I was born in 1950 at Brook Street Hospital and grew up in Lambeth, south London. My mother abandoned me on my grandparents’ doorstep when I was just eleven months old, so I have no memories of her whatsoever. I don’t even have a photograph, so I have no idea what she looked like, or whether I resemble her in any way. I’ve never met her since – I don’t even know if she is still alive – so I don’t know for sure why caring for a child was too much for her nor why she took the drastic step that she did.
I’ve been told that her name was Doreen Parker. I don’t know what age Doreen was when she married my father, or what age she was when I was born. She just disappeared into the ether and, so far as my family told me, was never seen again.
My father and grandparents often told me that Doreen had been a “lady of the night”, a prostitute, and I don’t know whether this was true or not. They were hardly likely to be kind and impartial under the circumstances; having raised eleven children of their own, Nan and Grandad were starting all over again with me at a stage in their lives when they might reasonably have expected to be able to start taking things a little more easily.
I like to think that in choosing my grandparents to look after her baby boy, Doreen was doing the best she could in what must have been very difficult circumstances for her. No doubt she had her reasons for not keeping me or leaving me with my father, and I hope that they were good ones.
As a child, I did my best to ignore or block out any comments I heard about my mother, because they hurt more than I ever admitted. For years, I thought that I hadn’t paid much attention to them, but looking back now, I believe that being told such awful things about my biological mother every time her name came up caused serious emotional problems for me later on.
Many children who grow up without a parent develop fantasies about how, one day, they will come back and find them. But I never did. I was never allowed to talk about my mother; it was a taboo subject. I just tried to get on with each day as it came and I hardly ever wondered about Doreen Parker. I have never found out what happened to her. For all I know, she is still living, and I presume that I may have uncles and aunts and siblings somewhere out there. At this stage, I just have to accept that I will never know.
I grew up as an only child with Nan and Grandad. My father was not around very much, even though he lived quite close by. We lived in Hutton Road in a small two-up, two-down house like so many others in the city. I slept in the same room as my grandparents because my uncle Albie, a single man, used the other bedroom. Uncle Albie was, at about fifteen years older than me, the youngest of Nan and Grandad’s many children.
I didn’t have a bed. I had to sleep on a rather lumpy, old-fashioned settee, from which I could see through a hatch out onto the stairway. This view regularly frightened the life out of me because of all the noises and sounds I could hear in the house and because of the shadows that I would often see dancing against the wall. I frequently had vivid nightmares and would sleepwalk. On one occasion, Uncle Albie stopped me from climbing out of the bedroom window, which was much closer to the floor than would be the case in a modern house. I don’t remember what any of my nightmares were about.
My grandparents were good people and they did their best for me. But it wasn’t easy for them to play the role of mum and dad at their age, even with Uncle Albie’s help – especially because my real father, Reg, was a difficult man who wasn’t willing or able to help out on anything like a regular basis. Dad was a very heavy drinker; an alcoholic, in fact. He had a good job as a steel erector, but went through the money he earned very quickly. He loved to gamble and regularly lost all of his money down at the bookies’ where, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he was always sure he would make his fortune one day.
Dad had serious problems with his temper, too. He used to call round Nan’s occasionally for Sunday lunch, or to sort me out when I had played up, especially as I grew older and more difficult to deal with. He would come round, threaten me by saying that I should behave or else, or give me a good hiding and tell me that Nan and Grandad didn’t want me and were going to put me in a children’s home, so they could be rid of me and all my annoying ways.
I was afraid of my father, and I think that my grandparents were often afraid of him, too. He didn’t seem to have a great deal of control over his emotions and was liable to lash out like a man possessed when things weren’t to his liking. And things often weren’t to his liking. I remember one Sunday when he came round straight from the pub, and complained that the dinner Nan had prepared was cold. When this wasn’t dealt with quickly enough for him, Dad started screaming and shouting his complaints, telling Nan that she was bloody useless and that the least he should expect after the hard week that he had had was a good, hot dinner. The tantrum climaxed when he smashed his plate over Nan’s head.
“Call that a Sunday dinner?” he screamed. “I wouldn’t fucking give that to a dog. It’s like something you’d find beside a lamp-post. That’s not food; I don’t want it.” He stamped off in a rage, slamming the door so hard behind him that the glass in the front window shook.
I remember Nan just standing there with gravy and blood pouring down her face. There was so much blood it half-filled the old enamel pail that she always used to wash the floor. Her head had been split wide open, and she had to go to hospital for treatment. I remember Grandad trying to stop the flow of blood as best he could while we waited for the ambulance to come.
I was hysterical and frightened, wondering whether Nan was going to die and what would happen to me if she did. I cried and cried but wanted to stay with her while she was being looked after. Eventually, Auntie Pat from across the road, Dad’s older sister, came to collect me, to look after me, as the ambulance arrived to take my grandmother away.
Nan was only in her fifties at that time, but she looked a lot older in her hospital bed when I was taken to visit her. I don’t know if my father ever apologised for what he had done, but he was back again not long after that and everything was back to what passed for normal for him, so I suppose Nan must have decided to forgive and forget – or that it was easier to carry on as though nothing had happened. I accepted that this was just the way it was. There was nothing anybody could do about my father’s behaviour, so we just worked around it as best we could.
On other occasions, Dad would be told about some misdemeanour or other that I had committed, and he would teach me a lesson the only way he knew how: he would give me a good thump and issue some more recriminations and threats. Having seen what he had done to Nan, I was sure that he meant them.
Reg was very much the black sheep of the family; the rest of his brothers and sisters had done quite well in life and most of them had settled down, had children of their own, and just got on with things. Dad was the third oldest of the eleven children in his family. Everyone told me that he had been a tearaway from the start, that Nan and Grandad had always had their work cut out with him, and that the teachers had found him impossible, too.
When he was a boy, our street was still lit by gas lamps, and one of my dad’s favourite tricks was to climb up them to get a light for his fag and to put out the gas light while he was there. He often told me this story, and thought it was hilarious. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, his parents had regularly had to deal with the police knocking on their door about some trouble or other that he had been up to. I think he must have had a hard time growing up, and presume that Grandad had been tough on him, the way he was tough on me. But because my father and I never talked very much, I can only guess at the details of what went on between them. My feeling is that he was a very unhappy man all the time I knew him, because his behaviour was not that of a person at peace with himself and the world.
Unfortunately, as I got older, it became obvious from the way I behaved and interacted with others that I had learned a lot from my dad, although thankfully, at this stage I was never violent towards Nan and Grandad. I shared my dad’s short temper and tendency to fly off the handle when things didn’t go well for me. I also found it very difficult to articulate my feelings and tell people that I needed some support when things weren’t going well for me.
Like my father, when I had a problem I kept it to myself for as long as I could and tried to pretend that it wasn’t there and that I had the situation under control, although I almost never did. Eventually, the problem would escalate and I would explode in a fit of rage and shame. These tendencies would cause me a lot of problems at school and later on.
When I was six I was sent to the local school – Vauxhall Primary School – a few roads from where I lived. It was an ordinary school in most respects, but the playground was on the roof, about four floors up.
From as far back as I can remember, I was the dunce of the class. I found schoolwork impossibly difficult, didn’t know when or how to ask for help and had a lot of problems dealing with the teachers and all their demands. All the other children mastered reading and writing, but I would just stare miserably at the page with a complete lack of comprehension. I was a bit better at maths, but not enough to make up for my shortcomings in the area of literacy.
The school, on Vauxhall Street in Lambeth, was quite rough, and any child who stood out as being different was a natural target for bullies. All the other children in the class seemed to be brighter than me by a long shot. They could all read quite well, while I was still struggling to spell out my name. They used to take the mickey out of me because I was stupid, and also because I didn’t have a mum or a proper dad and was one of the poorest children in the class; the one with the tatty clothes and the snotty face.
“What’s the matter with you, Steve?” one kid would ask. “Did your mum drop you on your head or something?”
“He doesn’t even have a mum!” someone else would say gleefully. “And he doesn’t have a proper dad, either.”
“Yeah, probably because they didn’t want him, eh? Nobody wanted you, did they, Steve?”
So I couldn’t read, and I couldn’t write, and on top of that I never had any new clothes. I wore hand-me-downs that Nan had picked up from my aunts and uncles. I was small for my age, too, a bit of a runt, and so naturally I became the whipping boy for the whole class.
I hated going to school, because every day I felt as though I had been picked out for special torture at the hands of the other kids. Since then, I have always been very sympathetic towards kids who are being bullied, as I know exactly what it feels like and how powerless the victim is. Things may be better in schools now, but in those days there was little or no support for the child who was struggling and being bullied. The general attitude seemed to be that if you didn’t stand up for yourself, you more or less deserved what you got. School was supposed to toughen kids up, and getting bullied was part of the educational process.
Because the school was big and the classes were large, it was run along military lines. As a matter of fact, I believe that a lot of the teachers had army backgrounds. This was the 1950s, so a lot of the men would have been in the Second World War as youngsters. Believe me, it showed.
Teaching in my school was very much an exercise in crowd control. The teachers would yell out orders in the large classrooms – and you’d be in for it if you didn’t do what you were told! One of the teachers was very much like a sergeant major. His way of teaching English was to get each child up in front of the class to read from a book, whether they could manage it or not. I couldn’t. I was painfully shy, and I wasn’t just slow to pick up reading and writing; I remained almost completely illiterate throughout my education.
I can still remember standing in front of the class and looking at the book, unable to decipher even a single word. The words were just like black scratches on the page and they conveyed no meaning to me whatsoever. After a while, the teacher screamed at me to sit down and stop wasting everybody’s time, and the rest of the children sniggered “stupid bastard!” as I made my way back towards my seat, trying not to cry and wiping my snotty nose on my sleeve. I was often made to look stupid because I couldn’t read, and I was often made to stand in the corner facing the wall, the better to think about my shortcomings and what I needed to do about them. This made me feel really angry; it wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t read and it felt like nobody was trying to help. Most of the teachers gave up on me. The children just laughed at me. Nan and Grandad were in no position to help.
Children who failed to do what they were supposed to be able to manage were sent to the headmistress to be punished. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time shuffling down the long corridor towards her office, waiting to hear the riot act yet again. With each year that passed, I became more conscious of all the things I didn’t have and couldn’t do. I learned that my illiteracy was something to be embarrassed about and ashamed of.
The school system offered free dinners to children from poor families, and of course I was eligible. This was a good system insofar as it ensured that everyone had at least one square meal a day. But children being children, it was used as a way to single out the weak ones and make fun of them. The teachers dealt with it quite insensitively. They would shout out, “Hey, Steve, are you having free milk today? Are you down for a free dinner?” and I would feel as though all eyes were upon me. If there was a school trip, the expense of bringing me was subsidised by the school and everybody knew about that, as well. I was sure that all the other children were talking about me and saying things like, “That’s Steve. The school has to give him free dinners and pay for his school trip because he has no mum and dad and his grandparents are poor.”
On those rare days when I brought in homemade sandwiches and rolls, or a little pocket money, I could never hold onto them for long because I was small and weak and pathetic and someone would hit me or just threaten to hit me and make off with my lunch or my sixpence. I never told Nan or Grandad about these instances because in those days you were expected to fight your own corner, and you would just get a clip around the ear for not being able to stand up for yourself. It would have been worse to have Nan and Grandad sort my problems out than make do with no sandwiches.
Eventually, I remember, I made a very conscious, very deliberate decision that I was not going to put up with being bullied any longer, and that I was going to start to fight my corner and learn how to stand up for myself at whatever cost. So one day, I found myself face to face with the kid who was known to be the top fighter in the school: Archie.
The very mention of Archie spread tremors of fear all over school. Like me, Archie was about nine years old and a local boy. To an adult, he would probably have looked like any little kid, with tousled hair and a snotty face. To the children he knew, he was a bully and a tyrant and the object of tremendous fear. Archie had few enemies, because nobody was brave enough to stand up to him. I decided that I would risk everything and take him on. One day, Archie took my rolls from me and demanded my pocket money. I decided there and then that I would not give in to him but would stand up and fight him. Even if I lost, at least I would have done my best. I lifted my chin and said, “If you want it, you’ve got to take it off me.”
“Are you fucking joking?” Archie asked in disbelief. “You want to fight with me?”
“I’ll do it,” I squeaked. “And I’ll win, too.”
We started fighting in the school playground and it wasn’t long before a crowd gathered to watch all the excitement. I looked into Archie’s eyes and saw no fear. But something very strange was happening. Boys who usually looked at me only when I had done something to attract their ridicule were shouting; shouting for me to win, not Archie. They didn’t like me very much, but they really hated Archie. They spurred me on and, from somewhere, I managed to find the strength to knock Archie to the ground. I sat on top of him, stared into his face and asked him if he wanted any more. Archie surrendered, the crowd cheered and started chanting my name, and I felt like a hero. I had beaten the school bully.
That was a wonderful day and a big awakening for me, because I had learned that I could stand up for myself and give it all I had. I had learned how to fight; I thought I had learned how to be a man. I swaggered home that afternoon, full of bravado and determined never to look back. Never again would I put up with the bullying and the mickey-taking; the name-calling and the sly back-stabbing. From now on, I was going to do whatever it took to stay on the top. And, sure enough, from then on the other kids looked at me differently. I liked to think that it was admiration, but it was probably fear, because now I was the new Archie.
From then on, I ceased to be a bullied little runt and knew I could look after myself. I had found a new way to live; a way without being scared. I wasn’t going to let the bastards get me down ever again. I had earned the respect of my peers, if not their friendship, and I was prepared to settle for that. That was good enough for me.
Despite my new-found status, I remember feeling utterly alone throughout my primary school years. I had no real parents, no older siblings to stand up for me and no younger siblings to lord it over at home. I respected my grandparents, but I think I was protective of them, in a way, and didn’t want them to know how badly school was going for me. Nan and Grandad doted on me, and although I was often resentful of having to be in earlier than the other children on the street, I loved them both very much. They had a lot of time for me and did the best they could in what were quite difficult circumstances for them.
Money was rather tight and they had to be careful with every penny. Nan worked hard as a cleaner on trains and buses and in stations, and my grandfather wasn’t able to work because of an injury he had received to his arm. Years before, he’d had a job for the council. He had always cycled to work. One day, he was on his way to work when he caught the front wheel of his push-bike in a tramline and ended up suffering a horrific injury. The doctors had considered amputating his arm, but he hadn’t let them, preferring to have a mangled arm to no arm at all.
Grandad was a house-husband long before the term was coined, and he was very good at it. He did all the cooking and cleaning, and the house was always spotless from top to bottom. He was so house-proud that I was never allowed to leave my toys around the house, creating clutter and mess. I had to play with them at the table and put them back at the end of the day. I had a Meccano set that I loved and a construction kit that I used to make reconstructions of buildings like Tower Bridge, which moved around and did things when you pressed the right buttons. I had a knack for anything mechanical and could count on Uncle Albie for help, when he was around. Uncle Albie was always very good to me.
Because Nan was out working, Grandad was the one who took care of me after school and made sure that I did my homework and had my bath in a tin tub that was brought inside. I wasn’t really able to do my homework, and I don’t know if Grandad would have been in a position to help; in any case, he never did. We both just went through the motions.
As my grandparents had had such a large family of their own, there were uncles, aunts and cousins in abundance, and lots of houses where I was welcome for a cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter. Uncle Albie, having no children of his own as yet, was often available. Albie worked as a lorry driver, often driving tipper lorries, which were enormously exciting to a little boy. Some days, when I was off school, Uncle Albie would say, “Steve, mate, do you want to come and help me at work today?” and my heart would swell with pride. “Helping” consisted mostly of sitting beside Uncle Albie and watching what he did, but once in a while, if we were going down a quiet country road to a tip with a load of rubbish, he would let me steer and then, when we got to the dump, even manipulate the levers so that the truck would drop its load. I was in heaven on those days, and when Uncle Albie took me out for a spin on the back of the motorbike.
Everyone was happy when Uncle Albie met a nice girl called Janet and they started courting, but although I liked Janet, I was a bit ambivalent about their relationship. With a pretty girlfriend on the scene, Uncle Albie had less time to take me to the dump, and that was a big loss.
My various aunts helped out with the clothes and toys that their children didn’t need any more, as the expense of raising a boy was a lot for my grandparents to deal with at their time of life. My auntie Marge lived right across the street in Hutton Road. I spent a lot of time in her house, and she was always very kind to me. Auntie Pat, who also lived nearby with her husband, Uncle Pip, had three children, my cousins David, Tommy and Jeanie. They were the closest thing I had to sisters and brothers and, while we squabbled at times, we were also quite close.
Auntie Pat’s house was a home from home for me. I used to take my bath there sometimes, and she and Uncle Pip generally did their best to treat me like one of their own in every way that they could. They were generous and kind to a fault. If they were taking their children on a day out to the zoo, I would go too. If there were iced buns to go round, there was always one for me. I often stayed the night and got to pretend that I was really at home with a mum and dad who would tuck me in and kiss me goodnight.
I visited other aunts and uncles but remember how confusing I found it to have to juggle the different sets of rules and regulations that went with each household unit. I had to be one person when I was with Auntie Pat and someone else when I was with Uncle Tommy or Auntie Marge, and it was all quite confusing – especially because none of those rules applied when I was at home with Nan and Grandad, but different ones instead.
As well as Uncle Albie, Auntie Pat played a big role in helping to bring me up, partly because of her natural kindness and generosity, and partly because she lived so close by. I also used to visit Uncle Tommy, who lived in Clapham. While he was very good to me, I was a little wary of him because his rules and regulations always struck me as quite rigid. Uncle Tommy had twin girls who were being very carefully brought up, and when I was around he wanted me to be on my best behaviour too. I did my best, but wasn’t always able to step up to the mark.
Uncle Tommy taught me to play chess, and to my surprise I was very good at it. He was a good teacher and a good player himself, and liked to enter competitions. I respected him because he never let me win; he taught me how to play and then made sure that I did it properly. I loved being able to think about my next move and work out my strategy, and the fact that Uncle Tommy usually won made my victories all the sweeter.
None of my aunts and uncles ever mentioned Dad. Along with my mother, he was a taboo subject for them. I think they’d all had enough of him and his violent, unpredictable ways.
I do remember having fun with my mates in the street where I lived as a child. On one occasion, a few friends and I made a cart out of old pieces of wood that we had found and great big ball-bearings that we fitted onto wooden axles. We decorated our fine chariot with lots of beer bottle tops – bottle tops were considered very valuable by children at the time. We had a great laugh racing up and down the street, making an incredible amount of noise and annoying the adults, whose irate comments only added to the fun.
Another game we loved to play was called “Knock Down Ginger”. This involved tying a dustbin lid to the door knocker of a house. We would then do a “rat-a-tat-tat” on the door, run like hell and hide, peeping out to see what would happen. When the door opened, the dustbin lid would be pulled off, possibly taking the dustbin with it, and we would jump up from our hiding places and run away, laughing like hyenas. We got caught once in a while and ended up with a good clump around the ear, but it didn’t put us off.
Uncle Albie finally moved out when I was eleven. He moved into a house around the corner with his girlfriend, Janet, and they planned to get married. Although Uncle Albie obviously had less time for me now, he was still fond of me and still did what he could to help me out.
I can’t claim not to have received the attention I needed as a child, because in fact there were many adults in my life. Still, it was difficult to know that I didn’t have my own mum and dad to care for me the way I saw my cousins being looked after, to know that I had been left with my grandparents because nobody had really wanted me.
I was grateful to them, but as I got older, I started to rebel more and more against what I saw as their strictness. I started to push the boundaries as far as I could, until Nan and Grandad were forced to resort to summoning Dad with ever-greater frequency, to sort me out and show me who was boss. Dad used to cause havoc every time he came, and his advice or discipline often made things even worse. I remember a particular day when I had got into an argument with another little boy called Paul, who was my best friend at the time. Paul lived on the same street and for as long as I could remember we had played together, sharing toys and gobstoppers. We occasionally fell out, but it never lasted for too long.
This time, it was just one of those silly, children’s things. Paul was with his cousin, and they both ganged up on me and told me that I was wrong about whatever it was and that they were right. It was nothing, absolutely nothing; just a little spat of the sort that children have all the time. I ended up crying and went home in tears because I hated the fact that I’d had a falling-out with my best mate. I didn’t know that Dad was going to be there. Well, he went livid when he saw me crying, as though it was some sort of an insult to his manhood.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Dad said. “What are you snivelling about? You look disgusting. Why are you crying?”
“I’ve been fighting with my best friend,” I sniffed. “Paul and Joe said that I was wrong. But I wasn’t wrong; I was right.”
“Look, you know what you want? You want to stop being so stupid. Look; here’s a stick. Take it. Take the bloody stick! Now, I’ll come down the road with you and if you don’t hit him with the stick, I’ll hit you with it! You’ve got to learn how to stand up for yourself, haven’t you?”
I took the stick. I hit Paul. I hurt him. I made my dad proud. But I knew it was wrong. I just hoped Paul knew that it wasn’t really me hitting him, but my dad.