Читать книгу Unbreakable: My life with Paul – a story of extraordinary courage and love - Lindsey Hunter - Страница 10

Sitting here amongst the packing boxes, I can’t help but look at all the old photographs I come across. Memories can be tricky things – the same picture can bring back both good and bad. For me, looking at ones of Paul as a kid is somehow easier because I wasn’t there. I wish I had seen every moment of his life, but photographs at least give me glimpses. I pick up one of him as a baby. The colour is fading and it looks older than it is; he’s golden-haired and smiling, with his mum beside him, grinning as if she’s going to burst with pride. I know that feeling.

Here’s another of Paul at Christmas surrounded by people and presents, always smiling. Always smiling.

I pick up another. Paul looks tiny. A little boy dressed up like a man. He’s wearing a waistcoat and bow tie, standing by a snooker table that seems made for a giant. His parents have told me the stories behind these images, and Paul has gone over his memories too. I feel as if they are my memories now – I’ll be the one to pass them on to our baby girl when she grows up. They are evidence of how handsome he was, how talented, and how adored. I wasn’t the only one to fall in love with Paul Hunter.

Once I got to know Paul and his family, I found out that he could always make people fall in love with him. It wasn’t a manipulative thing; he didn’t explicitly decide to have people fall at his feet so that he could get what he wanted – it was just that he was incredibly engaging. Paul would do anything for anyone and most people would do anything for him too. I remember thinking at the time, What’s going on here? Why am I suddenly head over heels for this boy? Of course, it wasn’t sudden really but I was still shocked by it.

I suppose I was becoming part of Paul’s world without it being a big deal. If I had been his girlfriend at that stage, I’m not sure that I would have got to know him as well as I did. We spent our first months together quite naturally, with no pressure, and that would always stand us in good stead. As time went on, I found out a lot about his background and it helped me make sense of some of his behaviour.

To be honest, Paul had never really grown up.

We had been brought up very differently as children. Both sets of parents are still together – in itself, quite unusual nowadays, I guess – but snooker-mad Paul was treated like a little prince from the moment he was born, whereas my mum and dad showed their love by giving me strong values and independence.

Paul’s big sister Leanne had been born three years before him in 1975, the same year as me. His mum, Kristina, was over the moon when she got pregnant with Paul – he was very much a wanted child – but she had a huge scare when she started bleeding very heavily at three months and thought she was having a miscarriage. Paul’s dad, Alan, and a friend carried her upstairs to bed feet first to try and stop her losing so much blood, but I know that it was terrifying – she was sure she’d lose the baby. Next day, she was taken to hospital and stayed there for a week. When the bleeding stopped and she was sent home, she says she somehow knew that her baby was a survivor, and the rest of the pregnancy was fine.

Alan was present at the birth and seemingly was so overcome by it all that as soon as the baby came out and the doctor said, ‘It’s a boy!’ the proud new dad keeled over in a faint.

Paul Alan Hunter was born on 14 October 1978, weighing 5lbs 3oz. He was put in an incubator for a few days as he was so tiny, and when his mum looked at him, he seemed like a little dolly; perfect and with incredibly blond, almost silvery-white, hair. He liked attention from the outset – and that wasn’t to change much. When you put baby Paul down, he’d scream. If you picked him up, he’d smile. Everyone says that, as a baby, he just wanted a cuddle and a bit of love.

He had an extended family nearby, with several cousins who were roughly the same age as him, and Polish grandparents, Babcia and Dziadek, on his mum’s side. Everyone loved the golden-haired little boy who had come into the family. However, more than anything, Paul was a mummy’s boy. He hated Kristina going out, and whenever she did, he would sulk at the bottom of their stairs; often he got his own way and made his mum feel so guilty that she would come back early.

This didn’t stop in later years. When Paul was about 13, his mum came home to find him asleep on the sofa one night. She tried to wake him up, but nothing worked – he was so sound asleep that prodding and whispering in his ear had no effect whatsoever. Finally, she lugged her teenage son upstairs and tucked him up in bed without disturbing his dreams. It was years and years later that Paul admitted to her that he was awake the whole time and only pretending to be asleep so that she would cuddle him, pamper him, and make him feel like her baby again.

Any of the tricks Paul played, however, were purely fun and games. He got away with a lot because he was a genuinely nice lad who had a smile to break hearts and a sense of humour that got him through everything. Even as we faced our darkest days together, that smile would appear and the sense of humour would kick in and I sometimes got glimpses of the little boy he must have been. He was a crowd-pleaser even as a kid; a soft touch who always did his best to keep everyone happy, and who wanted everyone to like him.

These days, as I sit without him, I wish I could go back to the years when I didn’t know him. I want to soak up all those memories, those times when I wasn’t in his life. I wish I could just top myself up on all the Paul days to keep me going. I’m sure if I had known him then, he’d have made me adore him then too. Before his true talent came out, Kris and Alan say that they had no idea what he would become but they always had a feeling that the smiling little lad with the golden hair would capture many more hearts than just those of his immediate family.

By the time Paul turned three in October 1981, he had already started showing an interest in snooker. He kept trying to hit marbles with a chopstick so when Christmas came, a tiny snooker table was bought. This was at the time when snooker was reaching its heyday – it was on telly a lot and there were some real characters associated with the game so there was always some sort of coverage going on. Paul was born in the year that the BBC first decided to give blanket coverage to the World Championship. Snooker was booming when the little boy got his first taste of life on the baize.

On Christmas morning 1981, Paul opened the miniature snooker set and it was pretty much the only thing he played with all day long. It was so small that it fitted onto the coffee table in the lounge, but it was big enough to start turning Paul’s dreams into reality. He picked up that snooker cue when he was three and never really put it down again.

For his fifth birthday, Paul was given a 6ft x 3ft set, which was kept in the living room, and it was his favourite possession. Alan played regularly with friends at a local club called Snooker 2000. One night, when Paul was eight, Alan’s usual partner rang to say that he couldn’t make the game that night. As he put the telephone down and shouted through to tell Kristina what was going on, young Paul jumped up and down by his side. ‘Dad! Dad!’ he shouted. ‘Take me! Take me!’ Alan tried to ignore him, but an excitable Paul wasn’t too easy to shut out. He wouldn’t stop pleading for Alan to take him to the snooker club, and his dad finally said that, if it was up to him he would, but the manager would never let a kid in to play. He hoped that would be an end to the matter, but he should have known Paul wouldn’t be put off so easily.

‘Dad! Dad!’ he went on. ‘Can we find out? Can we ask if they’ll let me in? Please, Dad? Please?’ Alan relented. Given that he was pretty confident that he was right and Paul wouldn’t get to play, it seemed easier to make the trip and let someone else explain things to his snooker-mad son. When they got there, either the snooker gods were watching or the manager was in a particularly good mood because Paul got his way and he was allowed to play his dad on a proper-sized snooker table in a proper club.

The boy was like a duck to water.

He never looked back.

Paul and his dad went to Snooker 2000 a few times over the next couple of weeks, and it amazed everyone there that the little lad was giving his father such a good game. People used to congregate while he was at the table, until there were dozens standing watching. He was cute – which helped – but he could also play the game, which made things even better.

Now snooker is a pricey hobby and Alan was renowned for being careful with cash so everyone assumed Paul would just have to accept that the 6ft x 3ft table in the living room was going to have to do for now. They hadn’t accounted for the attention Paul had been getting while he was playing his dad. The club decided that he was so good for business that they would let him play for free as often as he liked, and Paul was over the moon.

When he was 10, Alan took little Paul to the Crucible in Sheffield, the sport’s most famous venue, for the first time. There the boy made a wish that would come true sooner than anyone thought: ‘One day, Dad,’ he said, ‘one day, I’d love to play here.’ He knew what he wanted from that moment on.

Paul’s first love was just playing the game. He wasn’t bothered about competitions and trophies to begin with, but it soon became clear that he was so talented, such challenges were the next logical step. He was winning under-12 tournaments from when he was 10 – the same age that he first beat his dad at the Snooker 2000 club. He was 11 years and one week old when he made his first century break (scoring more than a hundred points in one break).

Of course, he lost sometimes. He entered a Prestatyn Pontins under-16s tournament when he was only 10 and was devastated to lose in the second round. He rushed back to the chalet he’d been sharing with his dad, absolutely heartbroken. In later years, fellow players and fans would all say that you could never tell if Paul had won or lost a game because he always had the same happy demeanour. This certainly wasn’t the case when he was 10. He sobbed his heart out and said to Alan over and over again, ‘You said I had a chance! You said I had a chance!’ It was the last time he ever got really emotionally upset about losing; he was never up or down from that point on. Snooker was massively important to him but there was a dividing line, and that first clear loss was the turning point. He learned. He learned that you couldn’t always trust your talent – luck was involved. He learned that you don’t make yourself feel any better by getting upset. He learned that there’s always another game just around the corner. As Paul matured he was gracious in success and defeat, and he never had a bad word to say about anybody.

He was never sulky about the game but he was extremely competitive. Snooker was more than a hobby for Paul – it was a calling. Just before his 12th birthday, he moved from Snooker 2000. He was asked to bring his talent and potential elsewhere – he was poached, really – by the management at The Manor, a health and leisure centre that also had a snooker club. That was where the 1986 World Champion Joe Johnson practised. Joe was never Paul’s coach but he did take him under his wing to an extent and gave him advice on shot selection, as well as no doubt telling him plenty of stories about life in the snooker world.

Paul beat Joe for the first time when he was 13 years old, and that year he also won his first prize money at a Willie Thorne under-16s competition in Leicester. The prize was £100 and he got an extra £25 for the highest break as well. From this age on he was pretty much self-financing.

Kristina was more sceptical about the whole business than Alan. His dad went with Paul to the club and games, so he knew what was going on and how good Paul was. However, Kris tended not to be there, so she only heard about it all second hand. Maybe you wouldn’t really appreciate how good your kid was at something like that at such a young age unless you were seeing the proof for yourself. Kris tried hard to get him to go to school and do his homework but Paul couldn’t have been less interested. Many mornings he’d get dropped off at school, only to nip off to his grandparents, Babcia and Dziadek, for the day to get spoiled rotten. He’d be treated like royalty before slinking back to school to get picked up again by his unsuspecting mother later in the day. By the time Paul was 14, he was allowed to leave school by the education authorities on one condition – he had to employ a private tutor. From that point on, Paul had nothing to distract him from his beloved game.

Once her son started to earn money, Kristina realized that what Alan was telling her and what she hoped was true wasn’t just parental pride – Paul Hunter really was going to be snooker’s next big thing. All he wanted was to play, all the time, in whatever tournament he could.

He won the Pontins under-16 tournament at the age of 14, which sent out a message to the sport. It was a really prestigious event that had been won by lots of lads who have gone on to become famous names in snooker, such as Stephen Hendry. When Paul won, they all knew that here was someone who would be a danger to them in a few years’ time. He hadn’t had coaching up until that point – Paul always said that while coaching might work for some people, he thought that most problems needed to be dealt with in your own head. It certainly worked for him, but he was very young to be hanging around snooker tournaments and halls all the time.

People have this image of snooker being played in smoky, dingy places, real men’s clubs, with an atmosphere of drinking and being a right lad – and that’s exactly what it was like when Paul was learning his trade. I’ve heard from his friends that there were always girls hanging around. As a result, he definitely grew up quickly – perhaps too quickly. He lost his virginity at a very young age – well before it was legal. He definitely had an eye for the ladies, although I don’t like to dwell on it now.

The first time Alan took her boy away for a week, Kristina felt as if her heart had broken. He turned pro and went to the Norbreck Castle in Blackpool, to what is known as ‘qualifying school’. There, between three and four hundred budding players were competing for the glory of reaching the televised stages of tournaments. Paul’s talent shone through and he won all of his first 36 matches as a professional. Then when he was 16, they went away to a tournament for a whole month. It was a great adventure for Paul, of course, but Kris was very aware that she was losing her smiling little mummy’s boy. Eventually, she says, she got used to him being gone for periods of time.

Of course, she never dreamed for a moment how soon he would be gone from her life forever.