Читать книгу Lewis Hamilton: My Story - Lewis Hamilton - Страница 7

‘My racing career may not have started properly until I was eight, but it had in fact been part of my life much earlier. As a teenager, sadly my enthusiasm was not shared by all and my career nearly ended before it had started because of a case of mistaken identity by my school.’

MY START IN LIFE WAS PRETTY NORMAL. I was born at the Lister Hospital in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, on 7 January 1985. I was named Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton. My dad’s middle name is Carl and Nic also has Carl as a middle name. The name Lewis was just a name that my parents liked at the time. The name Davidson is taken from my granddad.

Stevenage was one of the ‘new towns’ built after the Second World War and is a typical commuter town with both local and international business facilities and good rail and road links to London, in the south, and to the north of England. Thousands of people travel from Stevenage to London and back every day on the train and my dad was one of them. He worked for British Rail while my mum worked in the local council offices. My mum and dad lived in a council house in Peartree Way, on the Shephall Estate, in Stevenage. My mum had two daughters Samantha and Nicola – from a previous relationship before she met my dad. Sammy and Nicky were about two and three when my dad came into their lives. It was not a luxurious or a privileged neighbourhood, but it was also not as bad as some.

My first school was just down the end of our road, the Peartree Spring Nursery School. My second primary school, Peartree Infant and Junior School, was a five-minute walk around the corner. For my secondary school I chose the John Henry Newman School, a Roman Catholic secondary, before completing my education at the Cambridge Arts and Sciences College. I have to say it was not as straightforward as it sounds, and there were a few ups and downs along the way. My interest in karting and motor racing, which took me away a lot at weekends as I grew older, did not always fit in with the strict thinking of some people. At school, I used to keep my interest in racing to myself.

My racing career may not have started properly until I was eight, but it had in fact been part of my life much earlier. As a teenager, sadly my enthusiasm was not shared by all and my career nearly ended before it had started because of a case of mistaken identity by my school.

To this day, I find it difficult to talk about this because it nearly destroyed my faith in the education system. But I think it’s important to set the record straight on a few things in my life that have been reported inaccurately in the last year or so. I wish it could be forgotten forever but some things just need to be said.

It was 2001, I was sixteen and a few important months away from sitting my GCSEs at John Henry Newman School. In January of that year there was a serious incident at the school involving a pupil who was attacked in the school toilets by a gang of about six boys. I was accused of kicking the pupil. This was not true. I, like many others, had been hanging around waiting for the next lesson to start and had entered the toilets around the time that the attack was taking place. I was not involved in the attack but knew the boys involved.

The headteacher thought differently and wrote a letter to my parents advising them that I was excluded from school along with six other pupils and stating the reasons why. I couldn’t believe it. I was so upset. I didn’t know how I was going to explain it to my parents. I walked around in a daze, not really knowing where I was going for a while, I even considered running away and then eventually I went home. When I gave the letter to my dad and step-mum Linda they were obviously extremely disappointed and really mad – not so much with me but with the headteacher – although I remember my dad said to me, ‘Congratulations, you’ve done something that I never managed to do!’ I knew that I had done nothing wrong so this made it all the worse.

We decided to go back to the school. I went with Linda and my mum to speak to the headteacher. When they arrived at the school, the headteacher was not sympathetic to anything they said to him and he maintained that I had kicked the pupil and that I was correctly excluded. I knew I was innocent but he did not appear to be interested. Subsequent letters to the local education authority, our local MP, the Education Secretary and even the Prime Minister, were of no help. No one appeared to listen – no one either wanted to or had the time. We were on our own and I was out of school.

I found it very frustrating and upsetting, with everyone seemingly against me except my family, some true friends, and McLaren and Mercedes-Benz. I could not understand how I found myself in such an awful situation.

We launched an appeal to the Governors’ Discipline Committee of the school, but the appeal failed. We then appealed to the Local Education Authority where the matter was considered by the Exclusion Appeal Panel.

From the very beginning I told my dad that I was innocent and he did everything he could to prove this. It was just typical of my dad: when something is wrong he will go to the ends of the earth to find out the truth.

Anyway, it took weeks to resolve (although it seemed so much longer at the time) with documents going backwards and forwards. I was still out of school and having private tuition paid for by my family until our appeal could be heard. My dad had gone through the evidence and meticulously studied all the documents and witness statements and he thought he had a pretty good case prepared.

At the hearing, the Exclusion Appeal Panel concluded (after a thorough investigation including hearing oral evidence from witnesses) that my appeal should be upheld and that I should be fully reinstated to school. The panel concluded that I was not guilty of kicking the pupil. They also found that in fact there had been a serious case of mistaken identity, or, as they put it, ‘unfortunate confusion’ with another pupil who was said to be one of the individuals involved.

While the matter should have been resolved at that stage (the beginning of April 2001), the battle was not over as the school refused to reinstate me back to my class. It was the same for some other pupils who had successfully appealed. Instead, I was offered segregated tuition. All this was going on just before I took my GCSEs, so it was really bad timing. My dad arranged for alternative private tuition and exams. In the end I sat the GCSEs in different locations. It was not ideal as I had missed crucial weeks of education but I did my best given the circumstances. Some exams I sat back at the school, but they wouldn’t let me go back to my class so I had to sit on my own. The rest I sat at other local schools.

I didn’t enjoy school that much anyway before the incident, except for my friends and the sports, of course, but when this happened I thought that everything I had worked for was going down the drain. I was worried, too, that I would lose my racing career and opportunity with McLaren because Ron Dennis, just like my dad, had always told me, ‘Lewis, you’ve got to work hard at school.’ Well, I wasn’t the perfect student, but I did the best I could and did what I had to in order to get by.

Following this bad experience, and the unnecessary stresses and strains brought upon my whole family, my dad decided it was time that we moved away from Stevenage. We relocated fifteen minutes away to a lovely quiet village where no one knew us at the time. When I look back, I think what a shame it was that the end of my Stevenage school years was spoiled for me. Although the Local Education Authority has admitted it was all a mistake, neither I nor my family have received an apology, private or public. It is much too late for me now but it would be good for me to know that something like this could never happen to another pupil. One thing is for sure: without my dad’s attention to detail I would have been lost. It has given me a completely different perspective on school life.

After that I was glad to eventually leave John Henry Newman School. I moved to the Cambridge Arts and Sciences College. CATS, as it is known, was a fantastic place. The teachers were professional and the pupils too. I got the train most times until I passed my driving test and then I would drive there. It was a really good experience. I had the opportunity to stay at the College, but I did not want to share dorms with people who I did not even know and I thought I would miss my family. To be honest, looking back now, I should have boarded because it would have been good to live on my own and to spend time with people of my own age who were not from the motor racing world.

There were people of all backgrounds: wealthy kids and not-so-wealthy ones. It was a real mixed bunch. It was a pleasurable experience for me. The staff were really nice: they spoke to you on the level and not as if they were above you. I also felt more fulfilled and began to value myself differently. I was happier. I liked design, technology and music, but my dad wasn’t keen on me taking music and recommended that I do business studies. He thought that it would be more useful and relevant in motor racing and that it would give me a better chance at a decent job should I ever need it to fall back on.

I didn’t think business studies was right for me – which is probably the reason I didn’t do so well in the exam. I was not even slightly interested and if you’re forced to do something you don’t like, you’re not going to do as well in it. I was into music. I played the guitar and I also wanted to learn the drums. I always wanted to be like Phil Collins – he can play everything: guitar, drums, piano, bass guitar…Music was something I enjoyed and wanted to do at college, but in the end I listened to my dad. I still didn’t like business studies and, for that matter, some other subjects as well.

But I really enjoyed CATS and the city of Cambridge itself. Before I went there, I just thought, ‘I’m going to be a bum!’ I never said to myself, ‘I’m going to be a professional racing driver’ or anything like that. It did not cross my mind. Once I went to college, I realized that I could enjoy more things and I bucked up my ideas a lot. I felt like I really wanted to do well. Something clicked for me. It was a much smaller class and I got on well with my teachers. Bar a couple of really smart girls and maybe one smart lad, I was one of the top students in my class. I was even learning and understanding my science studies! But I am the kind of person who wants to be able to do everything. Aside from music, I particularly wanted to do French. It turned out to be my best subject. I almost aced French.

I spent some of my teenage years kart racing in France and Italy and so found it relatively easy to speak French with a French accent and Italian with an Italian accent. I speak more confidently in Italian than in French, I don’t know why. But when I go to France it all comes back to me. I want to be able to really speak it fluently, although I can’t comprehend it well. I don’t know how anyone can! How can they store all that information? Then again, I don’t really speak good enough English, let alone another language…

It got tough for me as time went by, though. My college days were Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and I had to work hard to catch up on the work I missed, because the Formula Renault single-seater testing always took place on the same days. So I took extra lessons, just as I had done when I was at secondary school when we had a tutor to help me. I had to get there an hour earlier or work later. I worked some really long days to make sure I caught up. It was the first time in my life in my academic work that I actually thought to myself, ‘I can do this and I can do well in exams.’

When I went to CATS, they were willing to give me time. They were totally open to my racing. They didn’t even ask about it. They were just…‘This is what you have to do, if that’s what you want to do then go and do it…’ They never said, ‘Oh, Lewis, you shouldn’t be taking this time off.’ They never questioned it. Instead it was, ‘Well, how can we work around it?’ And that’s why it was so good. They worked with me.

In fairness there were also some good memories from my Stevenage schooldays. I was reminded of them when Ashley Young, now a very successful professional footballer, was picked to play for England. We were in the same year and we used to play together in the school football team. From what I remember of Ashley, he was a very good football player and a nice guy.

I really liked playing football. I started in midfield and I would go into a tackle and go in so hard that I risked breaking my leg. I did not deliberately foul people, or go in with studs showing or anything like that, but I would give it a real sliding tackle and if I got the ball I would go charging off and do the best job I could with it. My problem was that I always kept my head down. I was always looking at the ball instead of where I was going and so would end up being tackled or run into another player. I always thought I did twice the amount of work of any other player on the field but for half the result! But I knew, at least, that I did the best job I could.

In general, I liked competitive sports – I didn’t want to read about the rules or go and watch it; I just wanted to do it because it was good fun – but motor racing was different. I read, studied and knew all the rules.

I was relatively good at most sports: I played for the cricket team, the basketball team, the footy team. I was on the athletics team and I did javelin, discus and the 800 metres and won the occasional event on school sports days.

Nic also loves competitive sports but is unable to compete in most. Still, he tries and he tries and he never gets down or depressed about things. If he fell over, he would get straight back up and get on with it even if he was in pain. He made such a big impact on me and on the way I think about things. Nic is blessed in so many ways.

Even now, I am sometimes quite hard on Nic about small things, I just want to help him learn and not to take anything for granted. Most importantly, I want him to do well, even better than me, in his education and exams and so I keep on top of him about this. He always tells me I am the best and he never really talks to me about my driving. He is so sensible.