My motivation for judo was that I wanted to learn how to fight properly and increase my ratio of wins to 10 out of 10. By this age I never wanted to lose a fight again.
MALKIT SINGH
My name’s Mal, I’m from Salisbury Road in Handsworth. Barrington and me used to go to school together in the mornings, and in the evenings we used to do everything together, including training. We started judo together, with Mr Fields as the teacher. When Barrington used to go out he was concerned about people taking the Mickey out of him because of his eye, or getting bullied. By the time we were about 13 or 14 years old, he’d taken a lot of shit. He wasn’t that big, no bigger than other kids, but there was this one guy, the school bully, who was six foot three. We’d get off the coach and we used to have to line up by the railings and wait for the teacher. Barrington was standing behind me and I was facing forwards when I heard this commotion and someone shouting, ‘One Eye, One Eye!’ Barrington got hold of the bully and was kicking the shit out of him before the teachers came along and stopped it.
That was a shock for me because I’d never seen him do that before. We’d just started judo but it wasn’t like a contact sport, it was more throws and holds, but this was punching and kicking. He just really wanted to do the bloke; it was a good job the teacher came along. He must have flipped, but from that day on no one ever said anything insulting to Barrington again.
If there was a fight in school and Barrington was involved, then the whole school would watch. We’d seen him batter the cock of the school, a good fighter with big fists who not many people would want to take on; to see someone like that get the shit kicked out of him was a turning point. I seriously think that if that teacher hadn’t stopped it Barrington would have killed him; he was on the floor and he was punching the daylights out of this big bully. He had loads of fights after that and everyone would be watching in a massive circle.
He was doing judo at school but he also started going to martial arts at a club outside. I wasn’t going to those clubs, I was just doing it in school, but he really liked it.
Since we had moved from Burton, we had become very impoverished. I remember feeling different to other children. I had worn clothes passed down from neighbours and holes in my shoes; our Christmases and birthdays were all terrible. I never had any breakfast and part of my day consisted of thieving for food; I stole milk, cheese and bread from doors streets away from my house – but never in the same road, as that was disrespectful.
I broke into the Asian shops when I was eight or nine years old, stealing anything I could. I broke into warehouses with a couple of mates. Later, when I was about 12 or 13, we used to rob the punters who went to a rundown old pub round our way where the local prostitutes used to hang around. Whenever you saw the prostitute, you saw her punter, and we used to go and ‘tax’ that same punter to get easy money.
There was an area of Lozells where we knew the prostitutes would hang out and we’d take money off them. Then we started to get friendly with them and said, ‘Look, we can both make some money if we rob your punter.’ I remember this brass sent us into a house with a client who was loaded. We already had two lads inside when she brought him; we came up behind, this Asian lad bashed him and we took all his money. I also mugged the prostitutes. I did whatever I could to survive.
Despite all this, I remember having good times at Hockley adventure playground, where I played happily as a kid. ‘Horsemouth’, a black guy, was a friend of mine that I’d been through all the same schools with, so we were pretty tight. But there was this other Asian lad whose parents had a corner shop, so he obviously had a bit of poke (cash) on him. Horsemouth and me thought it was a good idea to hold him up – I can’t remember who had the knife, but we stopped him and took all his biscuit money. Word got around, the headmaster found out and we got suspended from school. Our mothers had to come down: Horsemouth’s mum started going on about how I was a bad influence upon her son and I remember her bashing him silly.
When I left junior school, I had a good friend named Robert Luca, a white punk rocker. We did a lot of things together and he joined me on my first day at senior school. But in week one Robert got expelled for smacking a teacher in the face. From that day till this, I have never seen him again. I made some lifelong friends in school though – including Anthony Reed, who’s now a pastor and who taught me how to ride a bike at 11. (Late starter, I know.)
I continued to fight my way through senior school; some memorable times include sports days and athletics days, when we visited other schools. I would take on the hardest boy I could see and try to make a name for myself. It often turned into a big tear-up with loads of people fighting – great fun.
I was arrested for the first time at 11 years old. There was me and three other guys, and we decided to break into this builder’s yard just to see what we could get. We climbed through the fence and smashed our way into their office with a brick, starting to fumble through the drawers and throwing things all over the place. All of a sudden, after about 15 minutes, a torch shone through. It was the police, shouting, ‘Come out! Come out!’
I started shitting myself because we’d never done this before. We were debating what we were going to do as the police came into the builder’s yard and grabbed us. I was really scared because we’d never had a confrontation like this, but I was more scared of the beating from my mum.
They took us all down to Thornhill Road police station. They interviewed us and then my mum came down, very upset. It was serious – we were getting charged with burglary. We later made a couple of appearances before the courts, where I pleaded guilty, but I got a beating off my mum. I got an even worse one when I got found guilty and let off with a fine. I thought, I ain’t going to let this happen again!
MAL
We didn’t have much money in those days. I’d bought this bike and I needed five quid and I couldn’t have asked my dad, he’d just have given me a beating and said, ‘Don’t buy things you can’t afford!’ I told Barrington and he said, ‘We’ll get it, we’ll get it!’ He wanted us to rob a chemist’s shop. Barrington was ready to do it, but I bottled it. He said, ‘I do it all the time, that’s why I get arrested!’ I didn’t do that sort of stuff, but it was like second nature to him.
When I was 12, my mother took us out to a local picture-house called the Grand Palace on Soho Road. This was the first time I had seen a kung fu film and I was immediately mesmerised; I came out of the pictures thinking, I want to be like Bruce Lee. There were two cinemas in our area, the Grand Palace and Elites. Every Friday and Saturday night, they would be screening kung fu films, so me and my cousin would get our chips and sit through the show from 12 o’clock until 4 or 5am in the morning. You’d come out of the picture-house and everyone was making all these noises and doing kung fu moves in the street.
That started my love affair with martial arts. From that moment I always wanted to do something like that, so I started shotokan karate lessons at a school for a couple of years, but I didn’t like the style. My friends and I continued to go to the pictures every week though, and after the screening we used to mimic Bruce Lee and his fighting techniques. I remember those as very happy times.
* * *
I never saw my dad again until I was 14. I remember one day my mum had a letter that she was reading in the kitchen, but, when I walked in, she threw it in the bin.
I got it out of the bin. It was a letter from the courts in London, regarding access and maintenance. It had a court date on it, so me and my mate jumped the train to London with not a penny in our pockets. We bunked the train and stayed in the toilets (as you did in those days).
All I had was an old picture of my dad that my grandmother had given me, but we made it to the courthouse