It’s strange. I have a close relationship with my dad and my sisters. We’re a loving family but we don’t talk about that time much. There are times when I think we ought to talk about it. My younger sister was only seven, just a bit younger than my own daughter is now, when Mum died. She never knew her mum. She deserves to know more.
When I became a footballer, it was my decision not to say anything about my mum so it’s always been my responsibility to deal with people that don’t know about her death and therefore say something inappropriate. But with any problem I’ve ever had, the easiest thing for me to do would have been to blame it on the fact that my mum died when I was a kid. I have never used her death as an excuse. That’s one thing I find hard to accept about some people: there is a type of person that uses things that have happened to them as an excuse to fail. Some circumstances cause people to implode. Equally, you can try and be determined to cope with adversity and get over it. I went through a stage of just feeling utterly lost. I questioned everything. I questioned the fundamentals of my life and there probably was a time when I could have made some bad decisions that derailed me.
However, I avoided that. It is a huge credit to my dad and my two sisters, and to my school and friends, that things happened that way. Football was always a huge release for me, too. It was just there. That was my time – I was never distracted. It allowed me to block out all the stuff about my mum. It helped me focus. I was desperate to win anyway but this made me even more absorbed in my football. And my mum’s death had another effect: I’ve been through bad times in my career and I’ve been able to cope because none of it was as traumatic as my mum dying.
I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the woman who became my dad’s partner in the years after Mum died. Her name was Alice and she became a mother figure to me and my sisters. There was no sense of resentment towards her because she had taken our mum’s place or anything like that. I only feel a deep and lasting appreciation towards her. In many ways, she kept our family together. She and my dad never lived together but we always went round to her house for Sunday lunch and she became a steadying, stabilising influence in all our lives. She was a lovely, loving, caring, gentle and kind lady.
Alice knew my mum and dad when they were younger but after Mum died, Dad was working on a building contract at Jersey Potteries and he bumped into Alice again while she was working in the gift shop there. She was like a saint to us. She had a massive role in a lot of people’s lives: she gave her life to other people. Her sister and her own mother completely and utterly relied on her. She had met my dad again when he was a widower with three children. Why on earth did she take us on when she already had so many responsibilities?
Sadly, Alice has now gone as well. One Tuesday in August 2002, I was in London having lunch with Gianfranco Zola when Mariana rang me and told me I had to come straight home. I asked her what the matter was. Had something happened to the kids? Was she alright? She kept telling me to come home and that there was something she had to tell me. When I got back, she told me Dad had called and that Alice had died. She had gone to bed the night before and she hadn’t woken up. It seems her heart had just given out and they never discovered what caused it. A partnership of twenty years with my dad came to an end with shuddering suddenness.
I spoke at her funeral which was at St Martin’s Methodist Church. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. But I had to do it: I had to do it for her; I had to do it for me; and I had to do it for my mum. After what I had been through with my mum, I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t done that last thing for Alice. All the emotion that I went through on that day counted for double and in a way, it gave me some closure about my failure to attend my mum’s own funeral. I told myself that day that I had to stop taking small things so seriously. I told myself I had to remember what was important in life. I told myself I had to enjoy every moment because life can be so fleeting and brutal. We have all these constant reminders of our mortality and yet we still get so upset and stressed about the most ridiculous things. All great thoughts and then the next day you have a row about whose fault it is you’ve run out of milk.
I don’t know what my dad must have gone through. After Alice died, he said he felt lucky to have known both her and my mum but he must sometimes think ‘What did I do to deserve this’. But he never let his commitment to me and my sisters drop. He and my mum used to spend a lot of what is known now as ‘quality time’ with the three of us. After she died, Dad worked hard but he was always there for us. My mum was a good netball player and Dad had played football to a decent amateur standard so we were all encouraged to be sporty.
Dad was ambitious for me when I was a child. He would drive me here and there. He was a taxi service. But his way of connecting with me was through football. He would get a football out when I was two or three and he felt pretty quickly that I had an eye for it. As I got older, he became much more serious about my football. It helped that I was an outdoor kid. I wouldn’t think twice about going on a two-hour bike ride and I took cross country very seriously. Football, however, soon became all-consuming. I played for my school, St Saviour’s, and for the Island Primary Schools and the Island Cubs. That was the first time I ever came up against Matt Le Tissier, who was from Guernsey. He was right-sided, I was left-sided, so we were always rivals.
I came up against him time and again and it often seemed our careers shadowed each other’s. We were the first players from the Channel Islands to represent England. He made his debut sixty-six minutes after I made mine. There seemed to be something linking us. He was born on 14 October 1968. I was born on 17 October 1968 – weird. Every time I played against him when we were kids, I used to get that nervous feeling you have when you’re up against someone who you think is better than you. I can’t remember him showing me up too badly but that may just be because I have erased it from my memory. I do remember, though, that when he signed professional forms for Southampton when he was sixteen, it felt like someone had finally burst the dam as far as Channel Islands football was concerned. He was the first from the islands of my generation to get a professional contract. He showed it could be done.
There was some good schools football in Jersey. At a younger age, there was an Easter primary schools tournament which is still an annual event now and has become very prestigious. Deeside Schools always came down and they were one of the best sides in the country: Ian Rush, Gary Speed and Michael Owen all played for them at different times. So I was exposed to a good standard of football. Later, I went to a secondary school called Hautlieu and continued to play football while I studied. What went against me in terms of the bigger picture and getting a shot at a trial with a professional club was the fact that I lived on the island. For a club to invite me for a trial was a big commitment because they would have to pay for the cost of the flight and put me up in digs. The expense was prohibitive.
When I was thirteen, my dad paid for me to go to a soccer camp put on by Southampton. I had the accident when I fell off the garage roof a few weeks before the camp was due to start but even though I had all those stitches in my shin, there was no way I was going to miss it. I loved it. I spent a week there. They asked me to stay for a second week and said they would keep an eye on me. My dad had high hopes for what that camp might achieve for me but when I went back the next year, they said I had not developed as much as they had hoped.
I endured some of the rites of passage many aspiring footballers go through – such as the careers meeting with the sceptical teacher. She had a computer with a fairly basic careers programme. She asked what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to be a footballer. She keyed it in and it was reminiscent of Little Britain – the computer said no. ‘Nothing’s come up,’ she said. So she put ‘sportsman’ in and again nothing came up. In the end, she said ‘What else would you like to do?’ I shrugged. She gave me a printout of how to become a bank manager, just so she could tick her box. When I signed for Chelsea a couple of years later, they took me down to the Lloyd’s Bank at Fulham Broadway. I looked up at the bank manager as I was writing ‘professional footballer’ on the form. I thought of my careers meeting. ‘I could have been you,’ I said.
Anyway, I kept plugging away. I had had a trial at Notts County