Читать книгу One-Eyed Baz - The Story of Barrington 'Zulu' Patterson, One of Britain's Deadliest Men - Barrington Patterson & Cass Pennant - Страница 8

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 and I found my dad’s name on the door of the courtroom. When we walked in, I saw a black guy and a woman sitting outside and I knew instantly it was my dad. He later said that, as soon as he saw me, he knew it was his son, Barrington.

After the court case, we went back to my dad’s flat. His wife, Colleen, gave us a good feed and put us on the train back home.

From that day, I started to build a relationship with my dad. We kept in contact, and I always used to visit during the school holidays. Colleen treated us well and I looked forward to those visits as a kid.

I was going out to get money myself and I’d ring my dad sometimes to say I was coming to London. At the time, my dad was working as a presser in a laundry, while Colleen used to work emptying fruit machines; so I used to go down sometimes at a weekend and do some work with Colleen, then come back and spend some time with my dad. He’d take me round the area of London where they were living, telling me stories about how he used to be a rude boy in the area. I’d keep going up there but my brother and sisters weren’t really interested in my dad at all; I was the only one who kept going backwards and forwards. I was just doing my own thing anyway. But even before my dad died they weren’t really bothered, they wouldn’t go down and see him.

Still, to this day, I have a close relationship with my step-mum. She will always be a big part of my life and she says it’s strange how I’m so much like my dad, considering I grew up without him.

He was a bodybuilder and he was into martial arts – it must be in the blood.