I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It all seemed horribly unreal. As much as I tried to comprehend it, I just couldn’t accept it. I burst into tears while Dad tried to comfort me. As we drove home, fear gripped me. What was I going to say to my sisters? Who would I turn to now that Mum wasn’t ever going to be home again? Arriving at the house we walked into the lounge and there were all these cards of condolence – bizarrely it reminded me of Christmas. Mum was a very popular lady. She was a great netball player. She had loads of friends. And I just felt so lost. I looked around and I thought: ‘Everyone knows and I don’t. I’m their son and I’m the last one to know.’ Both my sisters were there – Jeanette is two years older than me and Alison is six years younger – and I felt that I hadn’t even been there for them. I can’t really express how difficult it was or how desperate I felt. I suppose you just spend time trying to come to terms with it.
I couldn’t even go to my own mother’s funeral – I was too embarrassed. I felt guilty because I suddenly saw it with such clarity after the event. It was like when someone throws a surprise party for you and you genuinely don’t know about it until you walk in. It’s that instant when you realize what has happened and suddenly all these pieces fit together.
Suddenly I knew why James Robinson’s dad couldn’t look me in the eye. I knew why we had been asked to go to church in France on the school trip the previous Sunday when we weren’t even a religious school. The teacher knew mum was seriously ill so he was desperate for us all to go to church and say a prayer for our loved ones. I didn’t realize any of that at the time. I was distracted because I had a game of tennis organized for that Sunday morning and I didn’t want to go to the church. So the teacher let me off church and allowed me to play tennis. I thought that was unusually generous. I thought I’d got the best of the deal because everyone else was going to church while I was hurtling round a tennis court.
On reflection, all these pieces came together and I just couldn’t deal with it. I regret not going to the funeral more than anything now because it stopped me coming to terms with my mum’s death. On the day of the funeral, I went down to a hotel in St Brelade’s Bay with Jason, where his father worked, and just sat by the side of the swimming pool, staring into the water. I grieved and I went through a lot of emotions but I never had any support in those early years. I’m not blaming anyone – it wasn’t anybody’s fault. We just didn’t speak about it and it wasn’t until later in my life, when I met Mariana, that I felt I could open up about it. I did grieve at the time. I cried – a lot. It was more shock than anything. I found it really difficult to let go of her. I tried to remember her and relive things that happened before she died as part of trying to preserve her memory. But that made me even more upset. I’d transport myself back to a time when she was there and then, when I was forced to come out of it, it just accentuated the loss. I was a thirteen-year-old kid having to deal with that kind of emotional baggage. It added a complicated layer to my psychology.
It certainly wasn’t my dad’s fault. He didn’t have anyone to tell him the best way of dealing with the situation. It all happened a generation ago and cancer was still a bit of a taboo subject back then. You were supposed to deal with tragedies like that with a stiff upper lip and just get on with it.
I went back to school after the Easter holidays. I can still see the look in people’s faces now: their sympathy. When people said how sorry they were it used to annoy me. I wanted to say to them ‘Why are you sorry; it wasn’t anything to do with you; you’re not to blame’. Emotionally, I became a lot more sensitive. Add the sensitivity from my mum’s death to the alienation I felt at Chelsea when I first arrived there in my late teens and it made me particularly vulnerable.
My mum had been so supportive of me as a child. One of the things that upset me most about not having her around was that I could no longer share my experiences and achievements with her. She was the one who picked us up from school. She took so much interest in us. Some of the things I did, I felt I was doing for her. We couldn’t wait to tell her what we’d done at school when she was there waiting for us at the school gates. She was so interested in our lives. After she died, I felt this huge hole because she was no longer there. From the age of seven upwards, I always played football on the school pitches during lunch hour. Because I was left-footed, every day I used to come home with eight inches of mud down my right trouser leg, a crusty, muddy mark that mapped out the trajectory of a slide tackle and invariably ended with a hole in the trouser knee. Mum used to wash them and mend them patiently. She had a rota with my school trousers because I got them muddy every day. I often think now ‘Thank God she let me carry on ruining my trousers’. I wish I could communicate that to her but I can’t.
That was one of the saddest aspects of it. Through all the various milestones of my life and my career, I always had a moment when I wished she could see it. It would have made all the sacrifices and the hardships that she had endured for me worthwhile. And I know, just like any mother, she would be proud of me and my sisters.
My mum’s death changed me. It strengthened my drive and my outlook. I was always single minded anyway. I was always feisty and ambitious but when she died it made me want to leave Jersey. It is such a small island and it was such a traumatic experience that it turned parts of Jersey into unhappy places for me for a few years. Whenever I went down certain roads or visited certain beauty spots or beaches or shops, it brought back memories of my mum. It just used to upset me. Now, I can look back on them as happy memories and happy associations but for a long time those memories just upset me deeply.
I love my island. It’s only nine miles wide and five miles north to south but I loved growing up there. My identity is Jersey. Even though my dad wanted to call me Jean-Pierre (he was overruled by my mum), I feel more English than French – but more Jersey than English. Life seemed uncomplicated and happy there in the years before Mum died. I would cycle down the hill from my house to St Ouen’s Bay, with its dramatic dunes and its miles of beach and the warren of underground tunnels the Germans built after they invaded Jersey at the start of the Second World War. I’d play football for hours on the firm sand. Then, for a real challenge, I’d cycle back up the steep hill past Stinky Bay, where the smell of seaweed wafted up from the rocks below, and past the trees bent over by the sea breeze and the signs advertising Jersey Royal Potatoes back to my house on the hill.
It’s such a beautiful place, such a stark contrast to what I had to confront in London. No wonder I felt the culture shock so badly when I swapped Jersey for Burnt Oak. Often, in the evening, when I was seventeen or eighteen, I would drive my car to the headland at Grosnez, the most northwesterly point of the island, and park it by the ruins of the fourteenth-century arch there. I’d get out, stare over the water to Sark and then lie on the bonnet, listening to the waves and staring up at the stars. Sometimes, going to those places still makes me melancholy but back then it would bring tears to my eyes. I suppose it was part of coming to terms with letting go of my mum. I never said goodbye to her. I never had that raw sort of emotion. I kept it all within me.
People can psychoanalyse me as much as they want and it would be very easy to pin all my emotional baggage onto this one massive event. It would be easy to say I reacted to Robbie Fowler because my mum died or I hit David Batty because my mum died. But I might have been like that anyway. I don’t know. One of the reasons I believe I kept it from everyone at Chelsea and was glad that no one knew about it was because I had this fear that if people knew about my mum, then at some point someone would have made reference to it to try to use it against me. And I knew that that would have made me uncontrollably furious.
That would have been worse than anything I experienced, worse than any of the homophobic taunts. That’s one of the reasons I have never spoken about it. I never told anyone at Chelsea about it. In that way, I used football as a valid reason not to talk about her death. It was part of my process of denial. I told myself I couldn’t talk about it because people would use it against me and that meant I didn’t have to talk about it.
At various points during my playing career, I might get a casual question about what my parents did. I’d say my dad was a chartered quantity surveyor and my mum was a housewife. I just never talked about it publicly because I wanted to protect