Читать книгу How Did All This Happen? - John Bishop - Страница 8
ОглавлениеI entered the world at Mill Road Hospital in Liverpool on 30 November 1966. I was the fourth child to Ernie and Kathleen Bishop, with my siblings – in order of appearance – being Eddie, five years older than me, Kathy, four years older than me, and Carol, who was one year older than me. She had spent most of that year in hospital, having developed problems eating, which was eventually diagnosed as coeliac disease. In fact, on the night that I was born my dad had been in the hospital visiting my sister. I’m sure my dad would have been in the hospital anyway to welcome my arrival into the world, although in 1966 men did not participate in the birth, as is now the fashion.
Having attended the birth of my own three sons, I realise how ineffectual I was, despite spending months in antenatal classes being taught that whilst in the throes of labour my wife would really appreciate having me in her face telling her to breathe. I am not suggesting men should not participate in some way, and I am not belittling the wonderfully emotional experience, but, really, has any woman ever forgotten to breathe during childbirth? I can’t imagine there are any maternity wards around the world where expectant fathers are being handed babies by a sad-looking nurse and finding their joy of fatherhood tarnished by the nurse saying, ‘You have a beautiful new child, but I’m afraid we lost your wife. She simply forgot to breathe and because we were all busy at the other end we never noticed. If only you had been there to remind her.’
Anyway, in the 1960s men didn’t have to put themselves through all that. They just waited until mother and baby were prepared and presented.
The man to whom I was presented, my father, Edward Ernest Bishop, at the time worked on the tugs in the Liverpool docks, guiding the numerous ships that arrived in one of Europe’s busiest ports. Liverpool in the 1960s was said to be the place where it was all happening, but for my mum and dad the swinging sixties basically involved getting married and having kids.
My parents had grown up around the corner from each other on a council estate in Huyton and had not bothered with anyone else from the moment they became childhood sweethearts. My mum still has a birthday card that my dad gave her for her fifteenth birthday, which I think is a beautiful thing and something I know won’t happen in the future, as the practice of writing in cards is coming to an end. I can’t imagine young girls of today keeping text messages or Facebook posts sent to them by their boyfriend. Having said that, for the sake of the planet, the giant padded cards with teddy bears and love hearts on the front bought by the teenage boys of my generation in an attempt to get a grope on Valentine’s Day are probably best left as things of the past in order to conserve the rainforests – although the quilted fronts could always be recycled as very comfortable beds.
My parents were married as teenagers and, shortly afterwards, started having children. That seemed to be the way with everybody when I was a child – I didn’t know anybody whose parents hadn’t done the same thing. I remember being at school when I was 13 years of age and my mate, Mark, telling me that his dad was having his 60th birthday party. I fell off my chair laughing at the image of his father being the age of what I considered a granddad. My dad was young enough for me to play in the same Sunday league side as him when I was 16, although I was under strict instructions to call him Ernie. Apparently shouting, ‘Dad, pass!’ was not considered cool in the Sunday league circles of the early eighties.
Having young parents had a massive impact on the way I saw the world, and perhaps was the driving force behind me wanting to have children myself very shortly after I got married. Or, to be fair, that may well be the result of me being a better shot than I anticipated.
When I entered the world, my dad was 24 and my mum was 23. They had four children, all born in the month of November. All my life I thought the fact that we were born in November was a coincidence; it wasn’t until I was married myself and I became aware of the rhythms of marriage that I realised the month of November comes nine months after Valentine’s Day. If you’re married, you’ll know what I mean; if you’re not, you will do one day.
The first eight months of my life were spent living a few doors away from the hospital on Mill Road in a house that my dad had bought from a man in a pub for £50. You could do that sort of thing in the 1960s. The house was about a mile from the city centre and proved to be perfectly placed, as it allowed my parents the opportunity to walk to the hospital to see my sister Carol, in between looking after the rest of us.
As Carol’s coeliac disease meant she couldn’t digest gluten, throughout our childhood my mum was constantly baking separate things for her. This meant our house very often had that warm smell of baking – although if you have ever eaten gluten-free food you will know the smell is a lot better than the taste. Nice-smelling cardboard is still cardboard.
I don’t have any memory of that first house, and it is no longer there. Someone came from the council and declared it unfit for human habitation, along with many others, as the city council progressed with the slum-clearing project which changed much of the centre of Liverpool in the 1960s. The declaration was upsetting for my dad, as he had just decorated, although I am sure the rats and lack of adequate sanitation had more to do with the council’s decision than his ability to hang wallpaper.
As a result of the clearing of the slum areas, various Scouse colonies sprang up as families were moved out to places such as Skelmersdale, Kirkby, Speke and Runcorn. Getting out of Liverpool was not something my mum and dad would ever have considered; it was all they had both ever known, and Carol was still being treated in the hospital. The council offered various alternatives and, like most decisions in parenthood, my mum and dad did what they thought was best for us.
They chose to move to Winsford, out in Cheshire, the option that was the furthest from the centre of Liverpool – if not in miles, then certainly in character. Winsford had been an old market town, but now had emerging council estates that needed to be populated by people ready to work in the factories of the local, rapidly developing industrial estate.
My dad went for an interview in a cable company called ICL and received a letter saying he had a job at the weekly wage of £21.60. This was a staggering amount at the time, when he was getting £9 a week on the building sites he had moved on to after too many falls into the Mersey had convinced him that tugs were not the future. So, without further ado, we moved. When the removal van arrived, such was the exodus from Liverpool that it was already half-full with furniture from another family, the Roberts, who actually moved into the same block as us in Severn Walk on the Crook Lane estate.
When my dad received his first week’s wages, he was paid £12.60.
Yes, thanks to a typing error, my mum and dad had made the decision to move all the way out to Winsford: a simple clerical mistake was responsible for where I was to spend my formative years. However, I have to say I am glad the lady who typed it (it was 1967 – men didn’t type letters, as they were busy doing man-things like fixing washing machines or carrying heavy stuff) made the mistake, because I cannot think of a better place to have grown up.
If you were a child in the 1960s and somebody showed you the council estate where I lived, you could not have imagined a finer location in the world. Rows of terraced houses that were built out of white brick reflected the sun and made everything seem bright. We lived at 9, Severn Walk, which I always thought was a great address as it had two numbers in it, until I realised the road was actually named after a river. We spent the first ten years of my life at this address. Coming from a slum area within Liverpool, it was an exciting place to be, and my mum even today comments about the joy of discovering such modern things as central heating, a hatch from the kitchen into the living room and, the biggest thing of all, an inside toilet downstairs. Opulence beyond belief to live in a house where someone could be on the toilet upstairs and someone on the toilet downstairs, at the same time, and nobody had to put their coat on to go outside.
When I started to write this book I wanted to go back to the estate and have a look, so, six months ago, I went for a walk there. It was night-time, and I sat on the wall and remembered all the times we had had on the estate, both good and bad, and I will always be grateful for the childhood I had there.
I have to say that the town planners of our estate did a brilliant job in setting out the rows of houses in such a way that you were never more than ten steps away from grass. Every house had a back yard and a front garden, and then beyond that there would be grass. I know that ‘grass’ is a very incomplete description, but that is basically what it was. You either had enough grass to host a football match, an area big enough for a bonfire on Guy Fawkes or any other night you felt like building a fire, or you just had enough grass for your dog to have a dump on when you let it out.
As a child, I don’t recall the concept of poop-scooping existing, and I can’t imagine anything more at odds with the world that I lived in than the image of a grown adult picking up dog shit. Dog ownership involved feeding the animal and giving it somewhere to sleep. Beyond that, nobody expected anything else. Nobody took their dog for a walk – you simply opened the door and let it out. The dog would then do whatever dogs do when left to their own devices, and it would come home when it was ready. The only dogs that had leads when I was a child worked for the police or helped blind people cross the road.
I am not suggesting that we were bad dog owners; in fact, I think the dogs were having a brilliant time, although you only have to slide into dog shit once as a child playing football before you think someone, somewhere should do something. I recall being asked to do a school project about improving the community and I suggested that dog dirt was a real problem. The teacher agreed and asked me what I would suggest to improve the matter. After some thought, I came up with the idea of the dog nappy. The teacher tried to seem impressed and not laugh, but sadly the idea never caught on – as there was no Dragons’ Den in the seventies where my eight-year-old self could have pitched the idea, it became no more than a few pages in my school book. And, instead, picking it up using a plastic shopping bag has become the norm. However, I challenge anyone who has to pick up dog shit first thing in the morning not to think the nappy idea has some legs.
Most of what I remember of my childhood happened outdoors. All we ever did was go out and play, and mums would stand on their steps shouting for us when our tea was ready. I should explain to people not from the North, or who may be too wealthy to understand what I mean by the word ‘tea’, that I am referring to the evening meal, which you call dinner, which is what we call the meal in the middle of the day, which you call lunch. It is important we clear this up, as I would not want you to think I am using ‘tea’ in the cricket sense, and that after a few hours’ play we retired for a beverage and a slice of cake. Instead, the call for tea was an important signal to let you know the main meal of the day was ready. The shout was not something to be ignored, or your portion of scouse (stew) or corned beef hash would end up in one of the other children in the family. Or the dog.
But if you didn’t hear it, someone on the estate would let you know. It is a great illustration of the sense of community we had that all communication was communal. If a mum shouted that her child’s tea was ready, all the other children would pass it on until that particular offspring was located and dispatched home. It was also a great way of getting rid of someone you didn’t like, but while kids can be cruel they can also be stupid. The estate wasn’t that big and everyone knew all the favourite hang-out spots, so when the now-hungry child returned to the gang you had to remember to blame the prank on whichever other kid had gone home for his tea.
I learnt what the place meant to me in 2010 when I was doing my ‘Sunshine’ tour. I was in the dressing room of the Echo Arena in Liverpool, about to perform for the sixth night. The venue had just presented me with an award for the most tickets ever sold there for a single tour: apparently I beat Mamma Mia! by 15,000 tickets. I was having a coffee in the dressing room and chatting with Lisa, my agent, when Alex, my tour manager, said my brother Eddie wanted to have a chat.
When family come to shows, I always see them either before or in the interval, as often I find it easier to do that than at the end of a show. At the end of shows I prefer to be on the road quickly; there is something very exciting and rock ’n’ roll about walking off the stage and straight into a waiting car. Eddie walked in with a gift-wrapped long, thin object. After kissing Lisa hello, he turned to me.
‘Do you want a drink?’ I asked, pointing to the fully stocked fridge that rarely opened as I only drink coffee and water before a show.
‘No. I just wanted to give you this. But don’t open it till I’m gone.’
‘Don’t be daft, you’re there now. I’ll just open it.’
‘No, wait. You’ll see. I’ll see you after.’
With that he walked out, leaving Lisa and me in the room with the parcel. I didn’t know what to make of it, so looked at the message on it, which read:
‘We are all very proud of you, but something so you don’t forget where you are from.’
I looked at it for a moment before Lisa broke into my thoughts. ‘Do you want me to leave whilst you open it?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I replied. ‘It’s the wrong shape for a blow-up doll, so there can’t be anything embarrassing about it.’
I tore back the paper and realised why Eddie hadn’t wanted to be there when I opened it as a lump climbed into my throat.
‘What is it?’ asked Lisa, concerned that I was supposed to go and perform in front of 10,000 people but looked like I was about to start blubbering over the parcel contents.
‘It’s who I am,’ I said, and showed her the street sign for Severn Walk, which Eddie had nicked from the end of the block.
When I revisited the street to get my bearings for this book, it was nice to see a block of houses built in the sixties with a brand-new street sign. The old one now hangs in my kitchen, in pride of place. You can’t return to your childhood, but you don’t have to leave it, either.
Football was the game of choice for all the boys on the estate. In the seventies, girls did things that involved skipping whilst singing songs, hopscotch on a course drawn in chalk on the pavement, Morris dancing with pom-poms, and being in the kitchen. I am sure my sisters Kathy and Carol did loads of other things, but if they did I never saw them. I was a boy, and boys played football and scrapped. Later, when I was given a second-hand Chopper from my uncle, Stephen, I added trying to be Evel Knievel to my list of activities. Along with the Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin, Evel was my first non-footballer hero – quite unusual choices, as one had bionic legs, and the other one was always trying his best to get some by crashing all the time. If you do not know either of the gentlemen to whom I just referred, then you missed out in the seventies, when a man worth $6 million was much more impressive than a person worth the same amount now, i.e. someone playing left back in League One. And, back then, the absence of YouTube meant that seeing a man crash his motorbike whilst trying jump over a queue of buses was classed as global entertainment. It basically meant that, during my childhood, I was attracted to taking risks by crashing my bike after jumping over ramps or jumping off things. Most of the time this was OK, but it did also inadvertently lead to my first discovery that I could make people laugh, more of which later.
Having an older brother who occasionally let me play football with him and his mates meant that when I played with my own age group I was a decent player, and, like any child who finds they are good at anything, I wanted to keep doing it. In terms of sport, this single-minded approach explains why I am rubbish at everything else: I didn’t do anything else. There was the odd game of tennis if we could sneak onto the courts at the park without the attendant charging us, but it seemed a daft idea to play anything else when all you needed for football was a ball and some space – ideally, a space away from house windows and dog shit but, if not, you could play around that. That is one of the great things about being a boy: you can find something you enjoy like football and you don’t have to stop playing it as you grow up. I played it continually for years, and I still play it occasionally now. I haven’t seen either of my sisters play hopscotch since I was 10.
Football was great, but cricket was also an option. People used to spray-paint cricket stumps onto the walls of end-of-terrace houses around the estate. This meant that we always had cricket stumps, but it also meant that we always had cricket stumps that never moved. This caused untold arguments because the bowler and the fielders would often claim that the stumps had been hit, but with no physical proof of this the batter nearly always argued against the decision. This generally caused a row that resulted in a stand-off, which, more often than not, the batsman won – he was holding a cricket bat, after all. I think this is probably the reason why I don’t like cricket – any game where as a child you are threatened with a lump of wood on a regular basis ends up feeling like it’s not worth the hassle.
There was also the odd dalliance with boxing which was something virtually every boy I knew on the estate did from time to time; my cousin, Freddie, achieving some level of success by fighting for England. I didn’t mind fighting as a boy; it was just something we did. My brother Eddie had taken it upon himself to toughen me up, a process that involved him taunting me till I got angry and flew at him, upon which he would then batter me. Older brothers never realise that they are natural heroes to their younger siblings and it was great when Eddie allowed me to hang around with him and his mates, but I would have given anything just to win one of our fights as a kid.
As a child, I would actively seek fights. If I started a new school or club, I would pinpoint the bully in the room and then challenge them to a fight. When I ran out of people in my year at school, I started looking for people a year or two above me. A challenge would be given, an arrangement made and, after school, I would be fighting someone for no reason whatsoever whilst other children stood around and chanted: ‘Zigga-zagga-ooo-ooo-ooo.’ While I never understood what that meant, I also never grasped the concept that by going around looking for a bully to fight I might actually have been the bully, but I did think I was doing the right thing. I was taking on the baddy and more often than not winning, whereupon I would go home and let Eddie know his attempts to toughen me up were working. Eddie, however, would usually say he wasn’t interested and give me a dead leg.
As I type this as an adult, I realise this reads awfully, but that is what life was like on an estate, and none of us thought it should be different. Eddie and I were also acutely aware that my dad had a reputation for being a tough man. He had been taught as a child by his mother, whose matriarchal influence on the family was immense, that you had to stand up for yourself. My nan outlived three husbands and three of her own nine children, and her life and that of her children was one of hardship and battles. Some she won and some she didn’t, but the fight was always there till the very end. She must have been in her seventies when I had to restrain her from getting involved in a fight that had broken out in the room next door to my cousin Gary’s 21st birthday party in Rainhill.
As I grew up and moved in different circles, I learnt that violence very rarely resolves anything and I began to associate with more and more like-minded people. The extent of this change became apparent when I received a call from my dad to say that there was a need for a ‘show of strength’ at my nan’s house. At the time, the council had moved a young family next door and they were basically scumbags: one mum, multiple children and two dads – the kind of neighbours from hell you see on television programmes where you can’t believe such low-grade people exist. There had been a row, and a threat made to my uncle, Jimmy, and my nan, so it was decided that uncles and cousins should arrive at the house to ensure it was known they would face more than just two pensioners should the arguments escalate.
It was a Sunday night and, as a young father, I had been looking forward to going to the pub with my mates. Instead, I asked them to come with me. We arrived at the house and walked in to find it full of the adult men in the family. I looked around the room at battle-ready faces of cousins and uncles, and then back at my mates – Paul, Mickey Duff and Big Derry Gav – and realised that if it kicked off I had perhaps not brought the best team. Paul was an accountant whose hair was rarely out of place; Big Derry Gav got his name from being from Derry, being big and being called Gavin, but as a trainee infant-school teacher the best he could do would be to create weapons from papier-mâchè; while Mickey Duff had perhaps the best contribution to make, if not in the physical sense – he spent most of his time hiding behind my nan – but in the sense that he was the logistics manager in a toilet-roll factory.
As it happened, the police arrived and the situation didn’t escalate. After far too long, the scumbags were moved on, but I have a slight tinge of regret that the success I gained later on had not happened by then, as money and celebrity does bring you the means to resolve such matters. Or the phone numbers of those who can.
Eddie and my dad used to do circuit training in our living room, so I would join them. From the age of seven I found could do more sit-ups than anyone else in the family. This bordered on an obsession for a period, as I would forever be doing sit-ups, one night doing 200 straight, which is a bit mental for a seven-year-old child who is not in a Chinese gymnastic school. We would often then end with a boxing match. This involved my dad going onto his knees and from this position we would hit him, wearing boxing gloves, while he would just jab us away wearing the one glove that was his size. Eddie and I would then spar. One time, Eddie knocked me flat out with a right hook. I got up, dazed, but instead of stopping the session my dad just put on his glove and put Eddie on the floor. We both learnt a lesson that day: neither of us would ever be able to beat my dad.
My dad and his twin brother, Freddie, played football locally, where it was clear they had some form of a reputation. I don’t think they ever sought a fight, but you can tell when people think your dad is hard; it’s just the way people talk when he is around, and the sense of protection that we had as a family when we went anywhere with him. I still have that feeling now, and he is 72. My dad always told us as kids that you should never look for trouble, but never walk away, particularly if you’re in the right. He also said we should never use weapons (Uncle Freddie had nearly bled to death as a youth after being stabbed in the leg), never kick someone when they are down, and, if you’re not sure what is going to happen next, you’re probably best hitting someone.
I think for the life we lived at that time that was sound advice, but it’s not a conversation I have had to have with my sons – they have not lived the same life. To be fair, I have not lived the life that my dad lived, but he could only pass on what he had learnt. My nan had been married before to a Mr Berry and had had three sons: Charlie, Billy and Jimmy. By the time Mr Berry died, Charlie had also died, aged nine, of diphtheria, and been buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, and my uncle, Billy, had lost a lung to TB. She then married my dad’s father, Fred Bishop, and had Janet, Mary, Edna, Carol and the twins: my dad and Freddie. With eight children in post-war austerity, things were inevitably tough – in one of the few photographs my dad has of himself and Freddie as children, only one of them has shoes on. There had been only one pair of shoes to go around, so they had a fight and the winner wore them for the picture.
Although my mum lived just around the corner, growing up, she never seemed to suffer the same degree of hardship. She was one of three for a start, with older siblings (in the form of John and Josie), and fewer mouths to feed makes a difference to any family. Her mum and dad divorced and her father died the same year I was born, which is one reason why I am named after him. Her mum, my other nan, was married to Granddad Bill, a caretaker of a block of flats in Toxteth, for all the time that I knew her. As children, Eddie and I would play for hours around the flats with Stephen, my uncle, who was in fact not much older than us. Pictures of my mum in her youth reveal a slim, beautiful, dark-haired girl with plaits who grew to be a slim, beautiful woman with a beehive. My mum has always stayed in shape, and I would guess that her dress size has hardly changed in the more than fifty years that she has been married to my dad.
There are not many pictures of my parents before we started to come along, but I love the ones there are. My mum was as close to a film star in looks as could be without actually being one. There is a softness to her features that belies the toughness inside, a toughness that would often hold the family together in years to come. My dad looks strong in all the pictures, with a handsome face and tattoos on his arms and a stocky frame that suggests that he was made to carry things. My dad is of the generation of working-class men who have swallows tattooed on the backs of their hands. He has often said that he regrets getting them done as they give people an impression of him as someone who wants to look tough before they actually get to know him. The reality is, he said he got them done so that people could tell him and his identical twin Freddie apart – not the greatest of strategies, as I don’t know anyone who looks at a person’s hands first, but at least it beats a tattoo on the face. Personally, I would have just worn glasses or perhaps a hat. In truth, my dad has the hands of a man who suits such tattoos. He was born into a world where social mobility was limited and it was essential that you protected what you had, as there was nothing left to fall back on.
If men like my dad were to ever progress through the social order, it was to be through hard graft, and by being prepared to fight your corner in whatever form that fight took. It was the week before Christmas in 1972 when I became completely aware of what it meant to be a family and the cost of standing by your principles. I was six years old and I recall my uncle, John, my mum’s brother, sitting us all down in the living room. My mum was sitting next to him, and we four children were squashed up on the couch.
‘Your dad has gone to prison.’
The words hit me like a train. I didn’t completely understand what they meant, but as everyone else seemed upset I knew it couldn’t be a good thing. One thing I don’t remember is anyone crying; it was as if it was another thing you just had to deal with. My mum sat there with the same inner strength that I always associate with her. No matter what was to follow, I knew she would make sure everything was going to be all right. She had managed to hold the family together when Carol was literally starving to death in hospital and her own father was dying of cancer. She had managed to move as a young mother away from all she had ever known for the benefit of a better life for her children. Her husband going to prison was not going to break my mum, particularly as she supported everything my dad had done.
Uncle John, his voice clear and strong, carried on: ‘Some people may say bad things to you, but never forget your dad did the right thing. You need to be proud, and you boys have to stand up for your mum and sisters.’ For the first time ever, I was given more responsibility than just being able to dress myself in the morning.
My dad had been sentenced to a year in prison as a result of an altercation with two men outside a chip shop. He had had a run-in with the same two men the week before, so when he’d stopped with my mum to get chips on the way home from a night out they had started another argument. When my mum had intervened, they had pushed her so hard she had bounced off the bonnet of a car onto the ground. My dad had reacted to the provocation and, as had happened the week before, both men ended up on the ground and my dad walked away.
To this day my dad is very bitter about the sentence, and even the arresting officers said the case should have been thrown out. On both occasions, my dad was not the aggressor and was defending himself, and on the second occasion was defending his wife. But for his defence he had not been advised very well, which is something that can happen when you are limited financially in the professional advice you can seek.
Months earlier, my dad and Uncle Freddie had been playing in the same football team, and my dad was sent off by the referee for something his identical twin had done. They appealed against the decision and the local FA had upheld their claim that the referee had sent the wrong man off because he could not tell who had committed the offence.
Had my dad just stood in court and simply relayed the events as they happened, there is a very good chance he would have walked free, or at least only been given a suspended sentence. However, it was felt by many on the estates that people who had moved to Winsford from Liverpool would be unfairly treated by the local police and courts. As the other two men were locals, or ‘Woollybacks’ as we called them (an insult to sheep that I have never really understood), he tried to use the same ploy in court that had worked with the local FA. As both men had ended up pole-axed on the ground, it would be impossible, so the plan went, for them to know which twin had hit them. As the judge could not send both my dad and Uncle Freddie to prison, he would have to throw the case out, and that would be the end of that.
The defence didn’t work and, as my dad was sentenced for violence, he was sent to a closed prison. At first he went to Walton Prison in Liverpool and then on to Preston.
He told my mum not to bring us children to visit him, but by the time he had been transferred to Preston he was missing us too much and asked her to bring us in. I remember that day as if it was yesterday. My Uncle Freddie drove us and we arrived early and had to sit waiting in the car, opposite the prison. There were all four of us, Eddie, Kathy, Carol and I, along with my mum and Freddie in the front, yet I don’t recall anyone saying anything as we just sat and waited.
To my six-year-old self, Preston Prison looked like a castle. It was a stone building with turrets and heavy, solid, metal gates that had a hatch, through which the guards behind could check the world outside remained outside.
At the allotted time, we approached the gates along with some other families, and the hatch opened. Before long, a small door swung open, and we were allowed inside, only to be faced by another metal gate.
Standing just in front of it was a guard in a dark uniform holding a clipboard with a list of names on it, which he ticked off with the expression that you can only get from spending your working life locking up other men. My Uncle Freddie said who we had come to see, whereupon we were duly counted and moved towards the next gate. Eventually, after everyone had met with the guard’s approval, the gate in front of us was unlocked and we were allowed to pass though to be faced by yet another gate.
This process of facing locked gate after locked gate was a frightening and dehumanising experience: we were being led through like cattle. We eventually walked up some metal stairs and entered the visitors’ room. I just recall rows of men sitting at tables, all wearing the same grey uniform, in a room with no windows and a single clock on the wall.
When I saw my dad, I broke free of my mum’s hand and ran towards him to give him the biggest hug I had ever given anyone. My dad reciprocated until a guard said we had to break the hug and I had to be placed on the opposite side of the table like everyone else. I know prison officers have a job to do, but who would deprive a six-year-old boy of a hug from the father he had not seen for months? It was not as if I was trying slip him a hacksaw between each squeeze.
‘Have you been good?’ he asked us all, and we each said we had.
‘Good. Have you been looking after your mum?’ he asked then, and for some reason it seemed like he was talking to just me.
I wasn’t so sure I knew what looking after my mum entailed, but I was sure I was doing it, or at least a version of it.
‘I have, Dad,’ I said.
‘They’ve all been good,’ my mum informed him across the table, which seemed to satisfy him.
‘Good,’ he said, with a smile I had never seen before. A smile that appears when someone’s face is trying to match the words that are being spoken, but not quite managing it.
I don’t recall anything else that anyone said. I just remember looking around and thinking my dad didn’t belong with all the other men in grey uniforms. He was my dad, and they were all just strange men wearing the same clothes as him, many sporting similar tattoos on the backs of their hands.
After what to me appeared to be too short a time, my Uncle Freddie said he would take us out so that my mum and dad could talk alone or, at least, be as alone as you can be whilst being watched by prison officers alongside thirty other families visiting at the same time. To soften the disappointment of having to leave, my dad gave us all a Texan bar each, a sweet of its era: chocolate covering something that was as close to being Plasticine as legally possible, so when you chewed it almost took every tooth out of your head with its stickiness. We didn’t get many sweets at the time, so it was a real treat, even if the trade-off was that Dad was in prison. What I didn’t realise at the time was that four Texan bars virtually accounted for a week’s prison allowance. Not for the first or the last time, my dad was giving us children all he had.
During the year that he was away, I can only recall visiting my dad on one more occasion. It was when he was moved to the open prison at Appleton Thorn. I remember the visiting room had windows so that light flooded in, and hugs were not prevented with the same degree of enthusiasm by the prison officers. Before he had left Preston, the governor there had told my dad that he was the first prisoner he had ever transferred to an open prison: by the time you reached Preston you either went onto a maximum-security unit or stayed within the closed-prison sector till your time was served or you died.
The only reason he moved my dad was because of the support he was given by one particular prison guard, Officer Hunt, who stuck his neck out for him and pressed for my dad to be moved. It would be easy to say all prison guards of the time were bad, but clearly this wasn’t the case. Despite one or two close shaves, I have not needed to visit a prison since.
I don’t recall the day Dad came home. You might imagine it would be ingrained in my memory, but somehow it isn’t. While he was away, I remember that things seemed harder than usual. As a family, we never actually felt poorer than our neighbours, but I was aware that some people just had more.
It was when I started junior school at Willow Wood that I was first exposed to people who had more than me – basically, people who did not live on our estate. My two friends from school were Christopher and Clive, and both were posher than I was: Clive lived in a house that had an apple tree in the garden. Despite being at least three miles from where I lived, I would happily cycle or walk there to play. By the time I was in junior school I knew the estate inside out, so leaving it to go on adventures seemed natural.
Clive was clever, and I recall his dad coming home from work once. He was wearing a suit and didn’t need to get a wash before having his tea, which I thought was a really odd thing for a dad not to have to do. I liked Chris because he could draw, which I also enjoyed doing. He lived on the private estate and, to my eyes, he had the perfect life: he was the oldest, so he didn’t have an older brother who always won fights; and his mum didn’t seem to work, so when we played there she would sometimes make us chocolate apples, which is basically a toffee apple but with chocolate instead of toffee.
My mum was great at making cakes and I did get pocket money to spend at the mobile shop on the estate, which was a van in which a bloke sat selling all household goods from pegs to sweets, but I had never come across the concept of the chocolate apple. Chris also seemed to have more toy cars than I could imagine it was possible for one child to own. We would play with his Matchbox cars and, occasionally, I would slip one in my pocket. Once, as I did so, I saw his mum looking at me. I guiltily pulled the car out but I knew there were going to be no more chocolate apples for me. I was not invited around again.
