Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
– George Orwell, ‘Such, Such were the Joys’
People react to fear, not love – they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.
– Richard Nixon
A little boy lies on his bed with his radio in the summer of ’76. It’s the first Tuesday in May and the battle for the league championship has gone to the wire. To retain their title, and deny season-long-rivals Queens Park Rangers an historic first championship triumph, Liverpool must win or draw with Wolves in the final game of the season. To avoid relegation and a return to Division Two, Wolves must beat Liverpool. The little boy listens as the excitement builds at Molineux. Posters of Kevin Keegan and Steve Heighway and John Toshack adorn his bedroom wall. The boy also likes Millwall but there is no team quite like Liverpool. And no player like Kevin Keegan he would more like to be.
The game kicks off. Steve Kindon gives the home side the perfect start with a goal after thirteen minutes. Ray Kennedy almost equalizes, but his volley is just tipped over. Half-time comes and goes. The little boy wriggles and wrestles with the sheets. After fifty-five minutes Jimmy Case is called to the touchline and David Fairclough runs on. Supersub! Ten minutes pass. An upset is on the cards. Liverpool on the attack. Just fifteen minutes left. The ball is pumped forward to Toshack. He rises and backheads it on. Keegan has made a run on the blind side . . . Kevin Keegan scores! The little boy jumps from his bed with delight.
The little boy’s name is Tony Cascarino. His little home at 10 Garden Cottages is in St Paul’s Cray, near Orpington, Kent. The little snapshot of his childhood is one of many happy memories he has presented to reporters and writers over the years. Would he have offered more of the same to Graham Taylor’s sports psychologist? Probably. Why? Because that’s what footballers do these days. We drive flash cars and wear flash clothes and behave like flash pop stars; and we shape and mould the truth about our lives and present ourselves as shiny, happy people in the pages of Hello . . .
I was twelve years old when I discovered what it is to be afraid. It happened on a cold afternoon in December when I was walking home to 10 Garden Cottages with my best friend Chris McCarthy. Christmas was coming and for weeks we had been working on a plan to make money from our fellow pupils at St Joseph’s Secondary School. First we had compiled a shopping list of the things they most wanted for Christmas. Then today we had taken the bus to Orpington and nicked what was required. It was a no-lose situation. By selling the order at seriously reduced prices we were guaranteed a nice little earner. Delighted with a job well done, we had stashed the loot into two large plastic bags and had just started the climb at the bottom of our road when we happened to bump into my parents. Not part of the plan. My heart skipped a beat and I decided to bluff it out.
‘Hi, Mum. Hi, Dad. Where’re you off to, then?’
Mum smiled. My father – no great surprise – was his usual crusty self.
‘What’s in the bags?’ he snapped.
‘Err . . . nothing.’ I panicked.
It wasn’t very convincing. My father took one of the bags and opened it and, without saying a word, handed it to Mum. The punch came from nowhere and spun me across the path. Stunned, I tried to find my bearings and catch a breath but everything was moving. A neighbour, Mr Choules, was staring across from his driveway in disbelief. Still shaking, I struggled to my feet and he hit me again. He thumped me as a man would thump another man. He booted and bombed me with every ounce of his strength for a hundred yards until we reached our house. Mum was pleading with him to stop but the battery didn’t end until I reached my bedroom. Mum was worried that I was seriously hurt and sat with me for hours. I had lumps and bruises everywhere and ached all over as I lay on the bed but more acute than the pain was the stinging sensation of damp between my legs: I had wet myself.
My mother had the world at her feet on that warm summer’s evening in 1959. She was sixteen years old, had just found a job in London and was waiting for her boyfriend outside the Rose Croft Social Club in St Paul’s Cray, when fate smiled and gave her a wink: ‘Ain’t he turned up yet?’ She had never met Dominic Cascarino before and wasn’t sure she wanted to. ‘Don’t worry,’ she replied coolly. ‘He will.’ A week later she noticed him again at the dance in the social club. Three years older and a fluent Italian speaker, he told her he lived in London and had taken the train out with some friends.
She thought a bit more of him, second time around: Dominic was witty, smart and ‘different’ because he came from the city. They danced and made a date to do it again. They dated again and before the end of the summer, my mother was pregnant. They married as quickly as arrangements could be made and moved in with my mother’s parents, Michael and Agnes O’Malley. It wasn’t an ideal start to wedded life. My grandfather wasn’t, for obvious reasons, that keen on his new son-in-law, but they made the best of it for a year until my parents found a place of their own. My sister, Mandy, was born in February 1960 and the family was completed, two years later on 1 September, when my mother gave birth to a son. My life had begun.
We choose our friends, not our family. I never chose my Dad. My first tangible memory of him was a severe smacking when I was six or seven years old. I’m not sure what I did to deserve it, but then it never took much. My father was a crusty man with a volatile temper and he was almost always in a bad mood. As a boy, I didn’t understand what bad moods were, but the knack of bringing out the worst in him seemed to come naturally. From the day I was born there seemed to be a chasm between us that widened the closer I became to my mother. I adored my mother and followed her constantly around the house as a boy but would never sit alone in the same room as a father who never hugged or kissed or showed me any affection. He wanted me to be like Mandy, spirited and fiery and confrontational, to be an Italian, a true Cascarino; but I just didn’t have the testosterone. I was timid and docile and more an O’Malley by nature. A dreaded mummy’s boy.
When I was nine, he came to watch me playing football at school one afternoon. We were hammered 7–2 and he did nothing but shout at me all through the game. It was miserable. I could see all the other parents looking at him and towards the end I completely lost it and told him to give me a break. He brought me home and gave me a beating. He swore he would never come to watch me again and as ever was as good as his word. The experience left me physically and mentally scarred. The bruises quickly healed but the emotional wounds lingered. I performed poorly in school and generally lacked confidence. I wet the bed until I was fourteen years old.
The eruptions continued through my teenage years. I had a habit of lying on the carpet in front of the fire that used to really get up his nose. Incensed that I was ‘blocking the heat for everyone else’, he’d lash out with his boot and kick me in the back. One night, a few months after my seventeenth birthday, he did it for the last time. I’d spent the day labouring on a building site and had collapsed on the carpet in front of the TV. My father had also had a hard day and returned home even later.
‘Get your arse away from the fire,’ he roared.
‘No, I’m not getting up,’ I replied, instinctively.
It wasn’t planned. The words had already left my mouth when I realized I’d rebelled.
I closed my eyes and braced myself for the inevitable.
Nothing if not consistent, he jumped off the sofa and hoofed me in the ribs: ‘I’m not going to tell you again, get your arse away from the fire.’
Gasping as the air was toe-poked from my lungs, I coughed and spluttered and decided to hold my ground: ‘No, not this time.’
Enraged, he picked up a glass and flung it across the room. It shattered and stuck in my hand as I lifted my arm to protect myself.
It would be easy to describe what happened next as that classic scene from the movies where the coward of the county breaks and shows the world he’s a real man by unleashing seventeen years of pent-up fury on the bastard who has cruelly abused him. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all. With blood gushing from my hand, I crossed the room to face him. We stood eye to eye and without saying a word, both understood he would never hit me again. And it was strange, but I felt no sense of joy or elation when it was over and the moment had passed. Just a sadness I couldn’t fathom. Just an awful nagging guilt that gnawed away at me for days.
There was one port of refuge from the violent storms. Don and Molly Wilson lived next door but were always more than neighbours. I remember one night in particular, when my father went berserk and smashed everything in the kitchen. Mandy and I were ushered out of the house and we fled to the bunker next door. It was extremely embarrassing for my mother, but the Wilsons were very understanding and kind. I’m not sure what they made of my father. When you didn’t know him, he could appear smart, witty and engaging, and it wouldn’t be an act. Sometimes, when he was in good form, I’d look at him and think: ‘Why can’t you be like this at home? Why can’t you be like this all the time?’ The answer was that he couldn’t help it. He was classic Jekyll and Hyde.
In the summer of 1971, he packed us off to Italy on holiday to visit our ancestral home. We travelled south to Rome and on to Monte Cassino (famed for its monastery and epic battle during the Second World War) and spent a week visiting relatives I had never met before and couldn’t understand. My paternal grandparents, Dominic and Rosie Cascarino, were born in Monte Cassino and undoubtedly would have died there but for the war, when they fled to Scotland and settled in Edinburgh. My father was the first of eight children born there. Dominic Cascarino was a cobbler by trade but decided to open an ice-cream parlour for this new chapter in their lives. It didn’t work. Edinburgh wasn’t Naples. After seven years of struggling to survive, they moved south to London in search of better times.
Dominic and Rosie were a mystery to me. The only time they ever came to St Paul’s Cray was on the day my parents were married. They never visited us at home or sent cards or presents on our birthday or conferred any of the warmth that flowed from the O’Malleys. They lived in a flat in Elephant and Castle in London and sometimes my father would take us up on the train to see them. Sunday was always a good day to visit because his brothers and sisters called and they’d gather around the table for cards. Except for Rosie. My grandmother never played. And never entered the room without permission. My grandfather treated her incredibly harshly. She’d come in, serve his tea and be dismissed like a dog to the kitchen: ‘Vaffanoculo!’ And every time, she’d withdraw without a word.
The card games were amazing. My grandfather would shuffle at the top of the table, smiling at the head of his big, happy family, until the money went down, when they’d start ripping each other apart. My grandfather hated losing and played each game as if he was playing for his life. I remember once casually glancing at his hand as I slowly toured the table. Furious, he threw his cards into the air and accused my father of using me to cheat. The game was abandoned, the table was upended and within seconds they were at each other’s throats . . . just another typical Sunday with la famiglia. I’d sit and watch and listen to them squabble, and another piece of the puzzle that was my father, would fall into place. The anger that consumed him in my childhood was born in that flat at Elephant and Castle, a place where love and affection was as scarce as bread on the table and education a luxury they couldn’t afford. Sent out to work as soon as he could earn, my father was unqualified and unskilled. He could not read or write on the day he met my mother and spent his early married life ducking and diving to survive.
Someone should write a thesis sometime on the effect of baldness on men. Some accept it with a shrug of the shoulders; others literally explode. My father couldn’t handle it. Racked by insecurity, he tried to pretend it couldn’t happen but soon the frustration and loathing began to burn like a fuse. Sooner or later, something had to give. Sooner and later we did: my sister gave, my mother gave, I gave. Together we survived the bombs until the war was ended and all that was left was the hurt.