Unlike some people, I don’t carry a cross of righteousness stoically and steadfastly. Some lads went into this religious place the other day and one had been really bad on coke and heroin, but they got him off both. I say it is a good thing. If you pray to something that is not there but it gets you off drugs anyway or it stops you being suicidal, to me it has got to be a good thing.
Even if God doesn’t exist, it still helps some people who have mental breakdowns, because they go there and it makes them better. I’m not saying anything is true or untrue, I’m sceptical, but I wouldn’t knock it. I would say, good on them if it is making them happy in their life and making their family happier. It’s better than gambling or taking drugs all weekend and not providing for your kids.
What really annoys me, the more I think about religion, is these fucking do-gooders who are all goody-goody but are braying or interfering with their own kids at home. Or these warped old nuns and monks sexually abusing kids they are responsible for. You must get the devil out of you and all that! They are just evil bastards.
There was a film, based on a true story, where these kids in an Irish school have been stealing and playing hookey and the priest is raping a young boy. In another one, about nuns, Pierce Brosnan played the father of two little girls who were taken from him because he couldn’t provide for them, as he was a drunk. But then he got himself on his feet and looked after them, but he found the nuns had been bastards to the kids, beating them with fucking sticks and rulers. To me, priests and nuns like that are cowards.
The way we lived as kids wouldn’t be acceptable these days. Can you imagine it? Our father was a gambler, seven of us living in a two-bedroomed cottage with no electricity. Nowadays your kids would be taken off you and put into care. There would be a demand for justice and vigilance by some do-gooder.
I remember, if we got into trouble, Mum would bray us – and I mean fucking brayed. If you did that today, you could go to jail. I am not saying it is a good thing, because I would never hit Jordan. If he ever misbehaves, I say I’m going to fucking bray you in a minute and he gets threatened every day, but he never gets touched. He isn’t a bad kid, he doesn’t get into trouble.
I remember breaking into a factory when we were kids and it was more like playing or messing about, but I haven’t got a record for stealing or for burglary. We didn’t get much, so we would pinch from the shops, but we never got caught for anything like that. It was fucking bad, though, having soaking wet feet. Now it’s funny but at the time it wasn’t. There will still be kids out there with holes in their shoes, but not many and there’s no excuse. Food has never been so cheap. Everything is so cheap. We must be living in a better time: everybody has got a car or a phone, though every phone I get the police keep bugging it.
Sandra and I lived in Billingham for about six months, but we didn’t know anybody there. I remember a trip to the seaside and we thought we were going into this place to see a film. Inside, everyone is sitting there with dicky bows and white shirts and I’m sitting there with a pair of cowboy boots, denim jeans and denim jacket on and Sandra is sitting there not looking smart either. We thought we were only going to the pictures but it was a play with Lorraine Chase in it. We’d got in the wrong queue, but it was good. My first and probably last foray into the theatre.
It was not long before Sandra and I split up, and soon afterwards I started weight training. I was about 18 or 19 and living back at Seaton Lane. I wanted to get into weights because I had seen The Incredible Hulk and things like that on the telly. It sounds corny now, but I wanted to be massive. When I saw the film Pumping Iron for the first time, I thought, Fucking hell, I would love to be like that. Look at the size of him!
My uncle Tam was a gambler, a bad gambler, like my dad. He would be up five grand and then lose the fucking lot. I remember him going to London, making £10,000. He went down there for about three months and within three weeks of coming home he had blown it all. He would go in the betting shop every day, putting every penny on the horses.
He had borrowed so much money off my mum, 100 or 150 quid, and he couldn’t pay, so he said, ‘Look, Mary, I’ve got a set of weights … take them for the money.’
I remembered the weights because I had been to his girlfriend’s with him in Redcar and I did a little bit of training on the weights he had there. My uncle had an old bench with a little bit of carpet on, two dumb-bells and about 150 or 160 pounds in weights.
I trained diligently every day for about an hour and a half or two hours, but I didn’t realise I was doing too much. My appetite went through the roof, so I ate a lot, but I still overtrained and I was still playing football too. Naturally, I didn’t put any weight on.
After I’d been training for about a year or two, I was this rock-hard Bruce Lee type, solid abs and all that. I turned the spare bedroom into a gym, just with the bench and a few weights and got another set of dumb-bells and I would just be bench-pressing all the time. But I never had a big body; I was thin and still only 12 stone.
I also training on the weights at my uncle Tam’s place and I went to Chapel Gym, which had been converted from a church. This had a real blood-and-guts atmosphere, what with the old imperial weights as opposed to the metric weights they use now. It was like the old Rocky film. I saw these lads, Peter Rayne and Terry Cooper, who had both been in body-building competitions. To me, they were Schwarzenegger doubles: Terry was just over 16 ½ stone and Peter was 14 ½ or 15 stone. To me, they were as huge as a small aircraft hangar. They bristled with rippling muscle. Their arms were 18 inches in girth and they had 50-inch chests. Massive!
I wanted to be like them. I was training like there was no tomorrow. I felt empowered by the discipline of the weights. I was there every day, six days a week. In those days, I used to train chest, back and biceps on a Monday, then shoulders, triceps and calves on a Tuesday and then rotate. It was too much, but I didn’t realise. Now I only train them once a week.
In Redcar, where my uncle lived, this lad called Chip, a drunkard, was offering a rundown council flat in a low-demand area known as the Courts, in the Lakes Estate. In fact, the place wasn’t too bad then, so I took the flat. It was only little but it had everything. Most important of all was the electric meter. You’d put a pin in it to stop it clocking up.
And you would be claiming on the dole. At that time, you could claim £10 a night for bed and breakfast because there was a law saying you could have bed and breakfast in a seaside town. What happened is that Margaret Thatcher stopped it, saying that you could only have six weeks in each town. So, with me having asthma, I got a letter from the doctor saying that I couldn’t be moving around to different places or damp places. I played on it a bit.
Anyway, some lad took Thatcher to court over it and he won his case, so I got some back money, about two grand, and spent it all on training and eating better food. Because I couldn’t drive, I got myself a racing bike. I got myself a job parking cars at Redcar racecourse. For that, I used to get about seven quid a day. I got another job there as well: every time there was a photo finish I took the shot, and I got seven quid for that too.
When I finished my shift at the course, I would steadfastly go to the gym. By now, I was putting a bit of weight on. The training was starting to pay dividends and I was up to around 14 ½ stone at the age of 19. I even managed to get myself a job at the gym as a training instructor. I met these people from a farm and I used to get about 150 eggs a week off them. I used to eat 30 a day! I would have ten scrambled eggs for breakfast and slices of toast with porridge. I could eat three times as much then as I can now, but when you are younger you eat more.
A girl I knew was a hairdresser, so she used to cut my hair, and I was starting to get to know other people. I was getting bigger and bigger and bigger while at Anthony Berg’s gym. Then I started training at another gym, the Olympia, an elite place and probably the best gym in Teesside now, something like a Gold’s gym. The owner was