Читать книгу Chris Eubank: The Autobiography - Chris Eubank - Страница 6

‘Ice cream, jelly and a punch in the belly.’ Dorothy used to say this to me every time I went round to her house. She was a very old, German Jewish lady, aged 93, whom my mother worked for as a live-in nurse in New York. I was only 19, negotiating my way through life in one of the toughest cities in the world. I had been sent to the Big Apple to distract me from the life of delinquency that threatened to pull me under back in England.

I loved Dorothy; she used to call me ‘sonny boy’. She accepted me. She was wheelchair-bound and I used to pick her up to put her into bed. I would sit and talk to her while my mother, a kind and extremely generous woman, busied herself. The house was crammed full of nostalgic bric-a-brac from over the years. There was also money lying around.

In those days, I never had a penny, so I started to take $20 bills from Dorothy’s room. This went on for about two years and added up to over $2000. I knew it was wrong, but I assuaged my guilt by telling myself that Dorothy wasn’t using the money and my mother didn’t notice.

There are certain things you do in your life that you regret but, if you put them right, you feel so much better. I knew I had to give that money back, especially when it became clear Dorothy was becoming progressively more fragile. By now, my fledgling boxing career had progressed quite nicely and I was taking bouts in England, flying back and forth between Brighton and New York. At that point, I was earning a small weekly allowance plus £700 a fight, so I saved up the equivalent of $2500 over a period of months and the very next time I visited Dorothy, I put the money back in her home. If I hadn’t done that, my indiscretion would have weighed very heavily on my mind. Thankfully, I paid her back.

Dorothy died two weeks later.