THE SCENE AT the hospital was carnage. There were doors banging, people screaming, men slumped on seats covered in blood, orderlies pushing bodies on stretchers with tubes sticking out of them, doctors and nurses running with stethoscopes flying.
As they wheeled me in, the first person I saw was Tucker Lee. His head was swathed in so many bandages it looked like a beehive. Then I saw Sam, in a terrible state, my Uncle Joe covered in blood and my Uncle Peter with his teeth smashed out, his mouth a gaping hole.
A nurse took my pulse as a doctor examined my wounds.
‘Have you been drinking?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I mumbled.
Suddenly I felt as though my stomach was coming out through my throat. I began to retch and the nurse pushed a stainless steel bowl under my chin. I must have spewed six dishes of blood. It was a thick jelly, like liver. They put me in an intensive care bed. I started to go dizzy and felt myself slipping away. I barely had strength to pull off the blanket and when I looked down, the bed was full of blood. How much blood does a man have in him? Fortunately a nurse spotted me and they all came running again. This time they rushed me into the pre-op room to prepare for surgery.
The nursing sister said, ‘We are afraid gangrene might set into your leg from all the sludge.’
‘Take it off then, below the knee.’ I didn’t want to die.
‘No, no, we can’t do that,’ she said.
Sam appeared, like the walking dead. I grabbed his hand. I had always had a fear of being buried alive. ‘Sam, if I die in this operation, don’t let them bury me for two months. Make sure I am dead.’
I had never been put under before. I was on drips and tubes and needles, connected to some kind of monitor; it looked like the cockpit of a plane. They put the anaesthetic in and I immediately started to go. I looked at this beautiful nurse. ‘Well I can always say the last thing I will ever see is a beautiful woman,’ I told her. Then I was out.
They performed microsurgery on my leg, stitching together the muscles and tendons that had been sliced through. It took hours and while I was unconscious the hospital car park filled up with travellers’ vehicles. The corridors were packed with bands of gypsies – Irish, Scottish, Londoners – and dozens of police. They couldn’t control them. BBC radio was reporting that there had been ‘a big disturbance just two hundred yards from the Queen.’ A horse called Crow had won the St Leger.
When I came to, I had tubes everywhere: glucose going in one hand, blood in another, a tube in my stomach, another in my penis, another in my throat. They must have piled me up with sedative because there was no pain. They weren’t supposed to give me a drink but I pleaded for one and the nurse let me. They put me in a room on my own. Later, people told me they were comparing me to Duncan Edwards, the Manchester United footballer who only lingered after the Munich air disaster because he was so strong and fit. Edwards died in the end and many believed I would die too. The doctors told me that even the Queen had sent for information about me; she had heard about the disturbance and wanted to know if everybody was alright. The News of the World carried a report saying the trouble had first flared up at Appleby Horse Fair, which was wrong, although I later found out that Bob Gaskin had fought Simon Docherty at Appleby that year and had lost. He had a grudge against the Irish and perhaps that was another reason for what had happened.
Despite my condition, I had a constant stream of visitors. Gypsy men kept arriving and stuffing the drawers full of tenners and fivers for me. There were bottles of whisky and Guinness under the bed and hidden in the cupboard. Hundreds of boxes of chocolates, bowls of fruit and rosary beads arrived. I gave most of them away to the nurses. The phone never stopped ringing.
Tucker Lee came in. He had a sawn-off twelve-bore under his coat. I was lying in the bed, couldn’t move, and looked down to see the gun pointing at me, resting on the bed.
‘Don’t mess with those men,’ I said.
A nurse fetched in a golden basket six feet high and put it on a table. It was like something you would see at a Mafia funeral, filled with red and white flowers. There was a note with it: ‘Very sorry what happened race week. Better luck next time. Will see you when you come out of hospital and give you a send-off. Keep these flowers.’
Tears came in my eyes. I knew who it was from: the Gaskins and their cronies. I took it to mean they would come after me when I came out of hospital – and to keep the flowers for my funeral. I made the nurses take it away.
For several days I was in a serious condition but eventually they moved me onto a ward. I had a plaster cast the length of my leg and later a rubber and iron calliper to hold up my foot, so it wouldn’t drag. All the tendons had been sliced. At night, all you could hear on the ward were accident victims yelling, ‘Help me, help me.’ Like wounded soldiers. On the fourth night, a man shouted, ‘God help meeeee.’
And I said, ‘And me tooooo.’ I couldn’t help it. It was like a chorus.
I couldn’t go to the toilet under my own steam for three weeks but after a fortnight I was well enough to give a couple of interviews. One newspaper had the headline: ‘Gang tried to cut off gypsy fighter’s leg.’ It said, ‘A gypsy fighter from Hinckley has claimed that he was attacked with crowbars and a broken bottle after he successfully defended his barefist heavyweight title,’ and quoted me saying, ‘I am lucky to be alive. They were like savages. I really believe they tried to kill me. I went to defend a challenge on my heavyweight title on St Leger Day. As far as I knew it was going to be a clean fight. If I knew it was going to turn out like it did I would not have gone.’
I sent for Jess Maguire, the policeman who had saved me, and offered him a reward but he wouldn’t take it. ‘It’s all in the line of duty,’ he said. But they did call up the special protection police from Scotland Yard, the top men. They were armed and stood behind the curtains all night with earpieces in until the day I left. They also came to interview me. They wheeled me into a quiet room in my chair and told me about Danny Shenton, the hired fighter. He washed his hands of it, like Pontius Pilate, when he saw what they were doing to me, despite the money they had offered him. He was the only man that did.
One of the CID stupidly said, ‘He would have beat you fair and square anyway.’
I jumped up, ripping out the tubes. ‘Put this down in your notebook,’ I said. ‘I’m getting these men. I’m not hiding anything. I’m going to blow them to pieces.’
I later learned that William Lee, the man who had accused me of robbing him, had paid the Gaskins £25,000 to attack me. Lee’s son, young William Lee, came to see me and cried his eyes out at my bedside. His father never came near me, though I was to see him years later and he was all over me. ‘I know you never done it Bartley,’ he said, but I could never be the same with him. He later died of cancer after flying all around the world to seek a cure. Ironically it was Lee’s sister Priscilla, my aunt, who nursed me through in hospital and fed me special gypsy foods. Will Braddock, who had missed Doncaster because he was ill, also sent me duck eggs and cured ham but I couldn’t eat anything except Priscilla’s food.
Hughie Burton came. He had been attacked as well and showed me a bit of a scratch on his face. Poor old Hughie: Doncaster ruined him, really. He was never the same man after it. He said the only wound he had seen as bad as my leg was on a stallion in Ireland. In his book, he would write:
As I came on to the road, I saw Bartley Gorman in the front of his car bleeding to death from the wounds in his leg, he was lying on the floor and surrounding him was a pool of blood. Ambulance men were standing by watching, as were the police. I stopped and intervened and placed a belt round Gorman’s thigh to stop the bleeding, then lifted him onto the stretcher and put him into the ambulance. I stayed with him all night and all next day, he was on the danger list for several days.
He still had enough pride to look down at me in my bed and say, ‘Well Bartley, I’m the only King of Gypsies that can say now that he never was beat.’
‘That’s right, Hughie,’ I said. But it took a small army to do it.
*
I HAD MIXED feelings about the men who had almost killed me. On the one hand, I wanted to tear them apart. But I knew that if I ever encountered them, I would not be able to control myself, and I didn’t want to go to prison over scum. I also didn’t want my relatives involved in what would turn into a blood feud. Many people would be maimed or worse.
On one of her visits, my mother made Sam and me swear that we would not pursue them. I could see the pain in her eyes and when my mother looked like that I couldn’t refuse her. But retribution was waiting for Bob Gaskin. At my bedside one evening, my mam started crying, and said, ‘Before two months today, Bartley, the man who did this shall be laying in this bed where you are.’ When I came out of hospital, I think after a month, Sam rang me up and said, ‘Guess who’s in the same bed as you, Bartley. Bob Gaskin. He’s been shot. Trying to beat up a man’s fourteen-year-old lad.’ Apparently Gaskin had gone round to this trailer and the man’s wife threw a kettle of boiling water on him and then her husband came out and said, ‘You’re not going to do what you did to Bartley Gorman,’ and shot him in the side with a 4.10 shotgun. Blew all his guts out. He’s got a bag on his side now. I wasn’t bothered about him after that because I knew he was finished. I have never seen him or the other men from that day to this.
None of the Gaskins was ever arrested: I wouldn’t tell on them. I’m no informer. I did ask what would be the charge and the police said attempted murder. They would be looking at fifteen years. The only man arrested turned out to be me. There had been a warrant out on me before Doncaster for fighting with a man in Uttoxeter. So when the police there read about me in the papers, they came up to the hospital, arrested me in my wheelchair, and charged me with grievous bodily harm with intent. Yet I was completely innocent.
What happened was that a dozen southern travellers had come to Uttoxeter and pulled onto the racecourse. A man called Glyn Thorogood had stolen a vibrator machine for tarmaccing and done a deal to sell it to them. He came into the Black Swan pub where I was drinking with my friend Caggy Barrett and asked to speak to me outside. He knew I had a lorry.
‘I’ve got a tarmaccing vibrator and I have sold it to these travellers for two hundred pounds,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you twenty pounds if you move it down to their camp because they are waiting for it.’
Three times he asked me and three times I said no. I don’t like thieves. I returned to the bar but he followed me back in, whining. I gave him the deaf ear until his girlfriend, in a loud, plummy voice, said, ‘Bartholomew Gorman, why are you so ignorant when someone is talking to you?’
‘Glyn, come outside,’ I said. ‘Now listen, I have told you I am not having anything to do with it. Get it into your head.’
I went to the toilet, which was across a cobbled entry from the pub. In the meantime, the travellers turned up. They had given £50 down for this vibrator. I could hear through the toilet window that they were having words and one of them said, ‘Give me my fifty pound back.’ I heard a scuffle and when I walked out Thorogood was lying on the cobbles, in a bad way. I walked into the pub and said to his missus, ‘Someone has hit Glyn, come out.’ They had to fetch an ambulance. So what does he go and do? Blame Caggy and me, and claim that it was us who hit him.
It was only when I was taken in my wheelchair to Doncaster police station and charged with GBH with intent that I knew Thorogood had blamed me. This was twice I’d been blamed for a crime I hadn’t done, while the police didn’t seem interested in the men who nearly murdered me. I had to be at Uttoxeter Magistrates Court on October 7, even though I was still in a terrible state. They wanted to put me on an identity parade but my barrister successfully argued that they wouldn’t be able to find ten men with plaster casts on their legs.
I was a wreck. Before Doncaster, I was as fine a physical specimen as you could wish to see of a male in his late twenties. Afterwards, you could have blown me over. I was frail, on crutches, and went down to twelve stone. When I finally left hospital and got home, I found the boxing boots I had been wearing that day. They were full of maggots feasting on the congealed blood. Our Sam was in a similar state. It was as though he had been painted with a black brush: his whole body was a bruise. They had broken his cheekbones and smashed his teeth and he had stitches all over his head.
I still have the estimate for repairs to the Vauxhall Ventura which Sam had hired that day and which probably saved my life. Every window had gone in, the boot lid, doors and bodywork were destroyed, the front and rear seats were damaged, the carpet was covered in blood, the wing mirrors, aerial and sun visors had been ripped off and it needed a complete re-spray. The repair bill came to £637 – in 1976.
It would take me fully two years to build myself up again. In the meantime, my trial for the Thorogood assault was at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court. I had discovered that Thorogood had asked a man called Graham Parker if he would take the vibrator before me, so I got Parker up as a witness. The judge asked him what his occupation was.
‘I’m a professional receiver of stolen property,’ he said.
‘And a very successful one, it seems, if you can tell a crown court judge that,’ said the judge.
I could have died when he said it, but our barristers gave Thorogood a terrible time in the witness box and the jury found Caggy and me not guilty. I was very relieved: the guy up before me was on a lesser charge of GBH without intent and got five years.
Though I was at least free, these were the bad times. I could hardly do anything. I lost all my ambition. I had to claim sick pay, the only time in my life I have claimed benefit, because I couldn’t work, and I never promoted another boxing show. I had also been planning to go to America to fight bareknuckle, starting in the southern states and fighting my way across the continent, challenging the toughest man in every town. That went out of the window. I lived in my mother’s trailer for a while, then moved into a house with my Shaun and Maria. I was stuck inside, swallowing these strong diazepam tranquillisers, a shadow of myself. I was still on crutches, and went in an ambulance to hospital three times a week for rehabilitation.
Fate was set against me: I became embroiled in yet another court case. Our John and Austin ‘Chinaman’ Lee came to see me and said they’d take me out for a drive to see Mick Mould and have a drink. They had to help me into the vehicle. Mick was a very nice man but unpredictable. ‘I don’t like looking at my friend like this,’ he said when he saw me. ‘I’m going to arrange for you to fight these men fair and square.’
We were going drinking in the village of Abbots Bromley, where they still hold the medieval horn dance, and Mould said he wanted to visit a couple of his shops first to tell them he wouldn’t be back that day. We pulled into the car park at the back of one of his fish and chip shops in Rugeley and there was a Tarmac lorry parked there with four men inside. Mould told them it was a private car park and asked them to move on. They told him where to go.
They couldn’t have said it to a worse man. Mould picked up a brick and threw it through the windscreen of the lorry. This is a man in a £300 suit and polished shoes, immaculate. One of the workmen got out and started fighting with our John and Austin Lee. Then two others jumped out and they all started brawling. I clambered out of the car and was propped up against a wall on my crutches, watching this ridiculous scene, when the driver of the lorry decided to suddenly reverse – towards me. I stuck the crutch out and it probably saved me, stopping the lorry for long enough for me to hop out of the way and shout, ‘Whoa.’
Mould and the others won the fight and these men drove off with black eyes and bloody noses, straight to the nearest police station. We went into the chip shop and the other three put on white smocks and started frying fish, as if they worked there. I went into the toilet in the back. The next thing, the three of them were hiding in the toilet with me because they saw the police coming. They arrested all of us and locked us up. Austin and John later went on the run and were never brought to court. Mould and I were charged with causing actual bodily harm. I pleaded guilty because I was too ill to go through with a trial. I was fined £60 and the others didn’t even offer to pay it.
After months of doing little more than lie on the bed, I gradually began to feel a little better. My great friend Peter Sutton, a slaughterman, built me up with fresh meat and looked after me and my children. I bought a Transit caravan that Gwendoline could drive and intended going to Norfolk to convalesce. Our John had been living with Tucker Lee’s family and had had a fight with them and came to see me with his shirt ripped. I was so pleased to see him. I had been eating Valium like Smarties, dangling little kids on my knee watching television. ‘You can come down to Norfolk with me,’ I told John. I got him sorted out with new clothes but two days before he was due to go, the Lees came to see him and he immediately went back with them. He had been the cause of my nearly getting murdered and yet he had left me just like that. All the bottled-up shock and emotion came out, and I sat weeping on the sofa. It put the top hat on it.
I went down to Norfolk with Gwendoline and the children and stopped in a field by a farm. It was a site for strawberry pickers near Norwich and others were stopping there as well. Shaun was six and Maria five. There was a bit of a pond and I was frit of the children getting drowned, so I parked away from the others, in an isolated spot. It was the week Elvis Presley died.
One night I was in bed when I heard a Transit pull in off the road. I opened the curtains and saw this van with ten men, some on the top rack and others pouring out of the back. One was opening the gate, shouting, ‘You gypsy bastard.’ They must have been local men, looking to have some sport. I grabbed the sleeping children and shouted to Gwendoline, ‘Let’s go.’ I snatched up some blankets and put the children in the Morris 1000, still on my crutches. Then, as these yobs swarmed towards us, I drove straight across the field with no lights on into a huge cornfield, the corn coming up above the roof of the car. There was nowhere else to go. Eventually I stopped and sat there, waiting and listening in the pitch dark, the children scared and bemused.
We stayed there all night. That was my lowest point. As we sat huddled in the little van in that field, in the black of night, I felt helpless and ashamed. Here I was, the toughest unarmed man in Britain, now weak as a child, unable to protect my own children, running away and hiding in long grass like Samson shorn of his strength. A gloomy depression came down over me. Part of it has never left, for I knew I could never again be the man I was.
Once dawn broke, and we could see the coast was clear, we drove back to the trailer. They had smashed it to pieces. Wrecked. I contacted friends of mine in Norwich, Allie Bailey and Big Leo McCarthy, men you don’t mess with. That night we waited for them to come back, but they never returned. The next morning I packed up and left the site.
*
I WAS STILL in a bad way a year after Doncaster. The muscles of my leg had wasted away when they took the plaster off. I needed an iron clamp on my shin for several months and have never been able to fully raise my toes since. Yet because I had survived, my fame spread even further. I became a legend. And there was something I still had to do: I had to show that Bartley Gorman could never be beaten. Doncaster, the scene of the crime and the meeting place for the gypsy world, was the place to do it.
Will Braddock egged me on. ‘I’m going to set a ring up and I want you to fight Gaskin on Hughie Burton’s ground at Partington,’ he said. Hughie agreed to bring in reinforcements to guarantee fair play. Though I was still in a bad physical state, I went to a printers and ordered hundreds of small, glossy leaflets. Each had a photo of me squaring up in my mother’s caravan, the Crown Derby plates behind me, and read:
THIS IS A CHALLENGE
I, Bartley Gorman, challenge any Gypsy Man in England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales or for that matter, the World, to fight me for my title, for £1,000 or more or less per side.
The fight must take place in a 20ft square ring, under New York State Rules, with 6oz gloves and no less than 20 rounds.
I will name the place and date of the fight. The referee will be Don Halden, Judges Matt Hyland and Jim Holmes, Timekeeper Fred Parker.
This challenge stands for 1 Month as from 10th September 1977.
No gypsy man had ever done such a thing before. The leaflet also listed my measurements: height, 6ft 1in; weight, 15½st; reach, 75in; chest, 43in; waist, 34in; biceps, 17in; neck, 18in; fist, 12½in, and so on, and had an address for challengers to contact.
Early one morning, I was driven up to Doncaster with four blacks and two white men I knew from the Midlands.
Their leader was a fellow known as Shaft. I didn’t take Sam or John or any of my blood relatives. This was something I had to do myself. My thoughts were terrible as we drove up. We didn’t go to fight but to put the challenge out. The men went around every trailer at Doncaster handing out the leaflets. There were fewer travellers there than normal because of what had happened the year before and my enemies weren’t there, but someone gave a leaflet to them. Even Bob Gaskin apparently said, ‘That man truly was the best man among gypsies.’
I stipulated gloves because I wanted to ensure it was a fair contest: no more iron bars. When I had challenged Roy Shaw through the papers, it was a spur of the moment thing, but this was going to be organised properly. And they didn’t like that. They sensed the danger of it. In the weeks that followed, the leaflets turned up all over Britain. Someone gave one to old Reilly Smith, one of the great fighters of the Twenties and Thirties. ‘If we were the same age I bet we could have some fun on the front lawn for half an hour or so,’ he said.
We did get some phone calls but they were mostly cranks. The only man I did come close to fighting was the new ‘Guv’nor’ of London, Lennie McLean. He was massive, an ogre with a huge chest and shoulders, a neck wider than his head and a face like an angry bulldog. He had beaten Roy Shaw and was always in the papers bragging about how hard he was.
A journalist who knew the Braddocks gave them the phone number of a man in London called Dave Chipping who could help sort out a fight between McLean and me. He was apparently McLean’s manager. Will Braddock called the number and spoke to Chipping, who eventually said, ‘I’ll put up £200,000 for Lennie to fight your man.’
Will wasn’t about to swallow any bull. ‘Now listen, owd lad,’ he told Chipping. ‘There is no way you London men are going to pay us £200,000, even if our fighter knocks yours out in half a second. And there is no way any gypsies are going to give you £200,000. But I’ll tell you what. Bartley will fight him for ten Park Drive cigarettes.’
The Braddocks told me that some tike wanted to fight me – tikes means paid men, hired guns. We never heard anything more about it. Many people have asked me since if I could have beaten McLean, who went on to act on television and films and became a well-known character. When his autobiography was published, just before he died a few years ago, it became a bestseller. He was undoubtedly a powerful, menacing man who didn’t even have to raise his hands to terrify a lot of people into submission: one look was enough. I wouldn’t argue that he was the King of the Bouncers. As to who would have won if we had fought bareknuckle, I’ll leave that for others to speculate.
*
IN 1978 I BOUGHT a small house in Tean, a village near Stoke, for £1500. I had wanted to stay in a trailer in Norfolk, cooking in the open air, taking my kids to the seaside, but Gwendoline wanted them back in school. Very reluctantly, I agreed.
It wasn’t long before I hooked up again with Mick Mould. As you may have gathered by now, Mould was nothing but trouble, though he was very kind. He’d sit in pub, stare at perfectly innocent men and say, ‘I don’t like the look of him.’ On this particular day we went to a pub called the Plum Pudding near Cannock. I was playing pool when a man came behind me and punched me in the side – hard. It was Don Halden, the Blond Bomber. I hadn’t seen him for three or four years. He had quit boxing now and was seventeen-and-a-half stone.
‘You bastard, you.’
‘How you doing, Bart?’
We started drinking. We went to a pub in Abbots Bromley and he threw a few jabs at me, joking. I punched back and accidentally caught him with a hook to the head that I meant to miss.
‘Oh, I’m sorry Don.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that Bart.’
He must not have forgotten that hook. It rattled his head. But I didn’t mean it. We went down to a country pub at Kingstone. Halden said to me – and I hate being called Bart – ‘I’ll tell you Bart, Hubert Klee said he’d give me a thousand pound to fight you because you’ve been going round all the camps challenging all gypsies.’ Klee was a wealthy man in the area and heavily into fighting.
‘Yeah, but that’s a gypsy thing, isn’t it? It’s not really anything to do with you. I thought you were my friend, Don.’
‘Yeah but I need the thousand quid.’
‘Well, he ain’t going to give you a thousand quid to fight me here now, is he?’
‘No, I want to fight you.’
‘Come on, then. Out in the car park.’
Out we went. There was an old wall outside and I took my shirt off and punched the wall, nearly knocking it down. ‘I’m going to kill you Don. You know you definitely started this. I’m going to destroy you off the face of the earth. You shouldn’t have done this, because we have been friends for a long time.’
Some men came outside. We faced off and walked around. Then Halden said, ‘No, we don’t fight Bartley.’
That was good enough for me. It had been nothing to do with gypsies or money, just for pride, for no reason. We went back in the pub. Then he started again.
‘I’m not drinking with you Don. I’m going,’ I said. I got up and left. I had come in Mould’s motor and left mine at Abbots Bromley, so I started walking, by a little brook with iron railings alongside it. I heard a shout.
‘Bart, come back, I want to fight you.’
‘Go away Don, I want nothing to do with you.’
‘You’re gonna fight, there’s no way out of this.’
‘No, forget it.’
I’d got about 200 yards now. He was following me, his big white shirt flapping loose. Well, a man can’t walk forever, can he? So I stopped. No witnesses.
‘I’ve got to fight you Don, but I don’t want to. I’ve told you I’ll destroy you.’
I had an old yellow soldier’s vest on and took it off. Just when we had squared up, he said, ‘No, I ain’t going to fight you.’ After all that.
‘Okay, but I’m going now.’
Halden had a brutal chopping right. I bent to pick up my vest and as I lifted my head up he fetched that big right into my eye. My grandfather once said he felt a particular punch till the day he died, and I can still feel that mighty right of Halden’s now. It dished my face in. I had let a gorgi man draw the box on me. What a mug. I stood there with blood coming out of my eye. I don’t know what would have happened if he had followed it up. But he didn’t.
‘So you want a fight, do you Don?’
I put my hands on his shoulders, pulled him to me, hit him in the chin with a short punch and he was out with the first one. His head twisted and I fetched it back the other way with a left. As he was falling, I sent one into his midriff, and down he went.
I walked off but couldn’t help looking back. Halden was still lying on his back in the middle of the lane. He hadn’t moved. I thought I’d killed him, so I had to go back.
‘Don, Don, this is me, Bartley, come on Don, I’m your friend.’
I lifted him and carried him over and put him slumped down by the railings, so he wouldn’t choke on his tongue or his vomit. I was also bleeding down my vest. I went back into the pub, the Blythe Inn, and said, ‘Go and pick your big champ up.’ They went out and saw him propped there while I told the landlord to order a taxi.
They took Halden to the hospital, while I went to Hinckley. I felt okay, but the next morning my face felt like it had turned inside out. I was up for the next two nights, pacing up and down, unable to sleep, breathing heavily with the pain. My aunt gave me painkillers but it made no difference. Sam’s wife took me to the hospital at Leicester. They X-rayed me and found the bone between my top teeth and my nose was broken, the bridge of my mouth was cracked and my nose was also broken. That’s how hard Halden could hit. They put a plastic shield inside my mouth, needles in it and in the bone of my nose. I was still in pain a fortnight later.
If that was how I felt, how was Halden? I rang up Stafford Hospital. With those few short punches, I had fractured his skull and broken two of his ribs. They had just let him out.