Soldier Of The Queen (3 page)

There was only one neighbour, Peggy — by coincidence a woman we had known in Dunstable - who would stand up to my father. Peggy told him to his face that he was a pig. She could see through the charade of "good old Paddy" he would put on for his drinking buddies. He was wary of her and told my mother to keep away from her.

One Mother's Day I brought my mother home a card that I had made at school. She put it on the sill above the kitchen sink. I was still sitting at the table eating my dinner when my father came home smelling of drink. My mother was still at the sink. He saw the card and picked it up.

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Is this what your little pet got you, is it? Mother's little fucking pet." My mother asked him to stop, but that only made him worse. He turned to her and said: "Shall I give you something for Mother's Day, shall I?" He picked up a plate off the draining board and went to smash it over her head. She raised her arm to protect herself and the plate broke across it, cutting it wide open. She spent the rest of Mother's Day in casualty getting it stitched. Another evening he came home and complained that his dinner was not freshly cooked, just heated up. Presumably he expected my mother to guess what time he would stagger back from the pub. He threw the dinner and the plate against the wall, grabbed my mother by the hair and started punching her. She was bleeding from the nose and mouth but he kept punching her until she collapsed on the floor. He stood over her, big fucking man, as she lay on the floor, his hands and shirt smeared with her blood. My mother raised her head slightly, coughed up some blood and asked me to get her some water. My father said he would get it. He walked out of the room and I helped my mother to sit up. He came back holding a mug of water: "Here Anna. You wanted fucking water - take it." And with that he dashed the mug into her face.

I used to go to school in the mornings like a bomb waiting to explode. I loathed the other children's happiness: "Daddy did this for me, daddy did that for me." I needed to shut them up. I used to fight them with a ferocity fuelled by a hatred of their normality and happiness. Even at that young age I was developing a fearsome reputation for violence. I must have spent more time in front of the headmaster than in lessons. When those in authority were standing there shouting at me I would take myself to another place in my mind, re-living a favourite film or a great football moment. My apparently cold and detached manner would infuriate them more and I would usually end up being physically shaken out of my daydreams. I was not invited to another child's house until I was ten, when I went to the birthday party of my next-door neighbour,

Nicky. There were about 12 children there, as well as adults, and everyone was laughing and joking. Their joy made me feel angry and down. One of Nicky's presents was a model of an American Flying Fortress bomber. When all the other children went out to play football, I stayed behind and smashed the plane to pieces, dropping the remains behind the television.

In 1971, when I was eleven, my father decided to show me how to do up a tie. He made me stand still with my hands by my side. This meant I could only see his hands and not what he was doing with the tie. Then he undid the tie and told me to do it. I got it wrong. He grabbed the tie which was round my neck and began pulling me about with it, slapping me round the head and saying I was fucking stupid. Finally I could take no more. I shouted at him: "I wish you were fucking dead," then I punched him on the side of the head before running out of the room and up the stairs. He ran out and caught me halfway up. He laid into me with a vicious fury. I ended up at the foot of the stairs curled into a ball to protect myself from his kicks which were aimed at the small of my back. I thought he was going to kill me. My mother was screaming at him to stop. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain and my legs went numb. I began shouting: "I can't feel my legs! I can't feel my legs!" Only then did he stop. He tried to get me to my feet, but I kept collapsing. My mother ran out to call an ambulance.

As I lay on the floor waiting for the ambulance my father knelt down beside me. He pulled my head up by the hair and said: "Say you were playing and you fell down the stairs on your own or I'll fuckin' kill ye." And that is what I told anyone who asked. Fortunately, nothing was broken, but the discs in my spine were damaged in a way that even today causes me pain.

I started going to Codsall Comprehensive, a school of around 1,500 pupils. I would have fights with other boys almost every day of the week. If I came home with a black eye or another mark on me my father would beat me and offer me the only bit of fatherly advice he ever gave any of us: "Don't let people get away with hitting you. If they're bigger than you, hit them with something." We all started following his advice. My brother Paul got into a fight on a pub car park with a gang from another part of town. He ran at them with two screwdrivers, one in each hand. He stabbed three people before being beaten to a mess. He served two years in borstal. The eldest, Jerry, took on a group of men in a pub. He had armed himself with a pair of large mechanic's spanners and started clubbing all round him. The police arrived and he clubbed one of them too before being overpowered. He had given one of the men a fractured skull; a policeman had a shattered knee. Jerry was sent to prison. All of us, under my father's tutoring, had developed a capacity for extreme and awful violence. It set us apart - and set us against the world, especially the world of authority. I hardly needed to consult a fortune-teller to know where I was heading.

I never felt English growing up, although I suppose I never felt properly Irish either. To be honest, with everything else that was going on, I didn't spend much time agonising about that aspect of my identity.

I knew my roots were in Ireland and I felt comfortable around Irish people. In a sense I lived in an Irish world, although there was no flag-waving Paddiness. I spent every summer holiday in Ireland, and I loved being there, especially with my mother's family in Sligo. My maternal grandfather, Tom, held republican views. He used to find my English Midlands accent comical and was always saying jokingly: "Oh, you Englishman." My older cousins seemed to spend a lot of their time playing cards in people's back gardens and by a weighbridge in the middle of the town. I remember the police turning up once to raid a game, having hidden themselves in the back of a removal van. I could not understand why they had gone to so much trouble over a group of men playing cards. I got on very well with everyone and liked the town and their way of life.

My stays in my father's hometown of Dungarvan were less enjoyable. People behaved as if a black cloud had descended on the place when my father arrived. He was well known, but not well liked. From his early years he had earned a reputation for violence and you could watch people steering clear of him. When there I would try to find out more about my father, but even the relations with whom we stayed didn't seem too sure about him. Or perhaps they were just not willing to tell me anything: he was not a subject that anyone liked talking about. All I knew for sure was that he didn't go to his mother's funeral. On that side of the family was a cousin who served a prison sentence for rioting in Belfast in the early seventies. On his release he came to live with us in Codsall for six months.

I was eleven when Bloody Sunday took place in Derry, but I can't remember the event having much of an impact on my life. My one clear memory comes from watching television and seeing a priest crouching over one of the victims, waving a blood-stained handkerchief. However, I didn't really understand what was going on. In fact the first time the Troubles registered with me was when the soldier son of a family that lived in our street got shot in Derry. IRA gunmen used a church porch to launch an attack on a Royal Horse Artillery checkpoint in March 1974. They killed one soldier and wounded two others, including my one-time neighbour, David Nuttall, whose brother Robert went to my school. The news caused great shock and excitement in our street and I remember a ripple of anti-Irish feeling. Around this time I had a slanging match in the street with some of the Nuttalls. During this confrontation I started shouting, "Up the IRA!", presumably to wind them up, because I can't remember being especially supportive of the Provos or even very aware of what they stood for. However, I met David Nuttall in a pub recently and he remembered me as being far more pro-IRA than I remember myself. He told me that, apart from the slanging match, I had also thrown stones at him while he was recovering from his injuries and shouted, "You British Army bastard!" I suppose my gut instincts were certainly pro-republican, although I can't say I had any real political consciousness. I tended to sympathise with anyone who fought authority, so people who threw petrol bombs at the police and army seemed like my sort of people.

I gradually became more aware of what has happening in Northern Ireland, although events there still remained on the margins of my mind. Once when I was 14 my father found me a job in a Waterford glass factory. He was going to leave me there as he thought a job was of more use to me than days wasted at school. Fortunately, my mother did not approve of the idea and she managed eventually to persuade him to take me back to England. It was during that holiday that someone at a Dungarvan disco reminded me forcefully of my perceived Englishness. One of the local teenagers must have assumed I was an ordinary English holidaymaker. Unburdened by notions of Irish hospitality, he ambushed me in the toilets, punching me on the nose and calling me an English bastard. He hadn't realised I was at the disco with a mob of my Irish cousins. We gave him and his mates a good beating outside, although my own nose was broken. This attack did not destabilise my sense of identity: I didn't feel more English and less Irish as a result. If anything - and perhaps this indicates my essentially pro-republican feelings at the time — I sympathised with his attitude. I didn't take his attack personally: I thought it was natural for an Irishman to want to punch an Englishman.

Back home in England the intensity of violence I was prepared to unleash upon others had given me a reputation as a fighter. I started getting special treatment at school from the teachers. Most of them were wary of me, either trying to appease me by letting me away with things or else going in hard immediately. Both approaches usually led to the issuing of threats and ultimatums. I felt I had to fight their authority: I saw their treatment of me as an extension of my father's treatment. They all said I was disruptive, I was violent, I was bad, but no-one bothered to ask why. At times I would feel almost overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness. When I look back now I think that my fighting against authority was a way of preventing myself breaking down and succumbing to that hopelessness. I had no sense of justice, no sense of right and wrong. It was me versus my father, me versus the teachers and, before long, it was me versus the police.

The cause of my first criminal conviction was laughable. I had developed a passion for Manchester United and most Saturdays I would travel around the country to watch them play. One Saturday I was with my friend, Mickey, on a train going to Bristol. We stopped at one station where there was a small group of Manchester City supporters on the opposite platform. They started jeering and shouting insults and we responded in kind. Nobody took it seriously: it was all quite light-hearted, just kids having a laugh. There was certainly not going to be a fight, if only because our train was about to move off. Once the train got going two middle-aged men in suits who had been sitting opposite us stood up and said they were British Transport Police. They said we were under arrest for using obscene language in a public place. They made Mickey and me stand in the corridor: they stood on either side of us, guarding the dangerous felons. They took us to a Bristol police station where a fat-faced desk sergeant formally charged us with using the f-word and gave us a date to appear at Bristol Magistrates' Court. Then the sergeant - his fat face bloated further with glee - told us he was not going to release us until after the match had started. He said — presumably unaware of the irony: "Don't think you little fuckers can come to Bristol and cause fucking trouble."

To top everything, my father, the man who had taught me from the cradle all the bad language I knew, had to accompany me to court. My mother had an appointment at the hospital, so he reluctantly took me. On the train journey he made three brief points: one, he had lost a day's work because of me; two, I was an ungrateful little bastard; and three, I would fucking pay for it. I stood in that court feeling bewildered, confused and angry. The magistrate gave me a lecture about bad language and fined me £5. This was my first experience of the state's justice - and it seemed no more justifiable than my father's. On the journey back my father slapped my face and punched me in the head. He told me that the money I earned from my two jobs - doing a paper round and helping the milkman - would pay for the fine and the expenses he had incurred that day.

My second criminal conviction was for an even more serious crime. At Christmas I would earn a little extra money by working at a local turkey farm. At first I did various menial jobs, but the boss soon promoted me to chief executioner — no other boy had the stomach for such grisly work. I had to put the squawking creatures head-first into a cone-shaped metal bucket; then I had to pull their heads through the hole at the bottom, trapping their necks between two metal bars; I would then simultaneously squeeze and pull down the bars, breaking their necks and killing them instantly. I think it's what they call a humane method. The birds would kick and scratch at the bucket as they fought for their lives, struggling with such force that the bars and my hands would shake. I used to close my eyes and imagine I was squeezing the life out of whoever had upset me that day, usually my father.