Читать книгу The Tax Man - The True Story of the Hardest Man in Britain - Brian Cockerill - Страница 8

WE MOVED TO Seaton Lane. The bottom of the road was rough … well, they had horses. I said, ‘I’m not moving to Seaton Lane because, when everyone asks me where I live, I’m not going to tell them Seaton Lane. That’s the roughest place in Hartlepool.’

As it turned out, our new house, number 200, was at the very top of Seaton Lane, near Stockton Road. So, when people asked where we lived, we would say it was on Stockton Road, as there was such a stigma attached to the other end of Seaton Lane.

I wasn’t keen at first, but I soon found it was great, because the girl next door was 15 and so was I. On the other side was a girl of 16 and then there was 17-year-old Tracy Laughton and another one of about 14 ½, so there were plenty of girls in the street.

The first night I was there, I was out in the street talking to the girls and this lad goes by. He was wearing a Crombie coat and, as he walked by, he threw a stick in my face.

This dirty lass said, ‘You know, I don’t think you should mess with him because he is the best fighter. He’s called John Redman and he is the best fighter in the area.’

I didn’t see this John Redman, who was perhaps a couple of years older than me, for about six months. I was 16 now and I’d started seeing this girl called Sandra Grills who lived down the street. She was my first proper girlfriend and we went out for about four years. I’d got a mouth organ for Christmas and started to learn how to play it, though I never really got far with it. I was on my way to see Sandra, with the mouth organ in my hand, when I spotted Redman. I walked on the other side, just to avoid trouble, as I could see he was either drugged or pissed. He was all over the road and he thought the mouth organ was a knife.

I tried to defuse him, saying, ‘It’s not a knife, mate, it’s a mouth organ.’

‘Come on, I’ll fight you,’ he goaded me.

I headbutted him and he crashed to the floor. Reaching down and seizing him by the ear, I pulled him up and thrust my knee into his face and he went down like a broken lift. I held his head down with my well-placed boot on his head. He was squealing like a pig.

My mum came and quipped, ‘What’s that on the floor?’

I replied, ‘Well, he is causing trouble.’

By this time, she knew I wasn’t taking any shit any more and I was beating the best fighters. I mean, he was about 17 ½ or 18 then and I was about 16. In that age group, he was the best fighter and I brayed him. But then he told everyone that I had pulled a knife on him – dickhead.

This girl, Denise Wakeland, said to me, ‘You were having him, but I’m not going to talk to people with knives.’

‘It was a mouth organ!’ I said.

I showed her it because I still had it in my pocket and she started talking to me again.

When I left school, I went for a job interview and in those days it was those YTS, where you only got £23.50 a week – slave labour. This was another government con. You went on to a YTS for six months and this didn’t count as working, but when it came to tallying up the unemployment figures you were classed as working and not one of the millions of unemployed. Fiddling the figures? They are the biggest gangsters walking.

Anyway, under the YTS I got a job in a forge. The foreman was a bit of a bully because three other lads that had been there had been filled in, but I wasn’t fucking bothered. He was about 25 years old, not massive, about 13 stone, while I was about 11 stone. Obviously, he was a man and I was only a kid of 16.

The boss, Peter, was all right, and it wasn’t hard work, mainly sweeping up and making the coffee and putting things away, drilling things and bullshit like that. But we still had to get up and go to fucking work every day. It was three miles and you would get the standard YTS rate of £23.50 a week for working eight or nine hours a day. It took half an hour to get there and half an hour to get back, so you are talking about ten hours a day for fucking 50 pence an hour or something.

So one day I’m working and young Tilly says, ‘Blokes, you can get away now, you can get away, fella.’

You would have these pieces of metal that you would put on a runner and they would be pushed out and formed into something like a letterbox. We were packaging these up and this bloke came up and spat, ‘Here, don’t be shutting, I’m the boss.’

I replied frostily, ‘Peter said we can shut up and he’s the owner …’

‘I’ll fucking give you a bat in the mouth in a minute, you cheeky little cunt,’ he threatened.

‘Well, I would like to fucking see you try,’ I told him.

There was this barrel where you would put offcuts of metal. While he was telling me to come and get him, I picked a metal bar up from the barrel and fucking brayed the cunt all over with it.

I broke his arm and four of his ribs. In a feeble attempt at pulling some of the glory back, he tried punching me in the face. I am not a bully but I’m not going to get bullied by any fucker.

Obviously, I got the sack. After being unemployed for a short spell, I got a job with British Steel, same type of thing, working on a training course for ten weeks. My wages had now gone up to £25 a week! I wasn’t going to be able to afford a boat on the Costa del Sol on this dramatic increase in income. It was even fucking further to walk every day, so I thought, Well, I’m going to get a motorbike. I started saving up for this one, which was about £50.

Then my dad said, ‘I’ll give you £1 an hour if you come on the beach.’ He was on £10 an hour and he was going to give me £1 an hour out of his wages to help him and Jimmy Walker and another lad. We got 50 tons of coal in one night, about 12, 14 hours’ work. After a night like that, my dad would come home and say, ‘Are you ready again?’ I couldn’t get up, I was totally fucking gone, I couldn’t do any more work. But soon I had made more than the money I needed for the bike.

I had earned £120 and I saw this bike in the paper for £125, so I went down with my dad and we got it for 120 quid. It was a 125-cc and I was flying about. Motorbikes back then weren’t governed for speed, and it could do 90 mph!

We were all getting on with my dad now because he wasn’t gambling, or only now and then. My mam had paranoia and odd thoughts in her head, and she would sometimes go on mad drinking sprees and you wouldn’t see her for two or three days. She used to go to Redcar on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and come home on Sunday. She would be in bed recovering for two days and then be back on it again. Now it was my dad’s turn to suffer. He had to make our porridge in the morning and get the others off to school.

You could give him a hammer, some nails and a lump of wood and he could build you a house; he can do anything. My brother Jamie – he’s a carpenter – he’s the same. Ask him to make anything out of wood or steel and he can do it; he is brilliant with his hands.

My dad would do daft things, like his gambling and drinking, and you would get up in the morning and Mam and him would be arguing. Then when you came home there would be this Randy Crawford record playing, and one night she played it about 25 times and I felt like smashing it.

My brother Bobby would say, ‘For fuck’s sake, she’s not going to play that fucking record again!’

We used to put toilet paper in our ears so we could fall asleep. I would like to kick Randy Crawford right in the fucking fanny. I think, if they kept playing that record in the police station like they did at home, I’d say, ‘I’ll tell you everything, just don’t play it again, please.’