At least once a month my wife will wake me up from a nightmare that I often have. It’s not just a bad dream but a real situation that I found myself in, a situation that to this day makes me weep.
If you had a few guesses at what would cause me so much trauma, you’d probably come up with a few well-known scenarios: why, for example, did I let Norman Whiteside cut inside and get a shot in on goal that cost Everton the treble? If you think the sight of Whiteside running past me celebrating as I dropped to my knees in despair prevents me from sleeping … you’d be wrong.
Another favourite might be why I didn’t get a grip of Gazza early on in the Cup Final a few years later. Maybe a senior pro like myself or Gary Lineker could have calmed him down and prevented him from making that horrendous tackle, a tackle that left him screaming in agony, one that almost ended his career. Is it the image of Gazza screaming in agony that makes me shout out in my sleep? No, it isn’t.
Those of you who know about my personal life are maybe thinking that the nightmare scene involves me walking away from my wife, who was in tears holding my baby daughter as I waved goodbye, leaving them to move in with Mandy Smith? That’s a close call as, although I don’t have nightmares about it, it does make me weep.
The nightmare is none of those. It is actually an incident that occurred in South Africa a couple of years after I had left England and had become heavily involved in the high life and drug culture that goes hand in hand with it.
I wake up screaming as, in the dream, one feature changes from the actual incident. In the dream, I pull the trigger of the .38 Special I have been carrying around with me for months and blow the head off a gentleman called Steven Kentridge. In real life, although the situation actually occurred, I did not pull the trigger. I let the bloke walk away. It was a decision that probably saved my life … as well as his.
My recurring nightmare never goes away and I am glad, as it makes me realise how fortunate I am still to have my liberty, and it also makes me realise how becoming involved with guns and drugs can only lead to death and despair. I came so close to committing murder that night that I never want to forget how fortunate I am that I chose not to pull the trigger. Every day when I wake up, that is the first thing that comes into my mind.
Before I got to that crazy stage of my life, I had plenty of other memorable moments on the way. My life was one big fairground ride that never seemed to stop. Some parts of it were good, some bad and some plain stupid. I look back at it now with a smile, the occasional tear and with some fondness but, believe me, it was a ride that at times was destined to crash and it was the excitement of waiting for the crash to happen that prevented me from ever getting off. I love excitement and I doubt there are many people who have been on a similar ride and are still here to talk about it. Luckily, I am.
The ride began when I was born on 16 December 1960 in Dendermonde, a town in Belgium. My father was a Belgian national who met my mother on holiday; she came from London and they fell in love. They ended up going back and forth between their respective homes until they settled in my father’s home town where they married and brought into the world two healthy, baby boys, myself and my younger brother Rudy. I left Belgium when I was five years old and have no memories of the place whatsoever. Given what I have been told about how boring Belgium is, maybe that’s not such a bad thing!
We moved to Bermondsey – Millwall territory – then settled in Deptford, which was not so much rough as tight knit. I was lucky that my mother’s cousins had pubs; Harry and Thomas Cottrell were well known in the area so, despite being a new kid on the block and viewed as a bit of an outsider, it did not take long for the word to get round that we were not a family that could be intimidated easily, or have liberties taken.
I went to a small kiddies’ school in Bermondsey, then on to Deptford Park Junior High School, where I started playing football and soon noticed a kid called David Memmitt. He used to do things with a tennis ball that older lads could not do with a football; he had amazing talent and could keep the ball up for hours. All he wanted to do was play for Millwall and he did so at the age of 16. Dave was an amazing player but, obviously, he never made the grade as I have never heard of him since I left school, which is a shame as every club in London wanted him to sign for them. Maybe his loyalty to the local side he adored was blind. Either way, far lesser players than him made it, including yours truly.
I was doing OK and playing for the local side and the school team, but my progress was hindered when I broke my ankle in an accident on a park ride. That was the start of my injury nightmare which plagued me throughout my career. As it turned out, that was not the last time I was sidelined from football due to an incident that was not football related. I spent a couple of months in plaster but made a full recovery and was soon back playing.
We then moved to Kidbrooke, to the Ferrier Estate, one of the new, huge estates that were popping up all over the place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was just the one pub – The Watt Tyler – a drinking hole that was frequented by just about every rouge and villain on the estate. It was quite a few years before I stated going in there but it was a pub I always visited when I went home until it eventually shut down in the 1990s.
To say I was not interested in school was an understatement; I despised going there, all I wanted to do was play football and any other sport that could get me out of the classroom. I took up judo, boxing, weightlifting and even squash, a sport that was not really known to anyone at the time.
Quite simply, if there was a sport that got me away from school I’d give it a go, the problem being that they expected me to compete in all these activities … and attend classes! It was never going to happen so, obviously, I stared bunking off and getting into the usual trouble for non-attendance but, no matter how hard my parents and the teachers tried, I simply did not go. I’d get up in the morning, put my uniform on and head off there, but I very rarely made it through the gates as I’d go to the gym or boxing club; anywhere but school, if the truth be known.
I wasn’t roaming the streets causing trouble or being a nuisance to anyone, I just preferred to train than to learn about some way of working out how many degrees a circle contained, how to make something useless out of wood or how to dissect a frog, for fuck’s sake! Looking back at it now, I think I made the right choice in concentrating on training, improving my fitness and the various sports I played as those activities were more useful in my later life than any of the things I swerved during school hours. Maybe I should have attended the odd maths lesson as, bearing in mind what I have earned and what I have left, I think somehow the sums just don’t add up!
I really enjoyed the boxing and the judo; I used to train with a friend of mine named Bradley Bellmen. It was nothing serious, just the pads and bags, and I never fought in a bout – I just loved the training. Bradley packed it in when he left school and soon became a heroin addict like so many more kids around at the time. I kept away from the shit that was hitting the streets and really took to judo, where I earned an orange or blue belt before giving it up to concentrate on my football.
I was now playing for a team called Kestrel Rangers. Even though I had been playing for the school team and now the Kestrels as a centre-forward, despite being half decent, I could not have been that special as plenty of my team-mates were going for trials with various London clubs but I never seemed to get the call. One of my team-mates was a lad called Micky who actually captained England Schoolboys. He was an exceptional player but, as is so often the case, that was as far as he went and Micky was another who, despite being the best of our group, never made the step up to the professional game.
Out of nowhere, I was asked to go and train with the schoolboys at