that started a very long time ago. You see we came from a very poor family. I don’t just mean we had little money, we had absolutely fuck all. We lived in Lancashire, and there was more clouds there than jobs. Some of my earliest memories were hiding behind the sofa, while the debt collectors would relentlessly hammer on the front door. Back in those days, you borrowed and you paid it back you were paying, or you were fucked up. Simple.
Now the trouble is, when you have fuck all, all you can see is how much everyone else around you has that you don’t. It can’t have ever been easy for my mum who did her best to feed me and my brother. Sometimes she would go hungry just so that we would have food on our plates. I can remember her crying one day because she only had bread and Oxo to feed us, and those things stick in your head, no matter how young you are. These things you never forget however hard you try.
My mother was a massively intelligent woman. She taught me to read at a very young age, and I absorbed all I was taught. At the age of four, I was reading passages from Jaws to astonished visitors to the house. I never failed to pronounce any of the words as my mother had taught me to break them down in my head before saying them. I could also spell without problems and had a great understanding of maths too.
From the age of three I just wanted to go to school, and would hate it when I wasn’t allowed to go. I was allowed to go at four years old though, and I loved it. My first year at school was one of the happiest years of my life, my teacher really enjoyed teaching and I have a picture of me with her (it made the back cover), and you can see how happy I was. The second year was to change all that.
The second year teacher was an old woman and a bully. She liked nothing better than to smack a bare child’s bottom. One day I saw the first helicopter I had ever seen out of the window, and I was amazed. Before I knew it she had called out my name while I was in a daydream. I was smacked at five years old for looking at a wonder of flight. Bitch.
My dad got a job working for crisp company, and at the end of the week, he would bring home a massive bag of crisps in every flavour. For a few weeks we were in heaven. It soon turned to dust though, as the job ended as abruptly as it had begun.
So it is again that dad has no work. We have bailiffs knocking on the door again every day that I could remember. Anything we have we will either have to sell, and when we have sold them all, what choice do we then have but to run. You see at seven years old, I didn’t fully understand the decision at the time. I liked it where we lived, so I wanted to stay. A choice I made which would later lead to my tears.
I wanted to stay at the school I liked, and I felt like I was starting to make real friends. Soon there were even more tears as I got a whack around the legs, for not understanding why we had to move. My father had hit me for wanting to not leave my friends behind, but what I couldn’t face at that time was that we would have to leave our beloved dog called Sheena behind. Sheena was our protector, and we loved that dog with all our hearts.
Now, one of our uncle’s had recently moved to a small town in Hampshire called Andover. The furthest I had ever been was Blackburn when my brother was born, and to move 300 miles down South, was almost like moving to another planet. Still we were moving no matter what. I even had to leave my favourite teddy bear behind. This uncle has made us a promise. Andover was going to provide us with a great future, a job and council house which were already there waiting for us.
So we left our house, our toys and our dog behind, and we moved via a lengthy vomit filled car journey down South. I never knew I would suffer from travel sickness until that day. South wasn’t quite what we expected.
It was in the early part of 1977 that we landed in the town called Andover. The problem was my uncle had either been really unlucky, or he had been a really fucking bad liar. There was no job, no house, and no money. We were fucked.
We spent the first few nights in a support centre for the homeless. Then we spent a few weeks in a caravan, and then we almost spent a night holed up in the council offices when my father decided we should pitch up there for the night in reception as a response to our housing plight. I think in the end the police may have been called, and we were moved on.
The next few months we lived in a relative’s elderly parent’s house. It was cramped but we had a room to sleep in, and it was warm. I really, really hated it. The place stank of cabbages being cooked constantly, and the old man of the house named Jack used to take us out in his car. After driving for about five minutes he used to nod off, and he nearly killed us all about twenty times.
It must have gone on like this for about four months before we were finally given some temporary accommodation. The house we were given was listed to be bulldozed imminently, but to us, we couldn’t really give a shit, we had a real roof over our heads for the first time in a year. I swear that the place must have been haunted, it creaked and cracked and groaned and it was so cold it felt like we were living in Siberia.
I was so cold that one day my brother decided that he would warm up his teddy on our small two bar electric fire that we had. My father came in the room and caught us, just as his teddy started burning. Instead of teaching us the dangers of fire, my father decided I should have known better and marched us to the police station where we were threatened with being put in a cell. It scared the shit out of both of us.
Our next door neighbour was a cobbler, and it didn’t take long for our father to start asking him if he could borrow a few quid, I doubt the old feller ever got any of it back, but he was good enough to lend us it. So here we were again. I hadn’t been to school for about six months, and it was great. I kept myself entertained playing in the back garden, which was more like an overgrown jungle, but it, was huge and provided adventure.
I wouldn’t say we were poor, people took pity on poor people and no one seemed to take pity on us at all. I really felt for my mum one day, she was crying her eyes out because all that we had left to eat was hot Oxo and a little bread. I didn’t really like Oxo, and made the silly mistake of saying so, for which I got a barrage of abuse from my father and a slap for a grand finale. I should have been grateful.
We still had no money at all, the D.S.S paid out a pittance in benefits in those days, and so what we had didn’t go far. I begrudged my father having cigarettes, at that age, I didn’t know that he was so addicted to them, and just couldn’t give up.
Then just when we were considering going back ‘up north’ something strange happened. The old man actually managed to get himself a job! He had got so fed up, that he had offered that he would even clean toilets and his determination worked. My parents were told that both I and my brother had to start going back to school, and then we started to have a little bit of money coming in too. To top it all, the council would soon have to move us, so that they could demolish the old place.
Just when I had started to get settled at school and make some new friends, our transfer came through. Even though I had missed almost two whole years of school in total, I was still managing to excel in my classes. My mother had continued to teach me at home, and she would constantly read to me. It had stood me in good stead. So it was that we were given the keys to our new house. The address was at number 68 King George Road. The house was huge, and had three bedrooms and although I didn’t know it at the time, the place was harbouring lots of secrets that would help to shape the rest my life. It also meant time to move to a new school.
The Madness of King George
It would have been nice if someone had just told us. Even just a slight hint about where we were going would have been great. You see every town in England has a King George Road. It may not have quite the same name, but it will have the same reputation of being one of the hardest roads in the town. In this road everyone knew each other, and everyone knew there place, and for some reason we were seen as a threat. It was probably because we spoke differently, and were from ‘up north’ and that damned saying rears its ugly head to the fore once again.
It didn’t take long to realise what it was that we had gotten ourselves into. I can clearly remember our first day there, as it had snowed really heavily. One downfall with all of these houses (like a lot of the houses built around the same time), was that they had an alleyway which led directly to the back garden, and this was easily accessible to the public. My brother and I were quietly building a snowman in the back garden, when the first of our welcoming party decided to pay us a visit.
The first one of the visitors threw a snowball at us, so we then threw one back. I don’t recall if it was a boy or a girl who threw the first one, but we thought it would be fun to join in the game and returned fire. I was eight and my brother was six. Slowly, more and more kids were appearing in our alleyway. We kept throwing snowballs back, because as far as we knew, it was still just a game. Then the kids started to get bigger and bigger, and so then did the snowballs.
By the time our parents decided to investigate the noise from the back garden and alleyway, thirty or forty kids were attacking us. This was our Waterloo, and we hid behind the body of our snowman. Snowballs that were bigger than our heads were being thrown at us. They were being thrown by kids about fifteen or sixteen years old, it wasn’t much of a fair fight, it seemed as though we were not welcome, Northerners had a reputation of being ‘hard’ even at 8 and 6 years old and we had to be firmly put in our place.
The Portway Way
So we eventually went back to school even though we didn’t want to. It was called Portway Junior School, and the methods of teaching at the school included fear and humiliation. My first teacher was called Mr Goodliffe, I will always remember him as he had a particularly vicious streak. On my first day in his class, he made me recite the fours time’s table aloud in front of the rest of the class. He Then proceeded to tell me how stupid I had made the rest of the class look, as most of them could not even reach half way there. Instantly I was hated, not only was I a Northerner who was well out of his depth, but now I was a swat to boot.
Mr Goodliffe had a particularly nasty streak. Maybe he had latent homosexual tendencies, but he liked to smack the legs of young boys who wore shorts. Maybe he just liked to see young boys cry. I don’t know. He ruled the class with fear, and you didn’t ever dare step out of line. The first day wasn’t all bad though. I made two new friends. The boys names were Mark Hazel, who had the most piercing blue eyes you had ever seen, and all the girls fancied him (sadly he died early in his twenties from cancer I believe), and the kid who was to become my first new best friend. His name was David Ellison.
David was a bit unfortunate in that his mother was an army wife, and she would make David wear short trousers to school. Goodliffe would smack his legs constantly, although I can never really actually remember him doing anything wrong. He cried a lot, but he also made me laugh a lot too. He had Star Wars figures and he wore a leather jacket. Well, from that first day, he made me laugh; he took me under his wing, and got me my first proper beating.
I can remember being happy to have made a new fun friend. Portway School had a weird layout, and in the middle of the playground, was a huge brick wall. At the back of the school was also the hulk of an old aeroplane (it was just for show though, and no kids allowed inside). Well, school had finished for the day and we were laughing and joking in the playground. The next thing I know, David is hiding behind the wall and he is shouting at someone.
‘Bastard!’ He shouted at someone at the top of his voice. I ducked behind the wall, laughing at what he had shouted, but my laughter would not last for very long.
I was still laughing as David walked off home in a different direction to me. All of the way down the road, I felt happy to be accepted, even when I reached the playing field close to my home, I was singing away to myself. The singing soon stopped as my coat hood was pulled over my head, and I was then unceremoniously thrown to the floor. The ‘Bastard’ as it were, turned out to be one of the hardest kids in the school and just my luck he also lived in my road. He was pissed off with me to say the least. So were his friends.
I remember being thrown to the ground. Then I remember the sound of footsteps on the grass they, running one after the other. They were running towards me, and then they were stamping on my back Phil Urry, Darren Gibson, and Wayne Hall. All three of them, again and again, took turns in running over my back. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. It did hurt enough to make me cry though. I was being taught a severe lesson in manners, when I had said nothing at all, I was guilty of nothing but laughter.
I remember being told
‘That’s for calling me a Bastard!’
Phil had said it, and then the punishment session ended as quickly as it had begun.
I lay on the floor, and waited for my attackers to go away, I had to be patient. When I could hear that the boy’s voices were far enough away in the distance, I got up. I made my way home with a look of sadness and those damned tears back on my face. Tears were rolling down my face, and when my mother opened the front door, but when she looked at me, the floodgates in my eyes just opened.
Whatever you do in life, you do not grass on anyone. Remember that one simple rule. Live by it, and die by it. I had begged her, and I had pleaded with her. Whatever I said to her had made no difference at all. My mother was like a woman possessed. She was dragging me to school, and she was intent on dealing with it. Mr Holness was the headmaster at the school. He had a quiff and looked just like Elvis, it was clear that he didn’t like grasses either. This was a situation he didn’t want to deal with at all. All three of the boys were summoned into his office. I almost got the slipper myself, for allegedly calling someone a Bastard, when I hadn’t. Holness said these exact words to me, which I will always remember:
‘So we never do anything wrong do we? An angel boy are we?’
Again I burst into tears I just did not want to be in that office, but for God’s sake when in my life am I going to learn to toughen up a bit?
I didn’t ask for the beating. I didn’t call anyone names. I didn’t want to grass on them either. Now I was responsible somehow for everything that had happened, and now I was about to get three boys the slipper smacked across the ass. These three boys all now knew where I lived. Three boys that were just waiting for the day when they have some further revenge.
Phil was defiant. He thought what had been done was justified, Mr Holness told him to shake my hand. He said that he would do it later. It took him over twenty five years to finally do it. They did deserve the slipper, but if given the choice, I would have honestly said nothing. For once in my life, I can honestly say if you ever read this Phil
‘It wasn’t me’.
King George Road seemed to attract trouble from all areas. The word on the street was that a local estate called King Arthurs Way was where all the local hard men lived. I knew the truth; the hardest people in the town lived in this street, as well as King Arthurs. It had a King in the title, but it was King George road not just King Arthurs Way, where fear and violence lived for me each day.
I made a lot of new friends in King George Road, but mostly I made lots of enemies. I had the first three fights of my life in this road, and I lost all three. The second was a very humiliating experience. Stupidly enough the guy I was fighting with was a sort of friend of mine, and we decided to have a fight just for a laugh. To be honest I didn’t even take him that seriously. I thought it was a joke. The next thing I know, there in my old friend the dreaded playing field, there’s a guy sat on my back, I’m face down in the mud, and he’s trying to punch my face. All I can do is to turn my head from side to side, while the gathered crown cheer and laugh.
I was now officially a laughing stock. This was compounded by the fact that a girl went to get my house and my mum had to come and end my humiliation. This time she didn’t drag me back to the school. She would have done, but my father decided that he would have to deal with me in a different way. If I had the choice of punishments again, I would have grassed, and I never ever grass.
It was around this time, that my father had begun to develop a serious drink problem. He drank at home, or in the pubs and he consumed a fair amount. Now I want to be clear about this from the very start. I loved and I still love my father, I always will. I don’t blame him for anything that has happened to me, and I don’t want to bring shame on his memory, but I need to get this off my chest, he messed me up as a child. Alcoholism is an illness, it makes kind people do things they deeply regret, and I know my father’s life was full of regrets. I know he loved me, but he never knew his real fathers love, and he never knew how to escape his troubles until the day that they devoured him.
My father was sick of me being bullied. He felt ashamed of me that I could not defend myself. Once he tried to make me and my brother punch each other in a makeshift boxing ring. This time he wanted to toughen me up properly. He decided if I couldn’t fight back, I must be a big baby. As a baby, I should wear a nappy. So, in his wisdom, he got a towel from the airing cupboard, and tried to furnish it into a nappy shape. Then he made me take my trousers off, and he was going to force me to wear a nappy.
I cried a lot. I didn’t know what I had done wrong. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to be a child. I loved reading, not fighting! I wanted my mother to be proud of me. I wanted to do well at school. So why did I have to learn how to fight? He tried his best to make me punch him, he threw my nicely lined star wars toys across the floor, he goaded me, and he pushed me, he was trying his hardest to make me hit him back. I just couldn’t do it but I didn’t want to. He was my father, and I was his son.
I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. At school, I was a victim. In the streets I was a victim. Now at home it was clear that I was also going to become a victim. I should have been grey by the time that I was twelve. I guess deep down, I had a much stronger resolve than that.
It was around this age that I had my first real panic attack. I had drowned in one of my dreams. I was caught in a net in a local swimming pool, and I could not break free. The air escaped from my lungs and my lifeless body floated. I woke up screaming and gasping for air. It would be the first of many panic attacks over the coming years that would be brought on by my irrational fear of dying.
What scared me about dying, and what still does, is the fear that there is nothing after this life. The thought that you will never see those you love again and all that you have achieved will all just turn to dust. We all have to realise our own mortality one day, but some of us deal with it better than others, for me I was petrified.
The Oxfam Beggar
Ty Borrow was without a doubt the school star. He would take the lead in all of the school musicals. All of the girls fancied him or so I thought. He was a bit of a joker, but he was the closest thing to a star we had in the school. I wanted to sing in these shows too, but I never found the strength to try. Now I may be wrong, and it is a very long way back to remember, but I am sure that Ty was a Leeds United fan.
Mum really did struggle to make ends meet on a limited budget. Dad had his three loves in life, his fags, his booze and his betting. He was great at the first two a real expert, but he was really, really bad at the third. So mum always did the best she could for us with what she had. We would wear second hand clothes from charity shops and clothes that we were given, my mum really didn’t know much about football or the clothes that kids wore, and I can honestly say that the first football shirt I owned came from Oxfam. Worse than that, I was a Liverpool fan. This shirt bore the badge of Leeds United.
Ty decided that he liked my clothes so much that he should make up a nice song about me. It was hilarious to him. He who would always wear fashionable clothes even at his young age. It was hilarious to him that we could only afford second hand clothing. From now on to Ty, I was no longer Martin McGregor. I was now, ‘Martin McGregor the Oxfam beggar’
It’s surprising how quickly a song like that gets around. When it does, it sticks. Just like kids were teased like pissy pants Tracey was (she was a girl who simply just could not quite make the toilet in time one day), I now had my own theme tune. I would have preferred to have had the Batman one. Bullied kids can sometimes turn to food, and so it was I found a new love in my life. I was comfort eating, asking mum for money for sweets every day that she could not afford but she still gave us, and I was getting fat. What more did I need in life?
Second hand clothes to wear. An expanding waistline on the continual increase. No money. A hostile father with serious issues. Hardly a perfect picture, it’s no wonder I could never get a girlfriend...............
...........you see the thing is, thanks to a television programme. I actually did.
The Professionals
Bodey, Doyle and Cowley. There were three of them on T.V in the new series ‘The Professionals.’ Mark Lynch and Phil Clark, they were going to be Bodey and Doyle. The older one was Cowley, he was in charge. I was happy to take it just to be part of something. For a few weeks I didn’t get bullied at all. Mark Lynch had a bit of a reputation, he could look after himself. He also had two big brothers. You didn’t fuck with the Lynches.
The next few weeks we did all sorts of undercover missions, in our heads, the three of us were the Professionals. We would all sing along to the theme tune. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I had only ever watched the first two minutes of the programme, and then it was my bedtime. My father refused to let me watch it. So I acted the part as if I knew what was going on, and I did it really well. Phil and Mark were sharing a girlfriend at the time, and her name was Judith Monk. To me she looked like a dream.
After those few weeks passed. It was soon to be the end of The Professionals, the programme was still on television but Mark and Phil were bored of it. It ended with Mark telling Phil to punch me in the school cloakroom, just to show how easy it was to punch someone. I could see that Phil didn’t want to do it, but he still did it anyway. Judith was now cast aside as well. As they didn’t want to know her anymore, she then decided that she would go out with me instead. I didn’t say a word. Secretly, I thought it was worth getting hit for.
For the next three weeks, I would spend my sweet money on postcards of horses and gave them all to Judith. She loved her horses, and her family were gypsies who did actually own some. We walked to school together, we talked all about horses, and for a while I was really happy. She gave me a school picture of herself, and for one day it sat on my school desk, and for one night it then rested at the side of my bed. The next day, I gave it back to her. I felt ashamed that I had nothing I could give her in return. The next thing I know, she had given it to Phil, who was now laughing in my face.
Within the next few days, her family were gone from King George Road. No one knew where or why but she was gone. I cried again. I could have been sponsored by Kleenex I cried so much. What hurt me the most though, is that she had gone and had not even told me that she was leaving? Maybe she didn’t know that they were going, but I blamed her completely. My world was over, and I would never speak to her again.
So after my temporary escape, the bullying at school carried on. My best friend David moved to Germany as his dad was in the armed forces, and I never saw him again. All I had for company now was my brother. Every now and again someone new would move into the road. I remember the day Steven Griffiths moved in. He was feisty but he seemed like he was a good laugh, he hung around with us and by the end of the day, he showed us his true colours when he tried to throw a punch at me just to impress a girl. It worked and they soon started going out with each other.
Her name was Mandy Sharp, and I really liked her at the time. My brother had started going out with her younger sister Nichola, and the four of us had spent a lot of time playing together. Now Stephen had her and I was jealous. She later told me that Steven was her first boyfriend. We still talk on Facebook occasionally to this day. Sadly Steven Griffiths has just met an untimely end a few days before I wrote this paragraph. At thirty eight years of age, his life was ended in that very same road. That damned road that was to blight my early years. He was stabbed through the heart. Another flame that had expired far too soon. A few years back I had bought him a drink in a pub we had both somehow ended up in, and that was the only real time I had anything to do with him in years.
Despite all that I had been through, I was doing well at school. I became a class super-spell, and it felt good. I still wore second hand clothes, and I was beaten up almost daily, I even feared for my life walking to the local shop. I used to spend my time, staring out of my bedroom window, wishing for a better life, hoping that one day things would change. I dreamt of aliens contacting me, and building a spaceship to travel to the moon.
The change when it came was something I could never have expected. When it came it almost destroyed us all. Dad was working now, which meant he was drinking more. It wasn’t long until things took a serious turn for the worse.
Everyone at school was talking about Blake’s Seven. Star Wars had been massive hit at the cinema, and the world it seemed had gone sci-fi mad. In dinner break we acted out scenes where we were on a spacecraft, and it must have been a testament to my acting skills, that I again managed to join in despite never ever having seen an episode. That night, I decided that I had to see it, just to see what the fuss was all about. My brother and I were laid across the front room floor and began to watch in awe. Then my father came in from the pub he was drunk, and told us to turn it off. I think I just said ‘ooh’.
Maybe, he had had a bad day. Maybe it was just the beer that he had drunk. I will never know for sure but I knew he was mad at me. He flew into a rage, screaming and shouting about how it was he paid all the bills in this house, and how maybe I should ‘get a job, and pay the bills my fucking self!’ My brother and I were both scared, we grabbed our bikes ran out of the house and rode to the end of the road. There we sat, chatting with our neighbour Paul Beadle. We discussed about how we would run away, and hide out in our den. He said he would bring us food every day, and it seemed like the only thing we could do, I actually thought that we were going to do it.
Then when my father shouted our names aloud, ‘Martin, Wayne, get in here!’ Like a good soldier, my brother pedalled off home. He urged me to go with him, but I refused. Petrified, I decided that I should stay where I was. I knew whatever awaited me, it would not be nice. I dare not move for I knew the tone of his voice only too well, and I knew that it would mean nothing but pain for me.
Eventually, I cycled up the road back to the front door of the house I was less than forty foot away. He had been constantly shouting my name and I was scared, but I had to go home. I had cycled up the road, and then prepared to accept whatever he would do to me. Once the front door was closed, I was dragged into the front room, and my father closed the door behind me, I was scared and crying, and if you asked me the words he shouted at me, I would not recollect a single thing. All that I saw was him removing his belt from his trousers, and my mother pleading with him to stop. The rage in his eyes was terrifying, but nothing would stop him. To feel the leather against my leg would have been pain enough, but it wasn’t leather that I felt smash against my knee.
The belt buckle was thick and solid. It smashed against my knee. He made sure that I felt that rage he had inside of him. The second time it hit, I must have screamed so loud, that my mother could take no more, she ran into the room, and pleaded with him to stop, she held his arms, and the belt was lowered. I was sent to my room. I cried and cried from the pain I was in. Holding my knee, I sobbed uncontrollably. I didn’t deserve it, I was just a child, I just wanted my father to love me, and the nightmare of this cruel childhood to end.
When my father calmed down, he apologised to me and told me that he didn’t mean it. I didn’t believe him but I cuddled him anyway. I had a hatred for him now but he was still my father. If I could have run away and be sure of being safe, I would have gone. I was just a child and I was scared. I then started to get ill quite regularly.
Time passed, and I took more solace in food, I would eat because I was sad, and I just got fat. Looking back at pictures of me at this time period, I looked horrific. I thought that life couldn’t get much worse, but it did. My father had decided that he would start a Christmas hamper savings club for the road. The only thing that was wrong with the idea was that none of the money was going into any savings accounts. It didn’t go anywhere else but into the bookies, or the pub. Soon it got out and the whole street was made well aware of what had happened, and then the neighbours started knocking on the door to get their money back. The trouble was we didn’t have it, and there was no way in the world that we could get it either.
My mother found a home job packing emery boards and my brother and I would help her pack them. I was under the impression that the money I earned would go towards a new bike for me. I came home from school, and worked until late in the evening, night after night. The boards would scrape the skin from our small fingers. I never saw any of the money though. It went towards the debts. Soon I refused to do anymore.
We still had to find the neighbours money; we soon found that there are always some less than reputable people or companies that will lend you money. Especially when you are desperate, these people will become your friends. These companies aren’t like banks. They have shall we say slightly different repayment terms, and there are no direct debits once a month, just those nice friendly collectors who knock on your door once a week for cash. Things only get tricky when you can’t make the payments back to them. So the neighbours all got their money back, and our family began a spiral into debt that would stay with us for a very, very, long time. Still, when you’re down, you can always have a drink to lighten your spirits, can’t you!
Then the debts we owed from up North also somehow managed to find us too. We were broke. We had run away for nothing! The bank for some reason decided to give my father a credit card and a cheque book around this time. It was almost like handing a bank robber the keys to a safe and telling him you will trust him. The debts grew and grew and then the interest landed on top of it as well. I will never understand how anyone thought he was worth the risk of giving that amount of credit to, bloody bankers.
Only when you leave
I lost count of the number of times my mother had said that she had wanted to leave. Even when she never said it, I knew that she still thought it. I could still see the sadness in her face and her eyes. Dad was getting more and more extreme in his behaviour, and it got to the point that we all became scared of what he might do. My mother finally told him she had had enough, so using me as a tool in his cruel plan to change her mind, he called me into the front room. He then produced a large knife, and he placed it just above the top of my head. I could feel the blade in my hair He then turned to my mother, he asked her
‘Which half do you want?’
I sobbed, and my mother cried and pleaded with him not to do anything. These were his terms to agreeing to the split. If they were to split up, they would share the kids, not on different weekends, but take half each with them. So they could still have half the family. He never cut me. Instead, he punched through a window pane, and then made me walk with him to the hospital while they patched him up. My mother endured so much during those days, she doesn’t talk about them or even remember half of what he did, and my brother was protected from most of it, which I think is a blessing for him.
It was only a matter of time before it would happen though. My mother was a woman of courage, but she feared for what would happen to us if she stayed or if she left. I know that he hit her sometimes as I heard it from my bed, but I hardly ever witnessed it, if I did, I may have done something back to him, and then I would have just been hurt even more. It must have taken my mother enormous courage to find the strength to leave, and I can imagine the torment she went through, the first we knew of it all, was when my father’s best friend asked my father
‘What would you do if I was to be with your wife?’
My father’s response was,
’ I’ll kill you. ‘And I knew that he meant it too.
I can’t recall what day it was, but it wasn’t until we came home from school that we knew something was very wrong. My mother had gone. She had just simply left the house. As far as we could make out, she had left with my father’s best friend. I didn’t know what had happened. I just played merrily with my brother outside the front of the house (always within a safe distance of the refuge of the front door). My father came home and perhaps he found a letter. He asked me to look after my brother and he walked toward the playing fields. I just said ‘yes dad’.
It was getting dark, and mum had still had not returned, I didn’t know what I should do. I thought my father was looking for her. Thankfully one of our neighbours took us both into her house, and I think my mother had confided in her about what she was going to do. That night, it was very late when my mother came back to collect us both, she looked so different and alive for once. We were driven away in a car late at night, and I can just remember being carried by Tom my father’s former best friend, while I was half asleep. I was carried in to a strange house, into a strange bed, but I was so tired, that I slept until daylight.
I wondered what had happened to my father. The walk across the playing fields takes around six to eight minutes. A line of bushes separates the two fields, and a narrow pathway leads to a main road. I know the thoughts that went through my father’s head when he made that walk. I have made it twice since at least, and both times with the same intention as he did. I would reach that bridge do the same thing as he did.
Upon reaching the main road, he turned left. I don’t know how long he stayed there for and contemplated his fate. I don’t know if he cried, regretted, hated, or raged. All I know for certain, is that from the highest railway bridge in Andover, my father made his decision. He climbed up and over the stone wall, and jumped from the bridge intending to take away his pain forever.
We didn’t know it, but we were in Acton. It was so very different to Andover. At first it just seemed like one big grand adventure. Again, I found that I wasn’t going to school. We didn’t understand what was going on, but at least we were away from King George Road. As far as we knew, our father would have returned home, and probably drank himself into oblivion. We simply had no idea what had happened. My mother now wore nice clothes and seemed happy for the first time in a very, very, long time.
Two of Tom’s daughters were also in the house, and from another room we could sometimes hear Tom’s wife screaming down the end of the telephone at my mother for breaking up both of the families. She cried whenever she had one of these conversations, Tom’s wife was her former friend and she felt guilty. For the next few weeks, we slept on a sofa. It was in the same room that my mother and her new lover slept. It was uncomfortable and cramped. We asked my mother a few times when we would be going home. She could not give us an answer.
Someone had seen my father jump from the bridge. Whoever it was had stopped dead and had gotten out of his car. He risked his life and limb to scramble down the railway embankment to reach my father. The fall hadn’t killed him. The trains somehow hadn’t killed him either. He was alive. For some reason, he had been spared. Sometimes, you just don’t get away with these things that easily. In those days, if you tried to end your life, you ended up in a hospital, but it was nothing like a normal hospital. This was a hospital for people who were disturbed. We called them mental hospitals, and our local one was called Park Pruitt.
Tom also liked a drink; he also liked to get drunk too. I think that is why my father and Tom initially got on so well. The trouble was they both had more in common than just liking a drink. They were also both very quick tempered too. They also had no problem with raising a hand to a woman either. As a relationship, it wasn’t going to last. My mother had tried her best to run away. Instead she had run into the hands of a man almost identical to my father in every single way.
My Nan became involved in trying to fix up the broken marriage of my parents. My father was in Essex, he had gone back to stay with his mother and father and after numerous telephone calls, at some point, it was decided that my father might just have learnt his lesson. My mother decided to meet him so that they could talk. As we left Tom’s house I knew that we would never see him again.
He certainly seemed different when dad talked to us on the telephone. He sounded more human and even humane. Perhaps now I would have a real father in my life. Perhaps now things would change for the better. The meeting between my mother and father was promising, and for the first time in my life that I would be able to remember, I saw my Nan and Granddad. Tom knew it was over the minute the meeting was arranged. As far as we know, he went back to his wife with his tail between his legs. We never saw him again, we were glad that we didn’t.
We were soon back in Andover. We were back in King George Road. Back at school, and back once again to being bullied. For a while, I think my father tried really hard. My mother had tried to leave, and it didn’t work out. How different it could have been, if only she had met a nicer man when she was younger, and I certainly wouldn’t be here now writing these words. Everything was certainly better for quite some time. In fact I was in secondary school now, and apart from that, nothing had changed.
A row erupted one night. For some inexplicable reason, my brother let it slip that he had seen my mother and Tom, doing things that only adults did. He wasn’t to know what he was saying. Maybe my father had even tricked him into saying it. My mother was crying. My father went mad, he had a knife in his hand, and I think the neighbours called the police. He vowed that he would kill him if he ever saw him again. I know that he meant it, as I too have felt that rage when you find out that someone has slept with your wife.
So my father started drinking yet again, and now I was at a different school, with the same bullies, who now had new friends to join in the bullying. Life was dandy. It wasn’t just the boys who liked to bully at this school either. The girls would sometimes join in, and that was extra special in the degradation department. If you’re fat, you’re going to get bullied. It’s a fact. Keep your kids fit.
Life was quite mundane, and for three years nothing changed. My father ran up huge debts on his cheque book. Then the flexible friend stopped being flexible to the point it became rigid and started saying no. The sherry was drunk at home now, and two glasses turned to four, then to eight, then from one bottle to two. Weekly changed to daily, and alcohol kept appearing to offer my father a way to escape.
The bullying continued, without any resistance from me, it was far easier to run, or just get hit. I was desperately unhappy, and would often dream of a better life. I would sometimes watch the rain falling down my bedroom window, dreaming that aliens would try and make contact, and maybe come and take me away desperately sad, that I had been dropped off on the wrong planet, and I would be taken somewhere where everyone was the same as me. I felt alone most days.
One day, things started to change for me. I was stood outside the school gate, just minding my own business, when Wayne Hall ran past me. He tapped me on the arm, and as far as I recall and I put my arm out to tap him back. Little did I realise at the time I actually slapped him on the face. My brother came out of school and we began to walk home together. We got about half way home, when Wayne ran up, and punched me straight in the back of the head.
I don’t recall what happened next, the following five seconds were just a blind haze, but during those seconds I found my inner rage. My school bag was thrown to the floor, and I was crying and shouting with blind fury. All those inner demons were now ready to finally break out and repel from that calm child that had patiently held them all in. My fists flew wildly, and for the first time in my life I was striking out at someone in anger. I wanted to hurt him, and I probably wanted to kill him. I couldn’t see through my tears, my eyes were half closed for the fear of more pain, but I carried on striking out. I couldn’t tell you how many times I hit him, or if any of my blows hit him at all, my brother claimed they did, but I can and always will recall the look on his face when it had all ended.
He looked as if he had just opened a coffin, and he had found someone still alive inside, a mummy that had back from the grave. He didn’t realise but that moment when he hit me, he had played a pivotal part in my upbringing. Never again would I be afraid to be hit, and if they hit me, then I would damn well hit them back. If I got hurt, I didn’t care. No one would get away with it anymore.
Then we moved away from King George Road, and everything changed beyond even what I could imagine. Lancaster close was to be where my life changed forever, this is the house where I would finally become a man.
Purple rain
We knew one person who lived in the close; it was Mark Lynch who lived opposite us. He had a couple of older brothers who were always getting in scraps, one day one of them was glassed in the face and I wanted so much to be like them. Looking on, I could see a glimpse of what the future held. Lancaster close was very different to King George Road, for a start it was a two minute walk from the nearest housing estate. That meant more people for us to get to know, potentially it meant more bullies, but ultimately, it meant meeting some different girls.
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(Pages 1-26 show above.)