Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (6 page)

One of my friends and I sneaked over to the girls’ dorms one night and found Maria in a little nightie with her glorious brown legs bare and her slim body on display. She was kind enough to let me get close so as to steal a kiss, but I didn’t get very far with her. I had no idea what I was doing. I had just managed to lean against Maria’s warm, nightie-clad body when I suddenly ejaculated inside my pyjamas. Shit.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I stammered. ‘Sorry … just … I’ve got to go.’

Horribly embarrassed, I ran back to the boys’ bedroom and could not bring myself to speak to Maria for over a week. I was sure that all the girls must have been laughing about me among themselves. The friend who I’d sneaked over with, who was bolder, more confident and vastly more experienced, stayed behind, getting some action in bed with one of the other girls.

Some of the girls in St Leonard’s ended up getting pregnant when they were still far too young to be mothers, and it is very surprising that more of them did not. There was one girl who used to do line-ups with all the boys, letting us take turns to have our way with her. I remember her wearing a pair of nylon knickers with a big love heart on the crotch. At one point, the carers thought that the poor girl might be pregnant and made her do a test. All the boys got into terrible trouble for what they had done, although, to be honest, I don’t think there was ever the remotest chance of her really getting knocked up. I was one of the boys who climbed on top of her in a ditch in the local park, and all that ever happened was that the boy whose turn it was got excited straight away and ejaculated stickily on her skinny, white thigh. I don’t think anyone ever actually got inside. We were all just between ten and thirteen at the time. Poor girl. We boys thought it was great that she was prepared to go so far for a bit of a laugh; she was probably just looking for affection in the only way she knew how.

Being children and teenagers, we obviously wanted to have fun when we could and one of the things we all enjoyed was singing. For some reason, all the boys in our dormitory were convinced that they could sing, including me. Back then it was all Motown, James Brown and Wilson Pickett – afros and high-waist trousers and cheap cologne – and so that’s what we sang, kicking up a racket to see who was the best singer of them all. I’m telling you, we had some fun! What added to the excitement was that we never knew how Uncle Bill would react when he caught us out of bed and singing when we were supposed to be going to sleep. If he was in a good mood, he would just stick his head in the door and tell us to shut the fuck up or make us take off all our clothes and stand in the hall for a while – but if he was in a bad mood, well, anything could happen, and often did. It was kind of like playing Russian Roulette; that was the beauty of it.

When my room mates got tired of singing, I had more ideas about how we could entertain ourselves. I would insist that everyone got out of bed, and made them go through the work-out routines that I had learned at the boxing club. I put them through their paces, telling them that it would be to their benefit to know how to take care of themselves, and that being fit and strong would really help them to achieve this. I very much enjoyed being the instructor and passing on what I had learned.

Everyone knew that St Leonard’s was haunted and we had all heard the stories of the three nuns who were supposed to wander up and down the corridors. Many of us also believed that we had had encounters with the ghosts. Most of us had experienced the feeling of an unseen person sinking down on to our bed when we lay down to go to sleep. One night I turned off the light and got into bed, only to feel a cold hand pressing down on my chest. I jumped back up and turned on the light, but there was no one there. Despite the fact that we were all sure that there were ghosts on the premises, none of us found the thought even remotely frightening. It was just something that we accepted to be true, and we all knew that we had much more to fear from the living than from any spectral vision. The care workers, too, just accepted that we shared our living quarters with the undead. We were all extremely matter-of-fact about it; it was what it was.

On some nights, after the small children had gone to bed and long after they were supposed to be asleep, I would hear one of them crying and go to see what was going on and if there was anything that I could do to help them in their distress. A lot of us bigger kids took an interest in the little ones and tried to be kind to them as best we could because we could remember all too well what it had been like to be in their situation a few years earlier.

What was invariably happening was that those tiny children had just realised that they were all alone in the world. That nobody wanted them. That nobody had ever wanted them. That nobody cared. That, ultimately, nobody really gave a shit whether they lived or died because they were essentially disposable. Disposable little scraps of humanity about whom nobody had ever cared. I remembered going through that myself. I think we all did. It is the loneliest feeling in the world. It is a feeling of utter, absolute desolation. It was almost worse watching someone else experiencing that realisation than it had been experiencing it for myself.

We older kids would talk to the little ones and try to help them work through what they were experiencing. We would say, ‘Well, yes, you are all alone in the world, but there’s nothing you can do about that. We’re all alone too, and look at us, mate; we’re all right.’ What else could we say?

But they would not stop crying and asking, ‘Why haven’t I got a mummy? Why haven’t I got a daddy?’

‘It’s all right,’ we would say again. ‘It’s all going to be OK. It’s not your fault.’ We couldn’t answer their questions, because we didn’t have any answers and because many of us had not stopped asking the same questions about ourselves, even if we no longer allowed ourselves to break down.

The fact was that it did not make a blind bit of difference whose fault it was. For most of those kids, the damage had already been done.

And the only people they could conceivably turn to either beat them up or sexually abused them or both.

I told myself that I could not wait to leave.

R
OUGH
B
OY

B
y the time I hit my teens, I was two people. On the one hand, boxing taught me to respect myself. I knew that I was very good at what I did, and I knew that the main reason for this was the fact that I worked tirelessly to reach my goal, putting in long hours in the gym and listening carefully to and acting on everything my trainers told me. But there was another side to my personality that was very unpleasant indeed. I was a thug, and knowing how to box meant that, when I was violent, I really knew what I was doing. I knew how to hurt people so badly that they would be walking around with the scars for the rest of their lives after an encounter with me.

While I would have knocked the lights out of anyone who had dared to suggest to me that I didn’t like myself, around this time I more or less consciously decided to lose contact with Mary and her family. Despite the fact that she had always been so kind to me – or maybe even because she had always been so kind to me – it no longer seemed appropriate for me to be having cosy little holidays with Mary and her family in the New Forest. They represented all that was middle class and clean and decent, and I already knew that I was going down a route that Mary would have seen as the wrong path. I hardly even felt as though I belonged to the same species as her. The boxing club had become my point of contact with the real world, and I lost interest in staying in touch for a while. Looking back now, however, I can see that Mary was a real touchstone for me all through the years of my early childhood and I was never as grateful then as I should have been. Now, I realise that I can’t thank Mary enough for everything she did for me.

Over the years, I would use my carefully honed boxing skills in a very wide range of circumstances and environments, from the boxing arena to the street. As an adolescent, I started to win amateur titles, even though I was so small I rarely weighed enough to box with opponents my own age. The fact that I was little and skinny could be to my advantage, because my opponents tended to underestimate me, at least for the first few moments of any encounter. I looked as though a strong gust of wind might blow me away, but I was able to punch well above my weight. I gained a degree of confidence from doing well in the boxing ring and learned to judge my own value according to how well I was doing at boxing. This was a saving grace. Some of the other children at the home were beginning to get into serious trouble for mugging old ladies and beating people up in the street. I was beating people up in the boxing ring, and getting praise and medals in exchange.

The order and discipline that boxing brought to my life also saved me from what would go on to blight the lives of most of the children at St Leonard’s in one way or another. I have never been one for alcohol and drugs, although I spent years and years of my working life in and around bars and clubs and various seedy establishments filled with equally seedy characters. I had innumerable opportunities to get into the drug scene, but fortunately I never had any interest. Boxing taught me how to control the violence that was just beneath my surface all the time, and I knew enough to see that taking drugs or getting drunk would threaten the control that had become so important to me.

However, although something good was happening in my life, I was also developing a very nasty streak. For years, I had been a bullied little runt, afraid of my own shadow and convinced that all of the horrible things that Starling and Coral said about me every day were absolutely true. Now that I had developed seriously good boxing skills, I was very ready to do some bullying of my own and more than prepared to bring my boxing skills out of the ring and on to the street. Nobody was going to look at me sideways more than once. I began to feel a little better about myself – but only a little. I was still going home to care workers who told me every day in a myriad of ways that I was stupid and unwanted and unloved.

Because Starling was in charge of the finances, the carers creamed as much money off as they could, and saved a bundle by feeding the majority of the kids rubbish – mostly just bread and margarine with a couple of fish fingers or a spoonful of beans. There never seemed to be enough bread and margarine, and there would literally be fistfights for it. We were growing kids who were hungry all the time, and at mealtimes it was a question of the survival of the fittest. We would just grab all the food we could and stuff it into our mouths as fast as possible. As soon as I was old enough, I got a paper round so that I could fill up on sweets and crisps. Another lifeline was the bottles of milk that milkmen left on people’s doorsteps. We stole the milk and any other dairy products that had been delivered to the householders and scoffed them on the way to school to fill up, because our breakfast of bread and margarine was never enough. I had to fit my paper round in without getting in the way of the work the carers organised for us. They were on to a bit of a scam, getting us to deliver advertising brochures for the local shopkeepers, and keeping our pay to augment their salaries and whatever they could keep from the food budget.

One of the ways Starling kept control in the home was by having a regime whereby the older kids were told that they were responsible for keeping the little ones in order, thus deflecting any responsibility for how this discipline was enacted. When I was little, one of the other kids often gave me a bit of a walloping at Uncle Bill’s request. There was a reward system in place. If the older children kept the younger ones under control, they would receive certain favours, such as permission to stay up late and watch television, or an exemption from Uncle Bill’s ritual humiliations. Uncle Bill would smile approvingly when one of the little ones got whacked around the head by a bigger kid. Not all the older children wanted to hurt the little ones, although they then got in trouble for not doing what they were told. Although I was a bit of a thug and never hesitated to take on someone my own size or bigger who was having a go at me, as I got older I drew the line at beating up little children and I hated Uncle Bill so much I didn’t care about the fact that I was not getting on his good side as a result. I had little enough self-respect as it was, without resorting to hurting the little ones.

In 1975, I was still just thirteen, but I knew what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be like. I idolised Muhammad Ali, who was the reigning hero of the day and a role model I really looked up to. His biography is still the only book that I have ever read from cover to cover and my house is full of as many photographs of him as I can get away with. I even have one from his very early days, signed ‘Cassius Clay’. It must be worth about a thousand pounds by now. But I would never sell it; it is one of my most prized possessions.

Muhammad Ali was everything I dreamed of being and the fact that he was black didn’t make any difference. In fact, I had grown up with so many black kids that I was not really sure what the difference between us was supposed to be. We were all rejects together. Anyway, there was Muhammad Ali – handsome, strong, gentlemanly and dangerous. He was on television all the time in those days. I never missed a fight and when I saw him being interviewed I hung on every word he uttered, glued to the small black and white screen in the television room. Afterwards, I would lie in bed and revisit the interview, remembering every word and every nuance.

In 1975, Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier. Ali got beaten up for fifteen rounds, hit with big swinging hooks over and over again, and in the last round he got knocked down. But he was not going to stay down. Despite the indescribable pain that he must have been suffering, he got up and finished the fight. I have never seen anyone so brave.

But Muhammad Ali was not just brave in the boxing ring; he didn’t let anyone in the outside world give him shit either. During the Vietnam War, he had been banned from boxing because he refused to go to Vietnam, on the grounds that he had no problem with the Vietnamese, so why should he want to kill them? This was at a time when prominent black people were getting murdered in the United States. Malcolm X was assassinated. Martin Luther King was assassinated. But Muhammad Ali, he was a survivor and he was brave, even when everyone called him a coward for standing up for what he believed in. He just stood proud and tall and told the rednecks of America, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger, and I’m not going to go and kill a yellow man because a white man tells me to.’