Soldier Of The Queen (6 page)

You're under arrest." I felt my arms being forced up my back. I glanced over at Hughie: he was in the same position. One of the detectives got out his radio and called for a car to take us to Digbeth Police Station.

The desk sergeant called us animals and said we were not fit to breathe the same air as decent people. He read us our rights and took down our details. Then we were put in separate cells. My cell had an arc of blood sprayed up the wall and the single tatty blanket stank of piss and vomit. A few hours later our mothers arrived: my brother Jerry had driven them to Birmingham. They looked distraught. We had been taken out of our cells while the desk sergeant filled in the forms for bail. He said: "Robbery - at your age! I'll tell you now -you'll be banged up for murder one day." Both our mothers were upset and angry; the journey home in the car was one of the longest drives of my life. I felt awful for upsetting my mother, but I didn't feel guilty about committing the crime, only regret at getting caught. I was sure we were going to be sent to a detention centre, but at the end of the judicial process the judge merely gave us "strict Supervision Orders". In reality, this meant that once a fortnight Hughie and I had to go to a council building where we sat in a room with other local hoodlums while waiting our turn to be called into an office and asked fatuous questions by a probation officer: "How are you? How's school? How are things at home? Are you keeping out of trouble?" I often used to wonder what they would have said if I had told them the truth: "Well, actually, I'm doing much the same as I was before - although I've cut down on the mugging." Sometimes while waiting our turn we would break into the probation officers' cars and fill them with rubbish. Occasionally the police would come and give us talks about the latest advances in crime detection. The burglars among us, in particular, found many of their tips extremely useful, but we all learned something to help make us better criminals. They even arranged for us to play football against a team of police cadets. We criminals turned up in working boots and started kicking lumps out of the cadets. The referee abandoned the match at half-time when the cadets refused to come out for the second half. We stood jeering on the pitch until they brought on a police dog and made us sit down.

At the end of the summer term of 1976 I left school with few qualifications. I was sixteen. 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 was not going to last much longer. He could see what he had turned his sons into - and he must have known the day of vengeance was coming. In fact it came in August 1976. He 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 just 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 that something had changed. The fight had gone out of my father. He did not 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.

The following morning my father got up for work as usual and told my mother he would meet her that afternoon outside the Marks and Spencer store in Wolverhampton. He said he was going to give her some money to buy some shopping. He left the house before Paul and I got up. In the afternoon my mother, penniless as usual, had to embarrass herself by borrowing money off a neighbour to get the bus into town. She waited for him for two hours, but he never turned up. She had to walk all the way home.

My father has not been seen since. Not by anyone. No-one knows where he went or what happened to him. He didn't take any clothes or personal effects. Rumours of his whereabouts came and went; some people on the estate even thought he'd been murdered. I don't know and I don't care. The less I think and know about him the better.

That summer of 1976 was a turning point in other ways.

I left school and was taken on as an apprentice toolmaker. Like all the other boys, I'd been brainwashed into believing that life was not worth living if I didn't have a trade. I had to attend a tool factory in Wolverhampton for four weeks' "familiarisation" training before starting a sponsored college course. I soon discovered that familiarisation meant familiarising myself with the drudgery I could now expect for the rest of my life. I had to work in the stores department humping boxes and crates for a sum of money that would just about have bought me a pair of dirty overalls. The unions were very powerful at this time. On my first day I was confronted by a picket line, advised not to cross it and sent

home. In the factory the union shop-stewards were constantly telling us not to do other people's jobs - such as sweeping up if you dropped something or replacing dirty towels in the wash room. 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.

I was introduced to experienced toolmakers - men I was meant to admire and aspire to be - some of whom had worked on the same lathe in the same spot for twenty years. One old boy told me he had named "his" lathe Helen. "Oh, you're lucky! Helen's on good form today!" I began to feel as if I'd been given a life sentence with no chance of parole. I went to a Further Education college to start a toolmaking course and immediately got off to a bad start. A fat chain-smoking former sheet-metal-worker in stained clothes talked to me as if I were a dog and insisted I called him "Sir". I said I would only do so when Her Majesty had knighted him. Apart from criminal behaviour and Manchester United, my other passion was music. I admired the Beatles and I jumped at the chance to go to a concert in London by the former Beatle Paul McCartney, although it was going to mean I would have to take a Friday off. I told the sheet-metal slob of my plans and he wasn't happy. He said I didn't deserve the opportunity that had been bestowed upon me. At first I thought he was referring to the concert, but I soon realised he meant the prospect of being imprisoned in a factory on slave wages shackled to a lathe called Helen for the rest of my life. I said I was going to the concert and that I was telling him out of politeness, not asking his permission.

I returned on Monday to a rant from the slob about my impertinence. We had an exchange of views in which I may have used the f-word. He stormed off to the nearest phone and rang my company. I had to return to the factory "as a matter of urgency" to see the personnel manager. I urgently caught a bus into town and urgently browsed through a few record stores before making my way to the company
headquarters for my showdown with Mr Personnel. When I
arrived I was directed to a plastic chair outside his office by his ferret-faced secretary who kept looking at me sternly over her glasses. She reminded me of the secretary at school who used to take my money from behind the hatch.

After about half an hour an electronic box on her desk crackled: "Send O'Mahoney in." I walked towards his office under the now-you-are-in-for-it gaze of the secretary. On his door was an aluminium sign saying "Personnel Manager", probably produced on the lathe called Helen twenty years earlier. Inside, the floor was covered with a thick blue carpet embroidered with the company logo. A man in his fifties in a cheap blue nylon suit began telling me how lucky I was to have an apprenticeship, how 400 boys had applied for the ten jobs, how I had been set on the path towards life-long security and how I was now in serious danger of destroying that bright future. Then, relaxing a little, he began telling me how he himself had been a bit of a lad in his youth, but had then knuckled down to some hard work, which had brought him eventually to the position he now occupied. He looked at me firmly, eyes oozing sincerity, and said that with application anything was possible: "Who knows?" he said. "One day, in ten, twenty years' time, you could be sitting in this seat in this office." On the journey from the plastic chair past the aluminium sign I had made up my mind. Any lingering doubts had been quashed by the atmosphere of his crummy office: the sagging features of his miserable wife stared up at me from a photo. She seemed almost to be imploring me, "Please don't end up like the git I've married." For a few seconds I looked at him festering in his cheap suit, then I said that if I ever ended up like him I'd kill myself. In case he had not got the point I added: "You can poke your poxy job." I walked out, leaving him stumbling for words.

I soon got another job working for a scrap-metal merchant underneath Wolverhampton's railway arches. The work was hard and tedious, but I liked the people I was working with -and I was earning about five times as much as before. However, my time there ended abruptly one afternoon when the hammers on the frag machine (so called because it would pulp metal into fragments) became jammed. A fitter climbed in to free them - without shutting down the machine. He freed the hammers, but the machine then started up, pulling him into its jaws. Someone managed to press the stop button quickly, but not before the fitter's legs had been mutilated: one was almost severed, the other shattered. The Health and Safety Executive immediately shut the yard; the management laid off the work force.

I could not decide what to do with myself. I was tired of living in Codsall, tired of the same old faces haunting the same old places, saying and doing the same old things. I was living at home with my mother and my youngest brother, Michael. My oldest brother, Jerry, had moved into a house in Wolverhampton with the Hell's Angels, while the second oldest, Paul, was still in borstal serving what should have been a six-month sentence but which had been extended to two years for bad behaviour. I had made pregnant my girlfriend of three years. She gave birth to a boy, Adrian, but then dumped me. With hindsight, I know she made a wise decision, but at the time I was heart-broken. I decided to leave the area: I packed a holdall and said goodbye to my mother, not knowing where I was going or what I was going to do when I arrived there. Saying goodbye to my mother devastated me. I walked the five miles to the M6 motorway in tears. I decided to leave my final destination to fate: I would stick my thumb out and go wherever the first car to stop was going.

That night I found myself trudging in a blizzard through a run-down area of Glasgow. I slept in a tin workman's hut near the Celtic football ground and in the morning I explored the city. I had heard unemployment was high in Glasgow, but I didn't think things could be that bad. Then I found a Job Centre that appeared not to have any jobs on its boards. When I enquired at the desk the clerk started laughing. He called over his colleagues to show them the Englishman who had come to Glasgow to find work. As he sent me away he said: "You're at the wrong end of the motorway, Dick Whittington." I lived rough in Glasgow for a few days before moving on and doing the same in Edinburgh and then Dundee. I started having breakfast every morning at a particular Dundee cafe where I got talking to another regular called Derek. He said he ran a cheap hotel and he asked me if I'd like to be its caretaker-cum-porter. I said yes, but soon discovered the hotel was little more than a brothel in a rough part of town. Prostitutes hired out his rooms by the day or the week. All I had to do was answer the door, let in the punters, make sure they left and collect "room rent" off the women on Fridays. Derek just needed someone there all the time. I spent most of my day playing cards with the women or watching TV with them. All the women, without exception, were trying to escape their own traumas, only to have plunged themselves into a worse existence. After a few months the human misery I was witnessing began to depress me and I left for home.

In Codsall not much had changed. My brother Paul was home, having been released from borstal. He had worked briefly with some well-meaning nuns in London handing out soup to the homeless, but had decided against making a career of it. For some reason known only to himself he then joined the Spanish Foreign Legion. He served as a paratrooper for two years, but spent most of his time in the guard house for breaking the rules. In the end he deserted. He sneaked himself on to a British cruise liner containing holidaymakers bound for England. When the ship docked at Tilbury in Essex he was arrested by police for being a stowaway. Local magistrates showed him mercy and gave him a non-custodial sentence. He had no money when he left the court, but a reporter paid for his ticket home to Codsall and even gave him some extra cash in return for a photograph of him which then appeared in our local evening paper. During this period my brother Jerry also moved back home, although he still maintained his links with the Hell's Angels. He became obsessed with catching a rat that sometimes appeared from under the garden shed. One day I was watching a film in the front room with my mother when there was an explosion outside. I ran to the window and saw that the shed had disintegrated. Jerry came down from his room and said he'd been waiting for the rat to poke its nose out and when it had done so he had fired both barrels of a twelve-bore shotgun at it. My mother, long acquainted with the bizarre and the violent, was most concerned about the shed. Her only reference to Jerry's shotgun was her suggestion that perhaps it would be easier in the future to let the cat deal with any rats.