With that he walked out, leaving Lisa and me in the room with the parcel. I didn’t know what to make of it, so looked at the message on it, which read:
‘We are all very proud of you, but something so you don’t forget where you are from.’
I looked at it for a moment before Lisa broke into my thoughts. ‘Do you want me to leave whilst you open it?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I replied. ‘It’s the wrong shape for a blow-up doll, so there can’t be anything embarrassing about it.’
I tore back the paper and realised why Eddie hadn’t wanted to be there when I opened it as a lump climbed into my throat.
‘What is it?’ asked Lisa, concerned that I was supposed to go and perform in front of 10,000 people but looked like I was about to start blubbering over the parcel contents.
‘It’s who I am,’ I said, and showed her the street sign for Severn Walk, which Eddie had nicked from the end of the block.
When I revisited the street to get my bearings for this book, it was nice to see a block of houses built in the sixties with a brand-new street sign. The old one now hangs in my kitchen, in pride of place. You can’t return to your childhood, but you don’t have to leave it, either.
Football was the game of choice for all the boys on the estate. In the seventies, girls did things that involved skipping whilst singing songs, hopscotch on a course drawn in chalk on the pavement, Morris dancing with pom-poms, and being in the kitchen. I am sure my sisters Kathy and Carol did loads of other things, but if they did I never saw them. I was a boy, and boys played football and scrapped. Later, when I was given a second-hand Chopper from my uncle, Stephen, I added trying to be Evel Knievel to my list of activities. Along with the Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin, Evel was my first non-footballer hero – quite unusual choices, as one had bionic legs, and the other one was always trying his best to get some by crashing all the time. If you do not know either of the gentlemen to whom I just referred, then you missed out in the seventies, when a man worth $6 million was much more impressive than a person worth the same amount now, i.e. someone playing left back in League One. And, back then, the absence of YouTube meant that seeing a man crash his motorbike whilst trying jump over a queue of buses was classed as global entertainment. It basically meant that, during my childhood, I was attracted to taking risks by crashing my bike after jumping over ramps or jumping off things. Most of the time this was OK, but it did also inadvertently lead to my first discovery that I could make people laugh, more of which later.
Having an older brother who occasionally let me play football with him and his mates meant that when I played with my own age group I was a decent player, and, like any child who finds they are good at anything, I wanted to keep doing it. In terms of sport, this single-minded approach explains why I am rubbish at everything else: I didn’t do anything else. There was the odd game of tennis if we could sneak onto the courts at the park without the attendant charging us, but it seemed a daft idea to play anything else when all you needed for football was a ball and some space – ideally, a space away from house windows and dog shit but, if not, you could play around that. That is one of the great things about being a boy: you can find something you enjoy like football and you don’t have to stop playing it as you grow up. I played it continually for years, and I still play it occasionally now. I haven’t seen either of my sisters play hopscotch since I was 10.
Football was great, but cricket was also an option. People used to spray-paint cricket stumps onto the walls of end-of-terrace houses around the estate. This meant that we always had cricket stumps, but it also meant that we always had cricket stumps that never moved. This caused untold arguments because the bowler and the fielders would often claim that the stumps had been hit, but with no physical proof of this the batter nearly always argued against the decision. This generally caused a row that resulted in a stand-off, which, more often than not, the batsman won – he was holding a cricket bat, after all. I think this is probably the reason why I don’t like cricket – any game where as a child you are threatened with a lump of wood on a regular basis ends up feeling like it’s not worth the hassle.
There was also the odd dalliance with boxing which was something virtually every boy I knew on the estate did from time to time; my cousin, Freddie, achieving some level of success by fighting for England. I didn’t mind fighting as a boy; it was just something we did. My brother Eddie had taken it upon himself to toughen me up, a process that involved him taunting me till I got angry and flew at him, upon which he would then batter me. Older brothers never realise that they are natural heroes to their younger siblings and it was great when Eddie allowed me to hang around with him and his mates, but I would have given anything just to win one of our fights as a kid.
As a child, I would actively seek fights. If I started a new school or club, I would pinpoint the bully in the room and then challenge them to a fight. When I ran out of people in my year at school, I started looking for people a year or two above me. A challenge would be given, an arrangement made and, after school, I would be fighting someone for no reason whatsoever whilst other children stood around and chanted: ‘Zigga-zagga-ooo-ooo-ooo.’ While I never understood what that meant, I also never grasped the concept that by going around looking for a bully to fight I might actually have been the bully, but I did think I was doing the right thing. I was taking on the baddy and more often than not winning, whereupon I would go home and let Eddie know his attempts to toughen me up were working. Eddie, however, would usually say he wasn’t interested and give me a dead leg.
As I type this as an adult, I realise this reads awfully, but that is what life was like on an estate, and none of us thought it should be different. Eddie and I were also acutely aware that my dad had a reputation for being a tough man. He had been taught as a child by his mother, whose matriarchal influence on the family was immense, that you had to stand up for yourself. My nan outlived three husbands and three of her own nine children, and her life and that of her children was one of hardship and battles. Some she won and some she didn’t, but the fight was always there till the very end. She must have been in her seventies when I had to restrain her from getting involved in a fight that had broken out in the room next door to my cousin Gary’s 21st birthday party in Rainhill.
As I grew up and moved in different circles, I learnt that violence very rarely resolves anything and I began to associate with more and more like-minded people. The extent of this change became apparent when I received a call from my dad to say that there was a need for a ‘show of strength’ at my nan’s house. At the time, the council had moved a young family next door and they were basically scumbags: one mum, multiple children and two dads – the kind of neighbours from hell you see on television programmes where you can’t believe such low-grade people exist. There had been a row, and a threat made to my uncle, Jimmy, and my nan, so it was decided that uncles and cousins should arrive at the house to ensure it was known they would face more than just two pensioners should the arguments escalate.
It was a Sunday night and, as a young father, I had been looking forward to going to the pub with my mates. Instead, I asked them to come with me. We arrived at the house and walked in to find it full of the adult men in the family. I looked around the room at battle-ready faces of cousins and uncles, and then back at my mates – Paul, Mickey Duff and Big Derry Gav – and realised that if it kicked off I had perhaps not brought the best team. Paul was an accountant whose hair was rarely out of place; Big Derry Gav got his name from being from Derry, being big and being called Gavin, but as a trainee infant-school teacher the best he could do would be to create weapons from papier-mâchè; while Mickey Duff had perhaps the best contribution to make, if not in the physical sense – he spent most of his time hiding behind my nan – but in the sense that he was the logistics manager in a toilet-roll factory.
As it happened, the police arrived and the situation didn’t escalate. After far too long, the scumbags were moved on, but I have a slight tinge of regret that the success I gained later on had not happened by then, as money and celebrity does bring you the means to resolve such matters. Or the phone numbers of those who can.
Eddie and my dad used to do circuit training in our living room, so I would join them. From the age of seven I found could do more sit-ups than anyone else in