Читать книгу The Tax Man - The True Story of the Hardest Man in Britain - Brian Cockerill - Страница 9

I WAS GETTING about on my motorbike and still going out with Sandra. We would go out on the bike for a few hours and then head home. Money was nothing to us then, we were just happy.

The council were modernising the houses, so we had to move into another street for a while. Then Sandra and I decided, when we were 17, 18, to get a house together in Billingham.

We were living together and we got an Alsatian; we named her Sadie. I have always loved dogs and looked after them. You see these scumbags hurting animals, cats sometimes. I don’t like cats, but I wouldn’t hurt animals. You see these people who shoot horses in the field with their air rifles. They are the vermin, they want really braying. Villains who shoot each other, they are different; they are doing that because they might get killed otherwise. If someone is planning to shoot you, well, you take them out before they take you out.

But someone looking after an animal and then hurting it like they were just lighting a fags turns my stomach; so does hurting old people. I have knocked out quite a few of these scumbags who harm animals. I don’t even kill spiders, I put them all out. I wouldn’t kill anything like that. Life is precious. The way I look at religion is, if there is something good, I would rather be on the good side than on the devil’s.

I wouldn’t say it’s the winning side because you get these fucking idiots that are evil bastards praying to the devil. Now I didn’t go to church or Sunday school, even though my family are Catholics. But what I am saying is I don’t think you have to go to church to be a good person.

Unlike some people, I don’t carry a cross of righteousness stoically and steadfastly. Some lads went into this religious place the other day and one had been really bad on coke and heroin, but they got him off both. I say it is a good thing. If you pray to something that is not there but it gets you off drugs anyway or it stops you being suicidal, to me it has got to be a good thing.

Even if God doesn’t exist, it still helps some people who have mental breakdowns, because they go there and it makes them better. I’m not saying anything is true or untrue, I’m sceptical, but I wouldn’t knock it. I would say, good on them if it is making them happy in their life and making their family happier. It’s better than gambling or taking drugs all weekend and not providing for your kids.

What really annoys me, the more I think about religion, is these fucking do-gooders who are all goody-goody but are braying or interfering with their own kids at home. Or these warped old nuns and monks sexually abusing kids they are responsible for. You must get the devil out of you and all that! They are just evil bastards.

There was a film, based on a true story, where these kids in an Irish school have been stealing and playing hookey and the priest is raping a young boy. In another one, about nuns, Pierce Brosnan played the father of two little girls who were taken from him because he couldn’t provide for them, as he was a drunk. But then he got himself on his feet and looked after them, but he found the nuns had been bastards to the kids, beating them with fucking sticks and rulers. To me, priests and nuns like that are cowards.

The way we lived as kids wouldn’t be acceptable these days. Can you imagine it? Our father was a gambler, seven of us living in a two-bedroomed cottage with no electricity. Nowadays your kids would be taken off you and put into care. There would be a demand for justice and vigilance by some do-gooder.

I remember, if we got into trouble, Mum would bray us – and I mean fucking brayed. If you did that today, you could go to jail. I am not saying it is a good thing, because I would never hit Jordan. If he ever misbehaves, I say I’m going to fucking bray you in a minute and he gets threatened every day, but he never gets touched. He isn’t a bad kid, he doesn’t get into trouble.

I remember breaking into a factory when we were kids and it was more like playing or messing about, but I haven’t got a record for stealing or for burglary. We didn’t get much, so we would pinch from the shops, but we never got caught for anything like that. It was fucking bad, though, having soaking wet feet. Now it’s funny but at the time it wasn’t. There will still be kids out there with holes in their shoes, but not many and there’s no excuse. Food has never been so cheap. Everything is so cheap. We must be living in a better time: everybody has got a car or a phone, though every phone I get the police keep bugging it.

Sandra and I lived in Billingham for about six months, but we didn’t know anybody there. I remember a trip to the seaside and we thought we were going into this place to see a film. Inside, everyone is sitting there with dicky bows and white shirts and I’m sitting there with a pair of cowboy boots, denim jeans and denim jacket on and Sandra is sitting there not looking smart either. We thought we were only going to the pictures but it was a play with Lorraine Chase in it. We’d got in the wrong queue, but it was good. My first and probably last foray into the theatre.

It was not long before Sandra and I split up, and soon afterwards I started weight training. I was about 18 or 19 and living back at Seaton Lane. I wanted to get into weights because I had seen The Incredible Hulk and things like that on the telly. It sounds corny now, but I wanted to be massive. When I saw the film Pumping Iron for the first time, I thought, Fucking hell, I would love to be like that. Look at the size of him!

My uncle Tam was a gambler, a bad gambler, like my dad. He would be up five grand and then lose the fucking lot. I remember him going to London, making £10,000. He went down there for about three months and within three weeks of coming home he had blown it all. He would go in the betting shop every day, putting every penny on the horses.

He had borrowed so much money off my mum, 100 or 150 quid, and he couldn’t pay, so he said, ‘Look, Mary, I’ve got a set of weights … take them for the money.’

I remembered the weights because I had been to his girlfriend’s with him in Redcar and I did a little bit of training on the weights he had there. My uncle had an old bench with a little bit of carpet on, two dumb-bells and about 150 or 160 pounds in weights.

I trained diligently every day for about an hour and a half or two hours, but I didn’t realise I was doing too much. My appetite went through the roof, so I ate a lot, but I still overtrained and I was still playing football too. Naturally, I didn’t put any weight on.

After I’d been training for about a year or two, I was this rock-hard Bruce Lee type, solid abs and all that. I turned the spare bedroom into a gym, just with the bench and a few weights and got another set of dumb-bells and I would just be bench-pressing all the time. But I never had a big body; I was thin and still only 12 stone.

I also training on the weights at my uncle Tam’s place and I went to Chapel Gym, which had been converted from a church. This had a real blood-and-guts atmosphere, what with the old imperial weights as opposed to the metric weights they use now. It was like the old Rocky film. I saw these lads, Peter Rayne and Terry Cooper, who had both been in body-building competitions. To me, they were Schwarzenegger doubles: Terry was just over 16 ½ stone and Peter was 14 ½ or 15 stone. To me, they were as huge as a small aircraft hangar. They bristled with rippling muscle. Their arms were 18 inches in girth and they had 50-inch chests. Massive!

I wanted to be like them. I was training like there was no tomorrow. I felt empowered by the discipline of the weights. I was there every day, six days a week. In those days, I used to train chest, back and biceps on a Monday, then shoulders, triceps and calves on a Tuesday and then rotate. It was too much, but I didn’t realise. Now I only train them once a week.

In Redcar, where my uncle lived, this lad called Chip, a drunkard, was offering a rundown council flat in a low-demand area known as the Courts, in the Lakes Estate. In fact, the place wasn’t too bad then, so I took the flat. It was only little but it had everything. Most important of all was the electric meter. You’d put a pin in it to stop it clocking up.

And you would be claiming on the dole. At that time, you could claim £10 a night for bed and breakfast because there was a law saying you could have bed and breakfast in a seaside town. What happened is that Margaret Thatcher stopped it, saying that you could only have six weeks in each town. So, with me having asthma, I got a letter from the doctor saying that I couldn’t be moving around to different places or damp places. I played on it a bit.

Anyway, some lad took Thatcher to court over it and he won his case, so I got some back money, about two grand, and spent it all on training and eating better food. Because I couldn’t drive, I got myself a racing bike. I got myself a job parking cars at Redcar racecourse. For that, I used to get about seven quid a day. I got another job there as well: every time there was a photo finish I took the shot, and I got seven quid for that too.

When I finished my shift at the course, I would steadfastly go to the gym. By now, I was putting a bit of weight on. The training was starting to pay dividends and I was up to around 14 ½ stone at the age of 19. I even managed to get myself a job at the gym as a training instructor. I met these people from a farm and I used to get about 150 eggs a week off them. I used to eat 30 a day! I would have ten scrambled eggs for breakfast and slices of toast with porridge. I could eat three times as much then as I can now, but when you are younger you eat more.

A girl I knew was a hairdresser, so she used to cut my hair, and I was starting to get to know other people. I was getting bigger and bigger and bigger while at Anthony Berg’s gym. Then I started training at another gym, the Olympia, an elite place and probably the best gym in Teesside now, something like a Gold’s gym. The owner was Don Williams and what a fucking moaner he was! You weren’t allowed to bang the weights. In the old days, you used to throw the weights back.

Although I was aware what steroids were, I had never taken anything like that, so I stayed off them and I trained at a gym with a lad called Tony Buxton, who was the training instructor there. He was about 15 ½ stone, he was ripped and shredded and he looked really good. Tony helped me along and I trained with him for a few years.

After that, I trained with a lad called George Fawcett, who has just won Over-50s Mister Britain. We would train twice a day. When we went out on the town together they used to say, ‘Oh, look, Twit and Twat,’ because we were from the local Gold’s gym.

I promised myself that I would work up to show standards. There was only ten days before a body-building competition I was keen to enter. You can diet in ten days and lose a stone. I went in for this contest and weighed in at 14 stone and four pounds; I had dropped over a stone, as planned. It was the Mr England at Gateshead, run by Matty Boroughs, himself a former champion body-builder. When I got there, the stadium was packed.

I had entered the Under-21s competition and 21 guys were vying for the title. Back in those days, it was a massive contest because everyone wanted to be a body-builder.

I can tell you, it took some guts and heart to stand up on stage with just a pair of fucking underpants on, greased up, in front of 2,000 people, with cameras on you.

I didn’t win but I came fifth or sixth.

I went on to enter the Mr Skegness competition, where I was fourth or fifth. Next came the Mr Crowtree competition at the local leisure centre, with about 20 in the line-up. All my uncles were there to see me, so I had to do well. But there I realised that it was all about who you knew!

The lad who was on stage with me, I thought I was better than him, and everyone else knew I was. I’m not blowing my own trumpet but, although the lad who won was excellent, I was sure I was in the first two or three and I was placed a disheartening fifth.

The lad who came second, his dad was one of the judges. I knew then that you couldn’t win with odds like that stacked against you. So I thought, Fuck this body-building malarkey.

I didn’t expect to win, but I thought I was doing better than him and when I was ranked fifth there were about 200 people booing at the result. But at least I’d been up there and had a taste of it.

I went on training hard and the most I ever weighed was 23 stone and 10 pounds, which was getting ridiculous. The only good thing I can say about being obsessive was that you were never happy, you were still hungry to achieve more.

Next year I will have been training for 25 years and I’m still going strong. But you would be down in weight one month, to 23 stone, and then you would go on the gear (steroids) and then come off and you might go back down to 21, which is what I am now.

The drawback is, when you get an illness, you still want to do it and to stay hungry. You get fighters wanting to be the best and I can understand why Mike Tyson just wouldn’t yield his title. It is hard to train, it is hard when you are getting there and it’s even harder to stay there.