Once I got to know Paul and his family, I found out that he could always make people fall in love with him. It wasn’t a manipulative thing; he didn’t explicitly decide to have people fall at his feet so that he could get what he wanted – it was just that he was incredibly engaging. Paul would do anything for anyone and most people would do anything for him too. I remember thinking at the time, What’s going on here? Why am I suddenly head over heels for this boy? Of course, it wasn’t sudden really but I was still shocked by it.
I suppose I was becoming part of Paul’s world without it being a big deal. If I had been his girlfriend at that stage, I’m not sure that I would have got to know him as well as I did. We spent our first months together quite naturally, with no pressure, and that would always stand us in good stead. As time went on, I found out a lot about his background and it helped me make sense of some of his behaviour.
To be honest, Paul had never really grown up.
We had been brought up very differently as children. Both sets of parents are still together – in itself, quite unusual nowadays, I guess – but snooker-mad Paul was treated like a little prince from the moment he was born, whereas my mum and dad showed their love by giving me strong values and independence.
Paul’s big sister Leanne had been born three years before him in 1975, the same year as me. His mum, Kristina, was over the moon when she got pregnant with Paul – he was very much a wanted child – but she had a huge scare when she started bleeding very heavily at three months and thought she was having a miscarriage. Paul’s dad, Alan, and a friend carried her upstairs to bed feet first to try and stop her losing so much blood, but I know that it was terrifying – she was sure she’d lose the baby. Next day, she was taken to hospital and stayed there for a week. When the bleeding stopped and she was sent home, she says she somehow knew that her baby was a survivor, and the rest of the pregnancy was fine.
Alan was present at the birth and seemingly was so overcome by it all that as soon as the baby came out and the doctor said, ‘It’s a boy!’ the proud new dad keeled over in a faint.
Paul Alan Hunter was born on 14 October 1978, weighing 5lbs 3oz. He was put in an incubator for a few days as he was so tiny, and when his mum looked at him, he seemed like a little dolly; perfect and with incredibly blond, almost silvery-white, hair. He liked attention from the outset – and that wasn’t to change much. When you put baby Paul down, he’d scream. If you picked him up, he’d smile. Everyone says that, as a baby, he just wanted a cuddle and a bit of love.
He had an extended family nearby, with several cousins who were roughly the same age as him, and Polish grandparents, Babcia and Dziadek, on his mum’s side. Everyone loved the golden-haired little boy who had come into the family. However, more than anything, Paul was a mummy’s boy. He hated Kristina going out, and whenever she did, he would sulk at the bottom of their stairs; often he got his own way and made his mum feel so guilty that she would come back early.
This didn’t stop in later years. When Paul was about 13, his mum came home to find him asleep on the sofa one night. She tried to wake him up, but nothing worked – he was so sound asleep that prodding and whispering in his ear had no effect whatsoever. Finally, she lugged her teenage son upstairs and tucked him up in bed without disturbing his dreams. It was years and years later that Paul admitted to her that he was awake the whole time and only pretending to be asleep so that she would cuddle him, pamper him, and make him feel like her baby again.
Any of the tricks Paul played, however, were purely fun and games. He got away with a lot because he was a genuinely nice lad who had a smile to break hearts and a sense of humour that got him through everything. Even as we faced our darkest days together, that smile would appear and the sense of humour would kick in and I sometimes got glimpses of the little boy he must have been. He was a crowd-pleaser even as a kid; a soft touch who always did his best to keep everyone happy, and who wanted everyone to like him.
These days, as I sit without him, I wish I could go back to the years when I didn’t know him. I want to soak up all those memories, those times when I wasn’t in his life. I wish I could just top myself up on all the Paul days to keep me going. I’m sure if I had known him then, he’d have made me adore him then too. Before his true talent came out, Kris and Alan say that they had no idea what he would become but they always had a feeling that the smiling little lad with the golden hair would capture many more hearts than just those of his immediate family.
By the time Paul turned three in October 1981, he had already started showing an interest in snooker. He kept trying to hit marbles with a chopstick so when Christmas came, a tiny snooker table was bought. This was at the time when snooker was reaching its heyday – it was on telly a lot and there were some real characters associated with the game so there was always some sort of coverage going on. Paul was born in the year that the BBC first decided to give blanket coverage to the World Championship. Snooker was booming when the little boy got his first taste of life on the baize.
On Christmas morning 1981, Paul opened the miniature snooker set and it was pretty much the only thing he played with all day long. It was so small that it fitted onto the coffee table in the lounge, but it was big enough to start turning Paul’s dreams into reality. He picked up that snooker cue when he was three and never really put it down again.
For his fifth birthday, Paul was given a 6ft x 3ft set, which was kept in the living room, and it was his favourite possession. Alan played regularly with friends at a local club called Snooker 2000. One night, when Paul was eight, Alan’s usual partner rang to say that he couldn’t make the game that night. As he put the telephone down and shouted through to tell Kristina what was going on, young Paul jumped up and down by his side. ‘Dad! Dad!’ he shouted. ‘Take me! Take me!’ Alan tried to ignore him, but an excitable Paul wasn’t too easy to shut out. He wouldn’t stop pleading for Alan to take him to the snooker club, and his dad finally said that, if it was up to him he would, but the manager would never let a kid in to play. He hoped that would be an end to the matter, but he should have known Paul wouldn’t be put off so easily.
‘Dad! Dad!’ he went on. ‘Can we find out? Can we ask if they’ll let me in? Please, Dad? Please?’ Alan relented. Given that he was pretty confident that he was right and Paul wouldn’t get to play, it seemed easier to make the trip and let someone else explain things to his snooker-mad son. When they got there, either the snooker gods were watching or the manager was in a particularly good mood because Paul got his way and he was allowed to play his dad on a proper-sized snooker table in a proper club.
The boy was like a duck to water.
He never looked back.
Paul and his dad went to Snooker 2000 a few times over the next couple of weeks, and it amazed everyone there that the little lad was giving his father such a good game. People used to congregate while he was at the table, until there were dozens standing watching. He was cute – which helped – but he could also play the game, which made things even better.
Now snooker is a pricey hobby and Alan was renowned for being careful with cash so everyone assumed Paul would just have to accept that the 6ft x 3ft table in the living room was going to have to do for now. They hadn’t accounted for the attention Paul had been getting while he was playing his dad. The club decided that he was so good for business that they would let him play for free as often as he liked, and Paul was over the moon.
When he was 10, Alan took little Paul to the Crucible in Sheffield, the sport’s most famous venue, for the first time. There the boy made a wish that would come true sooner than anyone thought: ‘One day, Dad,’ he said, ‘one day, I’d love to play here.’ He knew what he wanted from that moment on.
Paul’s first love was just playing the game. He wasn’t bothered about competitions and trophies