My first sexual encounter with a girl was set up by my friends. Because I was still a virgin, they used to take the mickey out of me, always testing my sexual knowledge by asking me questions which of course I couldn’t answer. I was very embarrassed about being the butt of their jokes but unsure as to how to rectify the situation as I hadn’t met a girl I liked enough to get up the courage to ask her out, and didn’t feel confident around women; I found their presence intimidating and confusing.
One evening, we were all on our motorbikes at Attbridge Park when my mates pointed at a nearby wooded area and said, “You need to go over there, Steve. There’s a girl called Sheila over there and she wants to talk to you.”
I walked over to the woods and met a woman of about twenty-five who told me she wanted to have sex with me. I quickly realised that my mates had paid her to give me a fuck and relieve me of my socially unacceptable virginity. Sheila did the business with me quickly and efficiently. Although I participated, I found the experience totally frightening; I didn’t know what to do, and it didn’t help that I could hear my mates sniggering in the bushes from where they were watching me.
Once it was all over, Sheila got up, wiped herself off and walked away without a word. It was not a happy time. Putting my clothes back together, I went over to my mates. They were all laughing and kept asking me questions. I was embarrassed and humiliated but did a reasonably good job of covering this up with bravado.
* * *
Fortunately, at this stage, I’d managed to get a new job, and I got stuck in. To be fair to myself, I was not and had never been afraid of hard work. My job was pointing up brickwork for a man called Tony who specialised in building restoration. Tony was in his thirties at the time. He was a big chap who was quite a trendy dresser, and I had a lot of admiration for him. He came from a local family who all worked in the more skilled end of the building trade, and there always seemed to be plenty of work for them. As I had already acquired a lot of labouring experience with the Woodcock Brothers, I picked up pointing skills very quickly, and Tony could see that I was a fast and willing worker.
Despite the fact that I was constantly getting into trouble and had a major problem with authority, Tony liked me. And there was always work for me when I wanted it, regardless of what I had been up to. I am pretty sure that Tony had no idea of how important he was to me; so far as I was concerned, he was much more of a father figure to me than my actual father had ever been. He tried very hard with me and did his best to keep me in a safe place. He kept in touch with my grandparents, and between them they tried to concert their efforts to keep me on the straight and narrow.
For a while, working for Tony gave me the hope that I might be able to build a normal life, despite all my deficits. I was pleased to discover that I was well able to learn the skills that Tony needed me to have and that I turned out to be quite good at the tasks he assigned to me. It meant a lot when Tony praised something that I had done, and on those days I would go home with a great feeling of satisfaction. But despite this flicker of hope, I still wanted and felt that I needed the excitement and thrill of everything to do with the wrong side of the tracks.
I was increasingly curious about the wide array of illegal drugs available on the street. Considering how much I had enjoyed my experiments with mixing Valium and booze, I was eager to learn more and pleased when my forays into illegal drug-taking proved to be as pleasant and exciting as I had hoped they would. One problem, though, was that I needed more money than I was making from the jobs I did for Tony. He paid me a fair wage, but the drugs I wanted were expensive, and my appetite for them voracious.
From grabbing the occasional bit of jewellery, I graduated to stealing motorbikes, which was more exciting and offered a great deal more in terms of thrills. I was still very interested in mechanics and vehicles in general. I had become friendly with a bunch of lads who were slightly older than me. They were making what seemed to me to be a pretty decent living robbing people and stealing from shops, and I was very attracted to them and their way of life. To me it seemed almost magical, and doing that sort of thing clearly gave them a buzz that lasted longer than the one I got from mixing Valium and alcohol.
I was taking a lot of drugs at this time, often together with my new friends, and I could see no reason not to join them, although Brian, always a good and loyal friend, told me that I was being stupid and that I would end up getting into serious trouble if I wasn’t careful. Much as I liked and respected him in general, I didn’t care what Brian thought. For one thing, stealing was a way to make a meaningful amount of money. While Tony offered me a route to full-time work and a decent salary, I certainly wasn’t going to get rich by pointing up brickwork.
I found out that, just like with drugs, the more you get involved with stealing and general law-breaking, the more you want to continue with it because it’s exciting, it’s fun and there is a real high involved in knowing that you’ve got away with it. And, as stupid as it might seem, I felt that getting away with it meant in some way that I was getting a dig at anyone who had ever done me any wrong, and that I was evening up the cosmic score. It wasn’t my fault that I had been born into a messed-up family, was it? People luckier than me had done nothing to deserve their good fortune. What made someone else deserve a nice house and an expensive motorbike when I had to live in my grandparents’ tiny house? It wasn’t fair; if fate had been kinder to me, I would have those things, too – maybe more. By taking things that didn’t belong to me, by taking things that belonged to people who were luckier and more blessed than I was, I was just making the world that little bit fairer. That was the way I saw it.
I was still working for Tony Spooner, and he watched with dismay as I spiralled out of control, despite all his best efforts on my behalf and despite his insistence that I was a good lad, really, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary. Tony kept telling me, “Son, you’re in the wrong area. You shouldn’t be doing this; you shouldn’t be hanging out with those guys, they’ll end up causing you nothing but trouble. You’re a good lad at heart and I know it. Stick with me and I will show you how to earn your living honestly. Forget about them; they are a bad influence on you.”
I would say, “Yeah, yeah, right…” but we both knew that I was paying him no attention whatsoever.
I never understood what I did to make Tony care so much. But he was genuinely fond of me, and had been ever since he took me on to work for him shortly after I left school. Although I wanted very much to impress Tony and make him proud, I also loved the feelings I got from taking drugs, anything from prescription drugs to what was available illegally on the street: amphetamines, nembies or sleepers, LSD, dope, mandies, dexies, purple hearts and anything else I could get my hands on.
I learned how to use the drugs together. If you’ve been on a lot of speed, for example, you can take sleepers to slow the comedown and make it easier to deal with. If you are drinking, you can take mandies – Mandrax is its brand name when sold legally – with the booze for an interesting buzz. For each drug that was available, there was a different type of high. There was always the risk that it wouldn’t go quite as you had planned. With LSD, for instance, you never knew if the hallucinations it would give you were going to be good or bad. That risk was part of the thrill.
Everything was taken out of my control and I just gave myself up to the substances and the experiences they gave me. Mostly, these experiences were wonderful. The drugs I took brought me a feeling of release and calm that was unlike anything else and far better than the approval of my elders or the satisfaction of a pay cheque at the end of the week. They made me feel like the man I wanted to be, and not the pathetic kid I actually was.
Aged about seventeen, I started going out with a girl called Kate, who lived in Wallington in Surrey. Kate was very pretty and sweet, and she was something of a childhood sweetheart. I can still remember her smile. We had met at the Green in Carshalton, which was where the rockers used to hang out in their cool clothes, trying to impress passers-by with how tough they were. I had long hair and I wore a leather jacket with studs, greasy jeans and hobnail boots. I felt I fitted in with the crowd and that I looked cool. I had a number of tattoos done and was very pleased with the result; I felt that they were a considerable enhancement to my look. I was quite good-looking, so the girls paid attention to me, which was nice.
Most of the guys knocking around the Green were hard men looking for a fight, especially with the crew from Mitcham, who were our enemies. We quite regularly got involved in gang fights and would set up meets to have a pre-arranged battle. Everyone would get stuck in using lumps of wood, motorcycle chains, boots and anything else they could find. Some people got really hurt, but that’s just the way it was. We were boys on a mission and we weren’t going to let anyone get in our way.
I was friendly with the guys for a while, but drifted away when I saw how the men treated the women in their group, which was just awful. Despite, or maybe even because of the fact that I had never known my mother, I was quite protective of women, even as a teenager, and I was genuinely horrified when I found out that these guys were treating the girls like sex objects, passing them around among themselves and making fun of them afterwards.
I think it was the girls’ vulnerability that really got to me. I could relate to it, having been vulnerable myself from a young age, and I didn’t like to watch it happening, or to hear the girls being laughed at. Kate was one of the girls they misused, and when we started going out we both broke away from that group and stayed away from that lifestyle.
Kate was a tall, confident girl with lovely blonde hair and a bright, intelligent face. She had been adopted by a fairly well-to-do family, with a big house and a comfortable standard of living. They had given her a good home and childhood, but Kate had a lot of unresolved issues about being an adopted child. In those days, adoption wasn’t discussed as openly as it is now, and any negative feelings about it would have been very much swept under the carpet. Now that she was a teenager, Kate was going through a rebellious phase and making a point by hanging around the park with unsavoury rockers.
I was very happy with Kate, and for a while it seemed as though this lovely relationship was all I needed to help me to go straight, because she made me feel wanted, and she made me feel good. I still had a big problem with my temper, and there were still times when I would boil up over something very small and lose control, but Kate was a steadying influence on me. She helped me to calm down, and I was able to take fewer drugs than before. Things were wonderful.
Once in a while, Kate would become convinced that I had got her pregnant, but then her period would come and we would be relieved to know that it had just been a false alarm. With each pregnancy scare that came and went, I became less worried that anything untoward would actually happen. So far as I was concerned, the future looked very rosy.
Initially, Kate’s parents were kind and welcoming to me. It wasn’t until I started getting caught doing the smash-and-grabs that they started telling her that I was an idiot and that she would be better off without me. I didn’t care. Kate was mine and I was hers. What did her parents’ opinion matter?
It all went horribly wrong when some of the Carshalton guys started hanging around with Kate again, and she became involved with one of them behind my back. The boy in question was a mate of mine, Eric. Eric had nowhere to live at the time, and Nan had said that he could stay with us for a while. This made Kate’s betrayal a thousand times worse. She hadn’t just been screwing around behind my back; she’d been doing it with a mate whom I had trusted and let into my home. That was the end of two relationships: the one with Kate and the one with Eric.
The one good thing that happened was that although Eric was a hard man, I found out that I was much harder than him. I had always been a little scared of Eric, but now that he had pissed me off, I tore into him and beat him to a bloody pulp, finding energy and drive I didn’t even know I had. It felt great, standing over him with my sore fists and looking at him where he lay crumpled on the floor. He got what he deserved.
Kate and Eric didn’t stay together, so in the end neither of us got her. I was still absolutely devastated by what I saw as Kate’s betrayal and just went berserk in reaction to it. I smashed things up and I had a run-in with Kate when I told her exactly what I thought of her. I thought she was the lowest of the low. She had deceived me. I had believed that she and I had something special and now I felt as though all my efforts and hard work in keeping the relationship going were being thrown back in my face. I took whatever drugs I could get my hands on to take my mind off the fact that Kate had cheated on me and in the hope that they would fix my broken heart.
At this time, I used to hang about in a café in Rose Hill; a greasy spoon that was enjoying unaccountable popularity in the area. It was a place where the kids used to hang out during the day and the evening, to play pinball and the juke box. It was mainly frequented by youngsters and barrow boys, the usual rough-and-ready crowd, most of them involved in petty crime of one kind or another. On one particular evening, shortly after the bust-up with Kate, I was in there and at a very low ebb, when I met my friend Lenny, who offered me some speed. Lenny wasn’t really a dealer, just one of the many slightly shady characters I knew from the street. He wasn’t pushing drugs on me, just trying to help me out.
“Come on, mate,” Lenny said, having given me a pep talk about Kate and everything that had happened between us. “They will make you feel better in a jiffy. It’s just what you need right now. Trust me. What have you got to lose, anyway?”
I decided that I had nothing to lose and I took him up on his offer. I quickly discovered that Lennie was absolutely right because, thanks to speed, I soon felt fantastic. All my worries and concerns and fears went away. I felt very good about myself and had no insecurities at all, despite the fact that I actually had a hell of a lot to feel insecure about.
On speed, I was confident and chatty and came out of my shell. Everybody liked me better when I was using speed. I liked myself better, too. Obviously, I thought, speed was what I had needed all this time. If I had known about speed earlier, things would have worked out better for me. I would have been able to focus, and I wouldn’t have let Kate humiliate me. To hell with Valium and booze.
I started to take speed more regularly and at least for a while I was happier and more confident than I had ever been before. My behaviour was more stable than ever and, although I wasn’t sleeping, but staying up all night partying and being crazy, I felt that I had found the medication I needed. Clearly, I was better informed than any doctor. While the Valium had numbed my senses and made me feel stupid, speed made me feel alert, clued in and clever. Speed was very cheap in those days; I think you could get twenty tablets for a pound. It was an easy habit to maintain, even for a kid on a modest and erratic income, and I was able to keep myself in speed without that many smash-and-grabs.
Because I was so happy and confident now, I became a bit of a leader among the group of guys that I used to hang about with, and one by one they began to follow my example and experiment with speed. They had already grown used to sharing my Valium when we went out, and when they saw how good I felt on speed, following suit was the next logical step. One or two were wise enough to experiment a little and then decide that enough was enough, but some of the others had as much fun as I did and proceeded to experiment with other drugs, too.