Dedicated to my grandad, Samuel Matthew Read – aka Harry – I love you
Contents
5 The More I See The More I Want It
6 If I Was A Wishful Thinker . . .
7 A Righteous Way Of Getting Paid
14 When I Wake I Must Do More Than Exist
17 All Those Who Don’t Believe
18 I Can’t Hold My Breath That Long
25 Where You Are, Can You See The Moon?
28 Gangster Or Spiritual Leader
29 It’s Good To See You Again Postscript
When I was a little boy and had toothache, my grandad would lay his hand on my cheek and the pain would go away. I can still feel the roughness of his builder’s hands on my young face. His home, a flat in Crawford Road, Camberwell, south-east London was an emotional anchor for my childhood, one of the few constants in my early life, along with my twin brother Luke and my mum. We moved house so often, nine times in all. That flat was the only place that stayed the same. At that tender age, I knew so little of what lay ahead. No one could have possibly predicted I would lead a life as exciting, traumatic, extreme, painful, loving and rewarding as I have. There would be so many moments of such exhilaration that I felt as if I’d been blessed. There would also be several times when I would wish that Grandad could have laid his hands on me and made the pain go away. Back then, as long as the toothache subsided, I was happy.
For the first five years of my life, everything seemed normal. Mum and Dad had fallen for each other in, of all places, a hospital, when my mum and her sister Ann were visiting their gran. My parents were both very stylish, shared a passion for music and quickly fell madly in love with each other. My dad, Alan Goss, was a bit of a Mod and my mum, Carol Read, liked the way the Mods dressed. They were both barely into their twenties but the relationship was immediately very intense – so much so that less than a year after they first met, Mum accepted Dad’s proposal of marriage, at Christmas 1967.
Mum was the middle of three kids and, unusually, was exactly twelve years older than her younger sister, my Aunt Sally. There must be something in the family genes about babies arriving on the same day! Reading between the lines, I think Mum sometimes felt a little bit of a piggy-in-the-middle, with Ann being the first-born and Sally being the apple of her parents’ eye, the baby. But Mum never complained, ever. It’s just not her way. Besides, she was very close to both her parents. When her mum died, on Bonfire Night, 1971, my mum was devastated.
Grandad was bereft. His wife Win was everything to him. She was a very spiritual lady and their hearts were seamlessly dovetailed. Grandad’s full name is Samuel Matthew Read (which is where I get my Christian name) but most people know him as Harry. He was a gunner in the Second World War and his trade throughout most of his life was as a builder’s foreman. He’d planned on studying to become a surveyor but the army interrupted that; on his return from war, he found work in a trade desperate for labour to help rebuild the capital. Consequently, he worked on the construction of some of London’s many important buildings.
When he lost his wife, rather than disown