No Ordinary Joe

Giuseppe Calzaghe was fourteen years old and fearless. His father was a builder and Giuseppe grew up in that environment, in the village of Bancali, outside Sassari, on the island of Sardinia, working with mortar and stones for much of his life. People in the village called him an animal because he was strong as an ox. It was said that he could carry five big bags of cement on his back and he was tough. When the Second World War broke out he decided that he wanted to fight for his country, even though he was still a boy.

His father, Antonio, refused him permission to go to war but young Giuseppe was stubborn. He went to his uncle Comitto who forged his brother’s signature on identity papers and presented the papers to the authorities to enlist in the Italian navy, two years before he was the legal age. He never spoke much of his experiences in battle but he was captured in Spain and spent more than a year as a prisoner of war in Majorca before he returned home. He lives in Sassari today, eighty-two years old, no longer as big or as strong as he was but he still has thick wrists and shovel-like hands. I’m proud of my grandfather. The soldiers of Sassari are renowned for their courage, immortalised in the stories of the Sassari Brigade, and my grandad, I know, is a fighting man through and through.

After the war he became a policeman in Torino, where he met my grandmother, Victoria. At that time in Italy a policeman wasn’t allowed to marry before the age of twenty-eight but when my nan became pregnant they had to bring forward the wedding. Unfortunately, it leaked out and he was discharged from the police force. He was twenty-one and my nan was seventeen and they needed some means to support a family. Many Italians had come to England at the end of the war, some to the coal mines in Wales and Scotland as well, but a lot of them ended up in Bedford, where there is still a large Italian population. There they worked in the brickworks, which is what my grandad set his hands to, having travelled from Sardinia, where he and Nan and their small family had lived for a couple of years back in his home village.

My dad was two years old when they sailed across, my uncle Antonio was four and my uncle Uccio was a baby. They settled easily in Bedford, where my aunt Alba was born, yet my grandad and nan always thought of Sardinia as home and after eleven years they returned home to Bancali with their young family. Dad had become friendly at school with a boy called Joe Bugner, the former British and European heavyweight champion from the seventies, whose family had moved over from Hungary at the same time. Joe’s sister, Margaret, was in Dad’s class and Joe was in Uccio’s class and was always over at the house, messing around with Dad and his brothers. In fact, Dad used to kick his ass in the schoolyard all the time. Another brother, Sergio, was born shortly after my grandparents returned to Sardinia and it’s funny that today Dad and his three brothers all live in England or Wales while Alba, the only one in the family born here, lives back in Sardinia. Gianfranco Zola, the former Chelsea and Italy footballer, used to stay regularly in her house, after games, when he was a young lad playing for Torres before he moved to Cagliari. For a short time uncle Manlio, Alba’s husband, was president of Torres, who played in the Italian Serie C, something like the Conference here, and Dad was an apprentice at the club, playing in the youth team with Communardo Niccolai, who featured in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. As a kid, his dream was always to become a footballer, but my grandad preferred to have him box at every party in the village, entertaining the grown-ups by fighting other kids. He never had to fight though. He was too clever and beat his opponents by outboxing them.

Dad never went to school in Italy and he couldn’t speak a word of Italian when he first returned to Bancali, but at the age of fourteen he found work as a butcher. There was no such thing as signing on the dole. Over the next few years he did a number of jobs – barman, chef, cleaner, clothes shop assistant; he even took up singing and playing bass guitar with his uncle Vicenzo – before he went off to do his national service in the air force. Dad was almost twenty when he left his station in Milan. It was the hippy era, late sixties, early seventies, he grew his hair long and decided to see a bit of the world. With his guitar on his back and a small suitcase in his hand, he left Bancali and set out on a tour of Europe over the next couple of years, busking on the streets wherever he went, sleeping out on park benches whenever he had to. Music was something he hated at first because his father had pushed him into playing in his uncle Vicenzo’s band, but he had a talent for it and he got to see cities like Paris and Amsterdam. He enjoyed life on the road and, eventually, he made it to England to visit his aunt Nina who lived in Bournemouth. Not long after that he met my mum.

I arrived in Bournemouth late at night and, by chance, bumped into my brother, Antonio, who I hadn’t seen for two years. He gave me directions to Auntie’s house and when I got there she and Uncle Peppino were loading up their Austin car. ‘We’re leaving tonight for Sardinia. Come home with us,’ she said. I told her I couldn’t. ‘No way. I promised my dad I’d be a millionaire when I went back to Bancali.’ She was able to fix me up with a little job at the Double O Egg restaurant and I ate and slept there, but Bournemouth wasn’t for me. I headed for Southampton, got the boat to Le Havre and started hitch-hiking, intending to go back to Italy. Somehow I ended up in a little French village on the outskirts of Dijon – I’d been drinking and had no idea how I got there – and got woken up under a lamp post by a gendarme. I told him I was on my way to Italy and he pointed me in the general direction. So I started thumbing again, still the worse for wear, and finished up all the way back in bloody Le Havre! For some reason I decided to get the boat back across to Southampton, finished up again in Bournemouth and met a guy there who said he was going to Cardiff, so off I went with him. We arrived in the afternoon, pulled into a Wimpy restaurant to get ourselves something to eat and that’s where I met Jackie Phillips. She took our order and got cheesed off with me because I kept changing my mind about having coffee or tea but, for me, it was love at first sight. She looked Italian with her dark hair and I just got the feeling that she was familiar. So I got cheeky and I asked her out and we met that evening after she finished work. I met her mum after a couple of weeks and we were married four weeks later. Everything just felt right. – Enzo Calzaghe

My mum is from Markham, a village in south Wales, which is about three miles from where I now live in Blackwood. Markham was a mining town here in the valleys and, although the colliery was closed in 1986, it still has that same sense of community. People know one another and their roots are here and in the surrounding area. My mum’s dad was a miner. He died when she was nine years old after suffering an illness that probably came from working down the pits for years. My nan, Rebecca, was a lovely woman. Sadly, she died before I won anything in my professional boxing career, a few months before my first son, Joe, was born in 1995. She took a real interest in everything going on around her and I’d always pop round to her house, which was here in Blackwood, the day after a fight. ‘I didn’t see you boxing last night,’ she’d say. All she had was a little black-and-white television with one channel that worked, and, bless her, if she could, she would have enjoyed following my career.

For a while after they got married Mum and Dad moved to Sardinia but Mum didn’t settle, so they came back, to Bournemouth and then to London. Dad worked in a factory, making nails and screws, and had a waiting job at the B&B they lived in, on St Mark’s Road in Hammersmith. Mum was a secretary at the offices of Twentieth Century Fox and they continued to live in London after I was born in Hammersmith Hospital on 23 March 1972 in the same ward where a certain Frank Bruno first saw daylight. ‘Son of My Father’, a song which was originally written in Italian, had just been knocked off number one in the charts.

Dad decided to move back to Sardinia towards the end of 1972 and for a year or more we lived in my grandad’s house in Bancali, which he’d built with his own hands. I’m very proud of my Italian heritage. I love Italian food and I love the culture and the way the people dress. Rome has to be the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen and I’m fascinated by the history, the Colosseum, the old glory of the Eternal City. There’s not much of the Colosseum left but I’ve often imagined what it must have been like for the gladiators fighting one another to the death and facing the lions in that great amphitheatre. Sardinia has its own separate identity. It even has its own flag. The island was attacked and raided for centuries, so Sardinians are resilient and proud and sentimental. I’ve been back to Sardinia every year of my life and it will always have a special place in my heart. In my grandad’s house is the little cupboard drawer that was used as my cot when I was a baby and pride of place goes to my World Boxing Organisation (WBO) belt that I brought back and presented to my grandad after I had made my ninth title defence against Will McIntyre in Copenhagen. Family and roots have always been important to me. I’m proud to be Welsh and to represent Wales but I have Italian blood too. I’m proud of my name – it’s such an unusual name – and I’m proud to be Italian and Sardinian especially. My grandad’s little house in Bancali was really my first home.

I don’t know if my fiery character comes from the Italian side of my family or the Welsh side but my mum can be more fiery than my dad. I’m sure he’s not the only person who has thought she might be Italian! When Mum said that she wanted to move back home my dad didn’t argue and agreed to return to Markham. We moved in with my nan and lived with her for three years before the council built a new housing estate in Pentwynmawr, where we were the first family to move in. Mum and Dad still live there, on the edge of the village, about thirty miles from Cardiff. Over the years the house has been renovated and it’s a better place to live now but I was happy growing up in the area. Like most kids, I was very active and the surrounding countryside meant that I was heavily involved in outdoor activities. I was at my happiest playing football, which was my first love. I used to play all day in the summer months, from first thing in the morning until it got dark. Left side of midfield was my position and I was pretty skilful with a good engine. I could run all day but I lacked pace, unlike my dad, who was an out-and-out winger when he was young, with great acceleration. My strength was my stamina and I built up a tremendous level of fitness. If you’ve sat on your arse for most of your life, you’ll probably never reach the same peak of physical fitness as someone who has been active throughout. I was active all the time – if I wasn’t on the football pitch, I was playing hide-and-seek with my friends – and my heart and lungs developed a tremendous capacity for physical exercise.

Of course, there wasn’t much in the way of PlayStations or computers in those days, which helped too. Everything was basic. My dad worked as a conductor on the buses and my mum was a housewife. She stayed at home to bring up me and my two sisters, Sonia and Melissa, and it was hard, as it was for a lot of people in those days. There were no silver spoons in Pentwynmawr but we never went hungry. My mum cooked delicious steak and kidney pies and other great food and Dad proved more than a match. He used to come home and rustle up a curry out of nothing. I never asked him what the ingredients were and, if I’d known, I probably wouldn’t have eaten what he served up but they were great curries. Most days however, we had pasta with a beautiful sauce. My uncle Sergio went to catering college to train as a chef, yet he cannot make the same kind of meal as my dad. He just always had the knack. Actually, Sergio, Uccio and my dad are all great cooks. They take after my grandad, another brilliant cook. Unfortunately, although I don’t make a bad pasta, I’ve been unable to continue the family tradition. What can I say? I must have missed those lessons.

I don’t know why but I cried my eyes out on my first day at Pentwynmawr Primary School. I was a big baby, the only kid in the class who didn’t stop crying all day long. Mrs Watson, the teacher, tried to settle me down, putting me into one of those cars we had that were made out of red wooden boxes, but I just kept crying, like a mummy’s boy. Perhaps I had a premonition of a painful episode that was soon to come.

I wasn’t a loud kid. I was actually shy and timid. My sisters and I fought a lot but that was mainly because I was outnumbered. We loved each other. Every Christmas we went carol singing together and we could harmonise beautifully. Those were different times. We were able to go around to houses not having to worry about who would open the door or what type of person they were. I would never allow my kids to go carol singing or trick-or-treating now but back then it was all more innocent. It was beautiful.

My dreams were played out on the football pitch. I played at school and started to train with Pentwynmawr Under 10s. Whenever I wasn’t picked and was left on the subs’ bench I cried. I just loved the game so much that it was a real loss for me not to be playing when I had the chance. ‘Why do you keep leaving me out of the team?’ I would ask the coach, and if I see him now I nearly always tell him, ‘Vid, you left me mentally scarred as a kid,’ and I’m only half kidding. I was always a sub. Then Gordon Phillips took over and I started to make the team, so the next big challenge was to score my first goal. It took me a while but it was my holy grail. Dad would tell me on the morning of a game that if I got a goal, he’d give me 50p. I used to pray, ‘Please, God, get me a goal, just one goal.’ It meant so much to me to score and I remember my first goal vividly. We were playing a team called Cefn Forest and it was a scrappy, goalmouth scramble. I managed to toe-poke the ball into the net but I might as well have scored the greatest goal ever. Suddenly, I was off celebrating like Tardelli at the World Cup. I must have run half the length of the pitch before I heard a voice from the sidelines: ‘Joe, what are you doing? Get back. Get back.’ But it was too late. By the time I looked round the other team had scored – their fourth in a 6–1 win. But I didn’t give a monkey’s. I’d scored a goal. That’s all that mattered. I should have realised then that I’m not a team player.

I scored twenty goals in my first full season as a regular player for Pentwynmawr Under 10s and fourteen the following season, a good return for a midfield player. I looked forward to every game like it was Christmas morning. I remember staring out the window one morning and everywhere was covered in snow. There must have been a foot of snow on the ground and anyone would have been able to tell you that there wasn’t going to be a game of football played. But off I went to Gordon’s house, almost two miles away, just to make sure. I had a thin pair of socks on my feet and trainers that had holes in the bottom of them and by the time I got to Gordon’s my toes were so cold they were numb and my fingers were the same. Needless to say, Gordon told me there would be no game, so I turned round and ran home, crying as I was running because my feet were freezing. No matter the weather, if there was a game to be played, I didn’t want to miss it.

But much as I loved football, I discovered that my real talent was in my hands. I was eight years old when Dad bought me one of these Sugar Ray Leonard punchballs. I was still more into football then but I began to punch this ball and I liked the feeling. My first ‘bag’ was actually a piece of rolled-up carpet that my dad had brought into the house one day. I used to stand there and punch it, left hooks, right hands, uppercuts, crosses, shifting my weight on my feet, ripping into it like I imagined Hagler would do but always with Leonard’s speed. Leonard, Hagler and Ali were the fighters that my dad most admired. Football and boxing were his big sports and he kept encouraging me and after a while he began to notice that I had some skill. I would move around the boxing ball as if it was an imaginary opponent, just as you’re supposed to do.

The first boxer I remember was Sugar Ray Leonard. I couldn’t say his name properly and called him Sugar Ray Lemon. I can recall clearly in my mind the ‘No Mas’ fight when Leonard made Roberto Duran quit in the eighth round of their rematch in New Orleans. No mas, he said. No more. I couldn’t believe what Leonard did. He was like a clown, winding up the bolo punch with his right hand and hitting Duran in the face with his left. He made me laugh because I didn’t understand the psychology. I just saw a guy pulling faces and sticking his chin out while the other guy was unable to hit him. Duran just gave up in the end and it was unbelievable.

Marvelous Marvin Hagler was another fighter I liked. I used to watch him and get my gloves on and start punching the walls. While Leonard was a showman, Hagler brought out the aggression in me. I’d still never been to a boxing gym so I used to get out a cushion and Dad taught me how to stand and how to punch. I was ten when Dad took me to the gym for the first time, Newbridge Amateur Boxing Club. The trainer was Paul Williams and he had an assistant trainer called Dennis Rogers. The boxing gym was a big blue shed and the first thing I saw was these men punching the bags and what struck me was the loud boom boom boom as the fighters hit those bags and sparred in the ring. The noise scared me. I couldn’t skip so they gave me a pair of gloves and I started punching the bag. Dennis tried to show me how to hit it, but I was already into it and within a couple of minutes Paul Williams walked over and said to my dad, ‘Where has your son been boxing then?’ He thought I had come from another gym and that I’d already had some fights because of the way I could hit and move but I’d learnt everything I knew from my dad. People think my dad knows nothing about boxing. That’s what they believe. But from the first day I went to the boxing gym in Newbridge, where Paul Williams took training Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, my dad trained me every day of the week. At home he would take the cushion off the settee and put it around his waist and I would hit it as if he was holding the pads. As I got older, he used to have me punch his hand and, until I was seventeen and really began to grow, he was my best sparring partner. I used to have more trouble sparring him than anybody because he knew my style. He’d wear a protective cup and when I started getting bigger he put a headguard on and he was busy, throwing good combinations. I’ve never been one to bash up sparring partners, so with my dad it was more feinting and fencing, picking him off and parrying. We would tap each other really, neither of us hitting hard, but it certainly helped to hone skills and reflexes.

People are amazed whenever they see us working on the pads. We used to do our own combinations and I get my hand speed from the work rate I’ve always kept up on the pads with my dad. From the age of eleven, I’ve always had fast hands. I’ve got my own style and sometimes I throw so many punches, like Roy Jones does, like Leonard used to do, two incredibly fast fighters. But you can’t turn over your hand and add power to every punch, if you’re throwing them in fast bunches. When you’re throwing ten punches in two seconds it’s just impossible.

I played for the Under 10s on a Saturday morning and sometimes on a Wednesday. In the summer I had training in Newbridge on a Wednesday but when we had a match I wanted to play football. ‘I don’t want to box,’ I would say, ‘I want to play football.’ One Wednesday night I skipped boxing training for an evening game. At the end of the trial I realised that I was never going to be an exceptional footballer. I was winning fights and doing well in boxing, so I decided I would stick with that. I loved football but after Under 12s I gave up. I wouldn’t have made it as a top-flight footballer because I didn’t have enough pace. Perhaps I could have been a half-decent footballer but I wouldn’t have made the top grade. Yet what I lacked in my feet I gained in my hands. I knocked football on the head and threw all my energy into boxing.

I can see it and hear it still, the name-calling and kids in the classroom chucking things at me and laughing. I can feel the sweat rolling down my back and the humiliation. I was embarrassed and I just sat in the corner and bottled everything up. At break times, when the other kids went to play football, I would sit on a wall, completely by myself. It was one kid who caused all the trouble but, eventually, no one in the class would speak to me and it lasted for months. I was tormented. Now I’d just laugh it off, but to a young teenager, being bullied can seem like the end of the world.

There was never any problem at Pentwynmawr Primary. I liked school, did my homework and I made friends easily. The bother began when I changed schools at the age of eleven and instead of staying in Newbridge, where all of my friends were going to the local school, I was sent to Oakdale Comprehensive, about six miles away. It was outside my catchment area and I never really wanted to go but our next-door neighbour’s son went there and Mum thought Oakdale was a better school. I enjoyed my first and second years, the second year even better than the first. I was a bit unruly when I started, messing about with a couple of kids, giving them dead arms because I was an amateur boxer, I guess. But I wasn’t bullying them or threatening them. That was never my way. It was just a laugh. I did quite well at my studies when I concentrated and I was beginning to settle in when, in my third year, my friends just deserted me. It was like an exodus. It was horrible. Even my next-door neighbour stopped speaking to me, a boy I’d grown up with and known my whole life. Dave, a friend of mine through the boxing, wasn’t speaking to me either. Something happened involving a new kid from South Africa but I’ve never understood what really went on. All I know is that all of a sudden no one in my class was talking to me and I hadn’t a clue why. My nightmare at school had begun.

The abuse was mostly verbal, not physical, but it tore away at me. In reality, it was petty stuff but it was also an orchestrated campaign and it got to me. Even though I was boxing, I was small for my age and skinny, matchstick-thin, and I was quiet, therefore an easy target. Physically, I was sixteen or seventeen before I really developed and was always smaller than the other kids in my year. Occasionally, older and bigger guys would try it on because I was a boxer, so I became like a little hermit and just sat away in the corner. I couldn’t bond with anybody. I stayed within myself all the time. If I’d grown up more quickly, probably none of it would have happened and my schoolwork went completely down the pan as a result. I just sat in the class unable to concentrate, worried all the time, completely stressed out and I couldn’t take in anything that I was being taught. I just retreated into a shell, for the only way I could handle it was to shut myself off.

The next thing I knew, there were thirty kids who had turned up on bikes outside the front of our house one weekend, all of them looking for me. My dad went out and took me and this kid Miller, said that we were going for a walk and told the rest of the kids to stay there. I found out later that their plan was to jump me, so Miller wouldn’t walk anywhere on his own. He needed the protection of his mates, if he was going to fight me.

Joe was being bullied for a long time before we knew anything about it. He never came home and told us anything that suggested he was feeling so low. He just kept it to himself. Then one weekend morning a large group of boys came down on their bikes. Me and his dad were here and, at first, Joe said they wanted him to come out to play but what they wanted to do was hurt him. Enzo realised what was happening and went out and said, “OK, one by one,” but they all just scarpered. Before that incident I never could have told that Joe was being bullied. Boys go through their teenage years and sometimes they’re not too keen to open up. – Jackie Calzaghe

Mum and Dad both asked me if I wanted to change schools but I said I didn’t and decided to just stick it out. When I look back now I ask myself, ‘Why didn’t I just move schools?’ To this day I don’t understand why I put myself through that hell. I never skipped school either, even though I had to walk almost three miles just to get the bus. Why didn’t I? I was learning nothing anyway because my mind was switched off but I made a masochist of myself. Thinking back, I should have gone to the other school in Newbridge when I had the chance, but maybe it’s just not in me to be a quitter.

This went on for the whole of my third year but the people who were behind it all didn’t bother me so much in my fourth year because they got no reaction any more. I kept myself to myself and stayed away from the kids who pissed me off. But the abuse affected me to such an extent that I didn’t devote any time or energy to my schoolwork and didn’t sit any GCSE exams. It was 1988 and the European football championships were being held in Germany that year so I just stayed at home and watched the games. The headmaster had written on one of my school reports: ‘If Joe put half as much effort into school as he does into his boxing, he would be one of our top students.’ But I was only ever able to go through the motions in class because of the stress of my third year. I just wasn’t interested and lost so much during that time at school. I never recovered from it. I wasn’t listening to the teachers because I still thought that someone was going to say something about me and, as soon as they would, I’d start churning up inside. In the end it made me stronger as a person and now I speak out about bullying. It can be a devastating position for a young person to be in but I tell kids that it happened to me, a guy who went on to become a world boxing champion, so maybe my experience will help some of the victims of bullying today. A lot of children are embarrassed and ashamed to tell anyone but it can happen to anybody.

I also tell kids, my own included, that they should never throw all their eggs in one basket though that’s what I did. Boxing was escape. When I went to the gym, started sparring and hitting the bags, I was a different guy. I was left to concentrate on my training and my boxing. I had friends. So I was like two different characters, an introvert at school where no one would have guessed I was a boxer just to look at me, and outgoing and happy in the evening, joking with my friends from my old primary school as usual. I don’t really know what lasting psychological effects that bullying had on me but I went in for a very flamboyant style of boxing from a young age and, strangely, the ring was always a stress-free zone. I knew I had talent and my goal, my burning ambition, was to be a world champion. Dad could see that desire in me, almost from the start, and he always gave me confidence. Even as an amateur, I developed an aggressive, professional style. I planted my feet and threw hard uppercuts and body shots. In boxing you don’t see many aggressive, come-forward southpaws. Normally, southpaws are quite cautious but I’ve always wanted to move in and fight. When the bullying was at its worst I remember that I went to see my careers teacher one day and she asked me how I wanted to earn a living. I told her I was a boxer and I was going to become a world champion. I was full of confidence, but she looked at me and laughed.

I never had many friends growing up but my best friend has always been my dad. He didn’t drive a car for years, so most people in the valleys came to know him as ‘the running man’ because he walked and jogged everywhere and he still would, despite having a car now, if it wasn’t for his knees. Dad has always been fit and if he had to go to Blackwood, three miles away from our home in Pentwynmawr, he would often have walked there and I was always with him. If I had a penny for every mile we’ve run and jogged and walked side by side over the years, I wouldn’t still be boxing for a living. When I joined the boxing gym in Newbridge we used to walk the mile and a half there and back. I probably walked and ran ten miles most days, between going to the gym and getting out for the school bus, and this built up a good level of fitness and stamina. I didn’t start driving until I was twenty-one, taking after Dad.

My earliest memories are of my dad playing in a little band with my uncle Uccio. They were always into music and used to practise in an upstairs bedroom, Dad on lead guitar, Uccio on vocals, and every weekend they went out to do a gig. Uccio lived just up the road in Blackwood, but he often stayed over when they came home. Uccio was a big part of my life growing up and so was music. Saturday night was ‘Teddy boy’ night, with Dad wearing a pair of those bloody awful winkle-picker boots, which had metal taps on the soles and long, pointed toes. Their only redeeming feature was that I could always hear him coming home. I’d be lying in bed and I’d hear this distinctive clicking sound along the road. ‘Dad’s almost home,’ I’d say before running down the stairs to meet him and he’d let me stay up to watch Match of the Day or maybe a fight.

Eventually Uccio moved with his family to Milton Keynes, and this meant that Dad was away a lot with the band. Calling themselves ‘Foreign Legion’ and then ‘Burgundy’, they were working on a record contract and regularly played as supporting acts for bands like Bucks Fizz, the Barron Knights and Edwin Starr. There were times when I might see Dad only one day a week and I used to get lonely when he wasn’t around. I was the only boy in the house, both my sisters were closer to Mum and, because of what was happening at school, sometimes I had a problem dealing with the loneliness. The boxing gym became a refuge and I took up hunting with a mate of mine called Kevin and got myself a ferret, which my mum hated because he stank the house out even though his cage was in the back garden. I used to go to the butcher’s to get him bits of livers and lungs that were going to be chucked out and at the weekend me and Kevin would go into the fields looking for rabbit holes, throw down the nets and send in the ferret. We killed the rabbits by grabbing them and breaking their necks. Kevin had no problems killing and skinning the rabbits. He might even say he enjoyed it. My pleasure came from eating them and escaping from Jackson’s farm, which was one of our favourite haunts, as Farmer Jackson came running and screaming after us. We often had to leave the ferret behind because he could be hours down the rabbit hole. When Dad came home he’d grill the rabbit and throw salt on it and we ate it like that, although never in front of Mum who hated the rabbits more than the ferret.

Funny, when I grew out of hunting rabbits I got myself a pet rabbit and cried when the wee thing died after only a couple of months. Dad was the same. He didn’t like dogs and would never allow one about the house, but one day Mum brought home a beautiful dog, a cross between a sheepdog and a Lassie, who we called Bruce. The first time Dad came home and saw him he shouted, ‘This is an outside animal.’ He whacked Bruce to get him off the bed and cut his hand on his teeth. ‘Serves you right, Dad,’ I thought. It took a while for Dad to grow affectionate towards old Bruce. He wasn’t one to sit down and stroke the dog or take him for walks. Instead he used to give out about him all the time, yet when Bruce died a couple of years ago Dad cried for him more than my mum did. Really we must be big softies at heart, me and Dad.

We spent some of our best days back then hitch-hiking between home and Milton Keynes. Dad might thumb a lift in the morning back home to see us and head up the road again the same day, so I used to love it when he took me with him. There could be snow lying by the sides of the road, both of us freezing, but we still made the journey, which we could sometimes do in as little as three or four hours. We always tried to stop by an orchard near Bristol, so that we could grab ourselves some big cooking apples to eat along the way. That was our lunch. Dad liked to take me because passing drivers would be more likely to take pity on a guy who had a young kid with him. Back then there would be a line of hitch-hikers by the side of the road, all looking to be taken somewhere. I went up a couple of times a month and enjoyed the trip. It was an adventure and I was with my dad, spending time with him, and I loved listening to him and Uccio and Serge performing onstage.

At one point Dad was going to move us all up to Milton Keynes to make life easier and so that we could be a family again. We were even ready to pick up the keys to our new house before Mum phoned the solicitors and told them that we wouldn’t be moving. So Dad continued to do the commute and I kept going with him as often as I could. He played at the Apollo Theatre in London and supported Shirley Bassey. He even recorded with Paul Young just before Paul Young made it big. I thought he was going to make it into the charts and I told my friends but it just never happened for him. He made no money from it but that’s what he wanted to be and that’s what I wanted for him and me. However, soon we embarked on a new dream, one we’ve shared together every step of the way, most of it in a decrepit old shed in Newbridge where we’ve rowed, fallen out and not spoken to one another and forgotten it ever happened within minutes. Because we created something special in that place too.