He was from Barbados originally, somewhere near St Andrews and Bathsheba, on the Atlantic side, an educated man who at one time had hoped to become the first black announcer on the island’s national radio station. He was in the RAF when he met my mum at a dance and charmed her off her feet. She left her first husband and three daughters and they flew to Barbados, but she missed the girls too much so they returned and made their lives in Cannock.
They were married in a church in Chadsmoor, on the outskirts of Cannock. Five people there, that’s all, on Christmas Eve 1969. No fuss. Just a short ceremony. Somewhere close by, there was a Methodist college where Arthur Wharton, the first black footballer to play professional football in England, studied when he first arrived from Ghana. I’ve tried to pin down where that Methodist college was several times, all without success.
I don’t remember much about my dad. We finally freed ourselves of him when I was four. I went for a few visits up to his house in Rugeley after that. His idea of light entertainment was playing me educational tapes about sugar cane cultivation in Barbados. We would lie on the carpet in the front room of his house, just listening to someone’s dull voice and watching the tape whirl round on its spool.
Sometimes, when I was playing at my mum’s home – my home – in the side alley, I’d suddenly be aware of a presence and I’d look up and he’d be there, staring at me. He always seemed very sinister and cold to me on the rare occasions he took me back to his house for a visit. He scared me rigid, and with good reason. I don’t recall him laying a finger on me but my mum said he smacked me so hard when I was a six-week-old baby that she thought he had broken my hand. Mostly, though, all I remember is a cold, immaculately dressed man who brought terror into my life. It’s achingly predictable, but a few years ago he started writing letters to my mum, asking her whether I could give him £25,000 for a deposit on a new house. No answer required.
So much of my life since then has been affected by what he did to us and by the fact that there was just my mum to bring me up. It is much, much more than the mere fact of not having had a male influence to guide me. It is the deep, deep fear I have always had of being left alone; the compulsion I have to make sure there is no dead time in my life, that every minute is filled, with either women or with football.
I often think of myself sitting alone in that red-brick house at night, perched on a chair by the front window and staring out towards the main road. My mum worked all the hours God sent at the swimming baths to try to make ends meet. Most nights, after the short walk back home up the hill, she would get back about 10 p.m. If she was just a few minutes late I would start to panic, really lose it. I was petrified that one day she wouldn’t come back and I would have nobody.
My mum seemed old to me. She was 40 when she married my dad. He was 27. I thought she was so old she might pop her clogs any day. When we were going off to football matches, all the other kids had a father and a mother and they all seemed youthful compared to my single parent. However, she did more than her fair share of driving me about to places when I was a kid playing football in the local leagues, and she bought me everything I ever needed. She scrimped and saved and made sure I had the latest football boots and plenty of food on the table. My half-sisters said she spoiled me rotten. But sometimes, I would do something and she would say ‘you’re just like your dad’. It would send a chill through me, even though I knew that she often didn’t even mean it as a criticism, just a nod to genetics.
When I hit my girlfriend Ulrika Jonsson that night in the Auld Alliance pub in Paris during the 1998 World Cup, those words seared through my brain again. Just like your dad. Just like your dad. I knew my mum would be devastated. I knew I had let her down in the worst possible way. The thought of hurting her, as well as the guilt of what I had done in six seconds of madness to somebody I had fallen deeply in love with, was almost too much to bear.
That night in Paris was the start of the death of my football career. It destroyed me. After that night, everybody had an excuse to get rid of me when things got tough, and pretty much everybody did. Except Martin O’Neill. After that night, I knew for certain the pipe dream I’d harboured of being an upstanding, halo-ringed Alan Shearer or Michael Owen figure and to make my mum proud, would never be realised. I knew that the third England cap I had won in the 4–0 win against Moldova in September 1997 would be my last. Even that was only eight minutes at the end of the game as a substitute for Les Ferdinand. I had played two other games for my country, both friendlies against Brazil and Japan, but I had missed out on the festival of the 1996 European Championships in England even though I was playing the best football of my career. Terry Venables chose Alan Shearer, Teddy Sheringham, Robbie Fowler and Ferdinand as his four forwards for that tournament.
I missed out on the World Cup in 1998, too. That was why I was free to go on that tortured trip to France with Ulrika in the first place. I had been in Glenn Hoddle’s squad for the qualifying game against Italy the previous October but my form had collapsed by the following summer and I was injured anyway. Apart from that, Hoddle didn’t really fancy me, even though I had agreed to go and see Eileen Drewery, the healer he put so much faith in, with a few of the other lads.
In the autumn of 1997, before the qualifying tie in the Olympic Stadium in Rome, Hoddle had said he felt I would benefit from a trip to see Eileen. I went with Ian Wright and Paul Ince in Les Ferdinand’s Range Rover to her little bungalow somewhere near Reading. I was last in. Eileen laid me down on the bed and put her hands on my stomach and my head. ‘Do you drink a lot?’ she asked. I said I didn’t. ‘Do you smoke a lot?’ she asked. I said I didn’t. ‘Have you slept with a lot of women?’ she asked. I said: ‘Well, yeah, actually, I have.’ She nodded her head in a kind of knowing way. She seemed happy then.
I felt a bit worried about openly admitting such a thing, even though I had managed to keep my trap shut about the times I had sneaked out of the England team hotel at Burnham Beeches to go over to nearby Cookham Dean and shag Ulrika. I mentioned the questions Eileen had asked me to Les in the car on the way back. He just laughed. He said he’d given her the same answers.
Hoddle seemed pleased. In fact, he was more friendly to me than he ever was before or since on the day after I had been to see Eileen. ‘It’s much better having you around now,’ he said. ‘Eileen told me she’d cleansed your chakras. I can sense a more positive aura around you now.’ Bastard still never put me in the team against Italy. Or in any squad after that, for that matter. And I never got close again.
In another era, I would have won more caps. I scored 41 league goals in 65 games for Nottingham Forest and my only reward was a couple of appearances in the Umbro Cup in the summer of 1995. Think of how few goals Wayne Rooney has scored and how many caps he has got. Think about my pal Darius Vassell and his comparatively spartan returns for Villa and how many caps he has got. I’m not knocking Rooney or Darius. It’s just that England caps seem easier to come by these days. If my career had started three or four years ago, I would have had 40 England caps by now.
I had one glimpse of what might have been. In my debut, against Japan at Wembley, Shearer burst through in the first five minutes. There was a defender between him and the goalkeeper but I was free on his left. If he had squared it, I could have passed the ball into an open goal. What a start that would have been. Of course, the greedy bastard went for goal and missed by a mile. On such moments, international careers stand and fall, especially if you are pigeon-holed as a maverick, as I was.
I knew in my heart that my £7 million move to Aston Villa from Liverpool in the summer of 1997 had been a step down for me, and that my career was starting to slide. When I had joined Liverpool from Forest two years earlier, they had paid £8.5 million for me, a British transfer record at a time when the popularity of football was exploding in this country. Shearer usurped that, too, when Newcastle paid £15 million to take him from Blackburn to Newcastle, and in the years after the 1998 World Cup I started to live my life in football’s shadows.
The Ulrika thing. The thing in Paris. I can never quite bear to say ‘the night I hit Ulrika’. I think it’s a device I use to spare myself the full horror of the recollection. Whatever euphemism I use to refer to the moment when I hit her, it can’t disguise the fact that that moment and its repercussions nearly killed me. I know