All this support at times made for a difficult relationship between me and my sister. As kids, Emma and I lived very different lives. Socially we had different sets of friends: she went to a school in Maidenhead and had friends in Marlow whereas mine tended to be more in High Wycombe and Aylesbury. She saw her brother playing for England and getting the odd write-up in newspapers and her Mum and Dad following me everywhere. Looking back, it must have been hard for her, and I can fully appreciate her frustrations. I’m sure she would have welcomed some of that attention herself. It was only later, after we had both left home, that I consciously tried to make up for lost time. Emma is now married to Martin, with two children, Daniel and Ellen, and we often meet up for barbecues.
At the end of August 1991 I was invited to join Northampton Rugby Club. I accepted, and this marked the point at which my relationship with my parents changed. Up until then they were my support group; any problems I had, I turned to them. But at Northampton I met Keith Barwell, a wealthy local businessman, and he took me under his wing.
Northampton had approached me after seeing me play at scrum-half for England 18 Group against France at Franklin’s Gardens in April. When I returned from a tour to New Zealand with Marlow, it was to a message from Saints’ youth-team coach Keith Picton asking me to call him. I had already had a look at Wasps and there had been interest in me shown by Harlequins and Saracens, but I liked what I saw at Northampton.
Within weeks I was an 18-year-old commuting to the East Midlands to play for Saints under-19s. It was an expensive business, but Keith sorted me out with a job, working as a security guard for one of his companies, Firm Security. I was what is known in the trade as a ‘flyer’, which meant I had to be ready at the drop of a hat to go anywhere and offer security back-up. For example, one evening they phoned me up to say I was needed in Worcester by 10 o’clock the following morning to patrol Littlewoods.
Keith and my parents have since become the best of friends, but after I moved up to Northampton in January 1992 Mum and Dad felt a little bit left out. An awful lot of things were being sorted out for me by Keith during this period, things which parents would ordinarily do, like helping to arrange mortgages. My new place was about an hour and a half from home, which I didn’t think was all that far, but as far as Mum and Dad were concerned I could have been on the moon.
By August of that year I had moved into the head office of Firm Security and was being paid £10,000 a year. I stayed there until September 1993, when I went to work for the Milton Keynes Herald, another of Keith’s interests, selling £15 adverts over the telephone. From there it was on to a career of sorts in teaching, a fact that will amuse my tutors at RGS who wrote me off as intellectually challenged. At the time I was sharing a house with clubmate Brett Taylor, and he was teaching at Spratton Hall prep school in Northampton. I had spent a lot of time at RGS coaching junior teams, so when an opportunity came up to help out with PE lessons and generally to be an odd-job man around the school, I jumped at it. It was obviously good for the school to have me around for the rugby and PE, but I was keen to do more, so they allowed me to teach basic geography and maths to kids up to the age of 10. I surprised myself with how smoothly it went. I got on well with the kids, made them understand the subjects and found it easy to teach them.
I was at my happiest, however, when I was outside, and one summer I was asked to strip the paint off all the school’s football and rugby posts, sand them down and then rust-coat and paint them. Many saw it as a thankless task as it was a three-week job, but the weather was gorgeous. I finished it in two months, and I’ve never been so tanned.
Brett and I, known as the ‘terrible twosome’ (or ‘pretty boys’ to Keith Barwell), were very sporty and quite fit and athletic with all the training we did. As soon as the first ray of sunshine appeared we would be out in our shorts and sleeveless T-shirts to volunteer for car-park duty. It was no chore at all. You wouldn’t believe how many mothers turned up in open-top cars, fully made up and wearing short little skirts. We of course thought we were God’s gifts to the world.
Nothing altered that view when we were roped into taking part in the summer production of a Victorian music-hall show. Our particular scene required us to pretend to be two weight-lifters, complete with big moustaches and all-in-one leotards, lifting black balloons disguised as cannonballs on the end of a weight bar. Half an hour before we were due on stage we pumped ourselves up with circuit weights and clap press-ups in the dressing room, and then covered ourselves in bronzing lotion and got fully oiled up. The looks we got from the mums as we took off our dressing gowns on stage in the music hall were truly memorable.
Life was good for me in the early 1990s, and it was about to get a whole lot better.
Defence in football, midfield in rugby. That seemed to be my fate when, after joining Saints as a scrum-half, coach Glen Ross picked me at centre. Having been selected for the bench as a scrum-half for a second-team game, I’d come on in the centre and scored a couple of tries. Before I knew it I was in the first team, making my debut at Gloucester and playing quite well in a Northampton victory.
That night, I went out with Ian Hunter and Brett Taylor and got so wrecked that I ended up sleeping in the wardrobe of a room in the Richmond Hill Hotel. The next morning I woke with a very stiff neck and rushed out to get the papers, expecting huge ‘Dawson is fantastic’ type headlines. I was rather taken aback to find no such thing. The only reference to me in any of the reports was that I had missed a 22-man overlap! But the England selectors took a more positive view, and picked me to represent the under-21 team at centre for the game against the French Armed Forces. Kyran Bracken was scrum-half that day, but this time I did make the headlines, snatching the draw by scoring and converting a last-gasp try.
I still saw my future in the game as a scrum-half though, and that summer Glen Ross set me up with a spell in his native New Zealand, playing scrum-half for a club called Te Awamutu in Waikato. I spent my first two weeks living with Glen at his place in Hamilton; then, once I’d found my feet, I moved on to a farm deep in Waikato country which was owned by Te Awamutu coach John Sicilly. Also staying on the farm were two Scots boys from Melrose, Rob Hule and Stewart Brown, and together we just had the greatest time. Every day would be spent driving quad bikes up the mountain and then erecting fences. We had this big ram hammer with which to drive in the fence posts, but I was barely strong enough to pick it up let alone ram it down.
After a couple of weeks our job descriptions changed from fence erectors to tree surgeons. John needed all his pine trees trimmed, explaining that while the top third has to be branches and leaves, the second third has to be clean so that when it gets cut there are no knots in the wood. He then sent three muppets into the forest and left us to get on with it. Ladders against trees, taking no safety precautions at all, we took massive saws and secateurs up into the branches with us. It was extremely dangerous, and every quarter of an hour or so one of us would fall a good 20 feet to the ground. But there were no serious injuries, and as the days turned into weeks my body got stronger.
Life on a farm at the end of a long single-track road miles away from civilization was simple but wickedly good. One day the three of us were driving home with John and he got to a corner where he knew there would be wild turkeys sitting on the fence. On went the headlights, the turkeys froze in the beam, and out got John with a crowbar. The next day we were instructed to dunk the carcasses in water and pluck them.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Try plucking one without wetting it first,’ came the reply.
I did, and within seconds there were feathers absolutely everywhere. By the time we’d finished plucking this turkey, John’s front lawn was obliterated. The wind had picked up and blown the feathers all over his house too.
‘Wet them and they stick. You can then grab them and throw them in a bag,’ he explained. ‘Got it?’
We stayed on that farm for a month, the three of us living in a little annexe. After that we moved into a house in town and went from one labour job to another. We laid a resin concrete floor in a factory one day, landscaped a garden on another.