One day we’d had yet another disagreement over something I had done, so he cornered me. He was really angry and breathing heavily with fury. He leaned down over me and said in a truly menacing tone, ‘I don’t give a f**k about any of this, I will kill you.’ Now I had stood up to my fair share of bullies and bigger men in my younger years, but I knew this man was simply too big and too aggressive to mess around with. After this unseemly confrontation, I went to the bathroom and, because the home was a lock-up at the front, I crawled out the window and was gone. I was never in care again.
I had been so unruly when I visited my father on leave from the care homes, he could not tolerate my behaviour and eventually refused to have me back home at all. For the next 18 months, I was homeless. My territory was around Peckham and the Walworth Road, I did not have a permanent roof over my head. Much has been made in the media, and indeed by the public I meet, about how awful this must have been. No, I won’t have this said. I lived like a king. I wouldn’t say it was bliss, because bliss is not having to work and being at ease with yourself. You can’t really be at ease when you don’t know where you are going to sleep that night. So it wasn’t bliss, but it wasn’t far off.
I was a teenage kid, shoplifting daily and earning easily over £100 by 6 o’clock each night. I was young, quick, had good sleight of hand and bundles of courage, so I was never really too compromised. I had girlfriends all over the place and as much marijuana, Special Brew and Treats as I wanted, I went to Blues dances, called Shobins, two or three nights a week and was driven around everywhere by taxi, wearing the finest clothes. I was my own boss, I had no parents to report back to, no school to trouble me. I was lord of my own manor.
During this time, I was part of one of the most proficient shoplifting gangs in the country. On a bad day we would take home £110 per man, but when we were on song we would make £180 each. At the time, the average wage was perhaps £60 a week. There were four of us in the gang: myself (Eu-ey), Sticks, Nasty and Beaver. Sticks took his nickname from the Jamaican term for a thief, while Nasty earned his monicker because he was girl mad. They were both Nigerians. Beaver was the last man to join up. I now realise that this behaviour is foolish, but having gone through it myself I can relate to youngsters and talk to them effectively about getting caught up in this kind of lifestyle.
We worked Monday to Friday, consummately professional, and were very exacting in our standards. We wore suits, shirts and ties and always looked immaculate. Before a job, I would put on my Italian mohair suit, a crisp shirt and tie, and my prized Burberry coat. At the time, Burberry had just introduced these extremely sturdy security tags, so stealing one of their range was not an option, you had to buy your Burberry coat. I vividly recall going to Haymarket to purchase mine: it cost £180 and was a sight to behold. Magnificent. Oh, man, I felt I had arrived. On the streets, how you dress is inextricably linked to how much respect you command, so I was always intimately fascinated by the latest fashions. That may well have something to do with my latter-day passion for dress code.
The purpose of the Burberry coat was twofold. Firstly, you looked impeccable, not at all like a shoplifter. Secondly, if you bought the coat legitimately, you were given a Burberry’s bag, which was effectively a licence to steal anything. You would walk into some of the finest clothing shops in the West End and look as if you could afford to buy any item. The sales representatives never suspected a thing, they probably assumed I was some rich African youngster with money to burn. That uniform was crucial to our success.
We had numerous locations to work, including Oxford Street. Of course, things would not always go our way and sometimes we would end up being chased.
That year on the streets was so exciting. We were at the peak of our shoplifting prowess. I had all this money and freedom and never wanted to compromise that by staying at a hostel. Instead, I would crash on friends’ floors most of the time, flitting from one run-down flat to the next. I blagged it, as they say. I would go to someone’s house and get so drunk I couldn’t leave. It was during this time that I started to smoke weed very heavily. I had begun when I was only 12, but by this time on the streets I was a very heavy user. A lot of my shoplifting money was spent on weed, booze and clothes. I must have smoked thousands of pounds of ganja over the years. I still knew quite a few rastafarians and that influenced my attitude towards smoking too.
About once a week I would not be able to get a floor for the night, so I would break into a car and sleep on the back seat. I spent many a happy night napping on car seats in Peckham, Camberwell or the Elephant and Castle. On a few occasions, I did end up sleeping under a mattress but I didn’t like that: the cold still got through to my bones. The longest stint I had under a proper roof was at Nasty’s. Even then, he got tired of this after a couple of weeks and said, ‘Look, Chris, I can’t handle it anymore, you need to find somewhere else.’
I was still only a kid but I had been living on my own instincts for so long, my sense of self-survival was deeply ingrained. When your mother isn’t there and you live with your father who is doing long shift work, you don’t have time to be a child. If you want food, you have to find it yourself. With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that my personality was becoming heavily predisposed towards the life of solitude, hardship and suffering that is boxing. I maintain to this day that my childhood never felt like this. I have no complaints, but looking back I do accept that in a sense I was in training for the noble art from almost my first breath.
Of course, however buoyant I kept my disposition, life on the street wasn’t all a bed of roses. Inevitably, I found myself in compromising situations from time to time. One night, I had nowhere to sleep, so Sticks introduced me to a chef he knew vaguely. I later found out he was also gay but no one told me this at first. I needed a roof for the night, so I had to keep calm when I went inside his dishevelled flat and saw dozens of machetes and knives all over the house. I said, ‘I’ll be okay to sleep on the settee,’ but he was adamant, saying, ‘It’s a matter of principle that you sleep on the bed.’ I politely refused, but he was insistent. He seemed cool to me, so eventually I said, ‘Fine, okay,’ and settled down in this bed. At about 3 o’clock in the morning, I suddenly felt this big hand wrap around my waist and start to pull me backwards as he cuddled up to me. I was out of the bed like a flash! Then it struck me that I was with a complete stranger whose house was filled with cutlasses and various other blades, and now I may have offended his feelings. The night before I had burgled a house in Seven Sisters Road and took a camera, which I’d left on this man’s coffee table. I tried to say to him calmly, ‘I’m not like that,’ before grabbing my camera and clothes and hot-footing it out the door! I headed out into the street, but as I was halfway down the road, I got this bad feeling and decided to hide behind a wall, for no specific reason. Seconds later, a police patrol car slowly drove past. I was always blessed with an intuitive street sense that kept me out of trouble so often. Imagine if they had found me, a young black teenager wandering the streets in the middle of the night, out of breath and with a camera around my neck!
People often ask me how it feels to possess the material things my boxing success has brought me, having come from being a homeless delinquent. I do not see it like that. Whatever our individual circumstances, we are all fighting and each person’s own individual predicament is relative, it feels like a hefty burden. I always say to people, ‘If I have £1 billion and you have nothing, then my burdens are as heavy as yours. I still have things to do, I still have problems, I still have aches and pains. Nature doesn’t give anyone more than they can handle.’ Everyone’s burden is heaviest. I prefer to look at things this way. If I look at it any other way, it gives people who are less fortunate an excuse to say the world owes them something – it doesn’t. The world owes you nothing. If I had looked at my younger years in that way, I would have suffocated in resentment. I could not allow that, I had things to do. I had to fly, so to speak.
One night, I took a taxi to a gentleman’s outfitters in Brighton. We usually hired a taxi to take us around our daily targets, the driver would be paid £70 for the day and was aware of what we were