Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (3 page)

On one occasion, all the kids from the home had been taken over to Holland to do a hundred-mile march from Nijmegen to Arnhem, together with a bunch of boy scouts in uniform. Finding ourselves in the local red-light district, Liam and I spent so long eyeballing the girls that we missed our lift back to the youth hostel in the depths of the forest, and had to make our own way back in the dark, getting there just before the search parties were sent out.

These might not sound like typically happy boyhood memories, but they are what I have and they make me smile. For me, Liam was a real big brother, and I think he loved me, too.

S
CHOOL
D
AYS

I
STARTED GOING to St Mary’s Catholic School in Hornchurch when I was eight. Ostensibly, having been born to Catholic parents and baptised into the Church, I was being raised as a Catholic, and we all went through the motions of First Holy Confession, Holy Communion and Confirmation without understanding what it was all supposed to mean. The Church never intervened in any matters concerning our material welfare, and seemed to see us as nothing more than souls to claim for the Catholic God by dispensing the basic sacraments without explanation. The hypocrisy of the whole thing still makes me very angry. Presumably, my mother had eight children she clearly did not want because she was a Catholic and good Catholics do not use birth control. Heaven forbid! Having thus ensured our arrival into an unfriendly world, the Church did not seem to feel any further responsibility for us.

There was one positive figure in my life during this period, a fact for which I am hugely grateful. Mary, who had wanted to adopt me as a baby, had kept in touch with me, and was something of an aunt figure. By this stage, she had moved away from London and down to the New Forest on the south coast. Mary had married a kind man called Adrian and had a son of her own, Spencer, who was six years younger than me.

Bless her heart; Mary would invite me down every summer until I was about thirteen for a little holiday with her family at their home in Bournemouth. It was a different world. They had horses and stables and we would go to the beach every day in her little red Mini. Knowing that there was a real world in which people could be kind to each other was a lifeline to me; much more than I realised at the time. Mary was a kind, generous spirit who showed me how an adult woman could be nurturing and generous. As Adrian was usually working, I saw little of him, but he was a benign figure in the background. Their child, Spencer, was born when I was about six, and because of the age difference we didn’t have that much to do with each other, although I remember him running about after me when he got a little older.

My short holidays with Mary and her family were extremely precious to me but, kind as she was, Mary’s influence on me could not repair the damage that was being done in St Leonard’s and at school. I was still illiterate at eleven when we took the 11-plus, which of course I failed. Attempting it had been bordering on the ridiculous and I don’t know why the teachers even bothered to put my name down for it. From there, I went to the all-boys Bishop Ward Catholic School in Dagenham.

After the fiasco of the 11-plus, I largely gave up on school, skiving off whenever I got a chance. When I did turn up, I either got into a fight or got the cane. I was a poor kid from the children’s home with a free dinner ticket, cheap clothes and a lot to prove. As I fell farther and farther behind the basic minimum standards I should have reached, my behaviour deteriorated until I posed a significant discipline problem in the classroom and was probably a danger to myself and others. School continued to be a complete nightmare as I grew older. The lessons were awful and we were locked in the rooms in an attempt to wield some control over us.

Because I had failed the 11-plus, I was put in the lowest class along with all the other dim kids. We were now the ones who had been labelled as failures. We accepted the general designation of ourselves as dunces, but even then I think that I knew on some level that I was brighter than most of the kids in the dunces’ class. I was briefly put into a higher class, despite not being able to read and write, but I got upset because I wanted to be with my friends. All the Catholic kids from St Leonard’s went to school together, and I didn’t want to be away from my pals: my best friend Liam Carroll and two others. I felt that I needed to be with my friends because there was strength in numbers and I was glad when I was returned to the dunces’ corner.

Skinny and undersized, ignorant and completely unaware of my potential, I was belligerent, bitter and angry way beyond my limited ability to verbalise those difficult feelings. Like the rest of the children in St Leonard’s, I had very good reason to be angry. The cottage that I was supposed to call home was far from being a refuge, offering violence and beatings instead of home comforts.

On one occasion, my house father, Bill Starling, caught me bunking off school. Uncle Bill had been waiting behind the cottage door for me, and when I came back he grabbed me by the hair, punched and kicked me up two flights of stairs, saying, ‘Get up there, you little bastard. Go on, you little fuck. I’ll teach you to bunk off, I’ll show you who the boss is around here…’ Then Uncle Bill threw me off the balcony at the top. I landed heavily, breaking several ribs. I ended up in sick bay for a few weeks with my ribs bandaged tightly so that they could heal. I was philosophical about my stay in the sick bay; at least I didn’t have to go to school.

So far as I know, there was no onus on Starling to explain or justify the injuries in any way. Certainly, it did not occur to me to make any sort of official complaint, because what had happened was not exactly an anomalous event in a home where violence was a daily occurrence. I don’t even know if it would have been possible for me to complain, or to whom I could have gone. Perhaps files and reports were made about my unfortunate stint in sick bay, but as these would have been given to Principal Prescott, who was almost as dangerous as Starling, who was going to care?

You might be wondering how it was that nobody at school ever noticed that anything was wrong. For a start, most of the teachers either didn’t look at or didn’t care about the little scruffs from St Leonard’s. They didn’t like the blacks or Irish any more than the general population did. In fact, as they had to deal with us and our problems every day, they probably liked us even less. They saw their responsibility towards us as beginning and ending with keeping a certain amount of control in the classroom, and if that meant lashing out, so be it. As there was little expected of us in terms of academic achievement, there did not seem to be any feeling that we needed to be taught even basic literacy or numeracy skills. Sometimes another child’s parent would say something like, ‘Hasn’t that little boy got an awful lot of bruises?’ but an answer would always be supplied, along the lines of: ‘Yes, he’s a violent little boy. A bit of a problem, really. He had another one of his tantrums and he threw himself against the wall again.’

I did have one teacher who seemed worried about what was going on in St Leonard’s. His name was Mr Molloy, another Irishman.

‘What are you doing, Paul?’ he would ask. ‘Jaysus, why are ya always covered in cuts and bruises? You’re a little ruffian. What have you been up to, at all?’

I would say, ‘Yeah, sir, they beat me up in the home.’

‘Would you go on outta that. They never did.’

In the 1960s and ’70s, watching out for kids’ general welfare was not seen as part of the teachers’ remit.

To be fair to him, Mr Molloy did go down to St Leonard’s and ask what was going on, only to be met with a blank wall.

‘Paul Connolly?’ they said. ‘Let’s have a look at his file.’

Starling had to write in my file every day – as he did in every child’s – and I gave him plenty to write about so there would have been a weighty pile of papers on me.

‘Last Thursday?’ he or Auntie Coral, who he had no doubt instructed, would say. ‘Let’s see. Oh yes, Paul had another one of his violent tantrums. He was throwing himself against the wall again. He has an episode like that every other day. He’s a troubled child. To tell you the truth, we are barely managing to contain him. No surprises where he is heading…’

Starling didn’t have to answer to anybody; he was something along the lines of a dictator in his own little empire. He wrote the rulebook.

The year I turned eight, I was run over by a car when I was crossing the road to go to the shops. I know that if someone had explained to me how to cross a road I would not have been run over at all. The children from the home were all very accident-prone, simply because we were never taught simple, basic things such as the rules of the road. The car changed gears and I thought it was stopping to let me go but it ran me over instead. Nobody had ever told me about looking both ways before you cross the road, so I had not even acquired this very basic skill. The resulting injuries made me determined to get fit and strong, although I didn’t know how. I just knew that I wanted to be able to stand up for myself because I saw with my own eyes, every day, what happened to the kids who went along with their victim status, and because I was afraid that my injuries would make me more vulnerable to attack from the people who were supposed to be taking care of us.

By this stage, I slept with a knife that I had stolen from the kitchen under my pillow – a long, sharp kitchen knife that would do some serious damage if called for. I didn’t know how to use it properly – not yet – but knowing that it was there made me feel a little bit safer. When I was about to go to sleep, I would close my hand against the smooth wooden handle of the knife and it would give me more comfort than any teddy bear ever could.

The first time I met a real family was when a kid from my class in junior school invited me home to play one day after school. I was so overwhelmed by all the food on offer at my friend’s house that I just put my head down and ate like a wild beast. I had never seen steak before. I ate until my stomach hurt, and then I looked around and took in those exotic creatures, mum and dad, and a house where the pictures were not nailed to the walls.

For the very first time, it began to dawn on me that the way we lived in St Leonard’s might not be the norm; that there might be a different, better way to go about doing things. For the very first time in my short life, my yearning for something better began to take shape. I realised what I had been missing all this time – a family; a home.

By the time I was eight, I had already been identified in St Leonard’s and at school as an extremely violent, difficult child, so it was not surprising that I was drawn to boxing. The original idea to get into boxing was Liam’s. He was also a very small kid with a need to be able to stand up for himself, and I imagine that his motivations must have been very similar to mine. We used to walk to school together, and the route took us past Dagenham Boxing Club. Liam and I used to wonder what went on in there and we often speculated about it.

One day, Liam said, ‘Come on, Paul. Let’s go in. Let’s see what they are doing in there.’

‘Do you think they’ll have a pop at us?’ I asked. I liked his idea, but I was also a little intimidated at the thought of just going into the club.

‘Dunno. They might, I s’pose.’

‘I suppose we can always leg it if they do.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Come on, then.’

We went in nervously and poked our heads around the door. There were some men inside. They were clad in sportswear, and chatting to each other amiably as they worked out. We were sure they were going to shout at us and tell us to fuck off because we were just kids from St Leonard’s and everybody hated us. Instead, two friendly men looked at us with smiles.

‘Come on in, lads,’ they said. ‘We won’t bite your heads off.’

Liam and I looked at each other. Did they really mean it? We shrugged. There was nothing to lose.

We went in gingerly, but they really were friendly; they were not just pretending. Even when they saw our cheap uniforms and bad haircuts, they were not put off. This was the first time that anything of the sort had ever happened. Even when we told them where we were from, they did not recoil from us. What was going on?

‘Do you want to put some gloves on, lads?’ they asked. ‘Do you want to have a little move around?’

I looked at Liam. Liam looked at me.

‘All right, then.’

It was just a rundown gym in the local boxing club, but venturing into the Dagenham Boxing Club was absolutely the best thing that had ever happened to me. Liam and I were boxers after that, two wiry little runts together, beating out our aggression with our small, bony fists. Because Liam and I were both so small and underweight for our ages, people assumed that we were much younger than we actually were. They could not believe it when we told them our real ages.

Although the facilities were very basic, and I was just put in front of a bag with gloves on and told to hit it, getting involved in boxing was a revelation to me, and a real milestone in my young life. For a start, I had my first experience of being with adult men who were not only not violent and dangerous, but also were actually friendly and kind. And they were not just pretending to be kind; they really meant it. The boxing coaches were good with children, and they gave Liam and me the closest thing to proper childcare that we had ever received. The teachers at school caned us and battered us. The care workers in the home beat us up. So far as the social workers were concerned, we were just a series of boxes to be ticked. Our parents had been missing in action for as long as we could remember. These guys actually taught us useful stuff, gave us sandwiches and even listened to us with every appearance of interest. It was amazing. It was wonderful.

For a long time, I didn’t go to the boxing club to learn about boxing, but just to have the experience of someone being nice to me. I am sure that to them it was no big deal, but for me it was huge.