I was born into a large English family in 1987, in a hospital bed in North Wales – the first Welshman of the family. Both my parents were from Liverpool and had met there some years before, in the late 1970s.
Both my brother and sister, Paul and Liza, were older than me by quite a gap – my sister is ten years my senior – and they had a different father to me. I was quite the baby of the family – in many ways I still am!
Our large family, the Crumlins, was formed during the First World War when two men met before the Battle of the Somme. It was the lull before the battle and, in the face of a challenge that they knew would cost the lives of thousands, the two shared a cigarette and a conversation. After weeks and weeks of bloody fighting, by chance, the two men met again at the end of the battle and became friends, tied forever by the experience they’d both shared. The men kept in touch throughout the remaining months and years of the war, and then into peacetime. One of the men, from Belfast, brought his wife and young son with him on trips to Liverpool, where they’d stay with the other man, his wife and young daughter. The two children, Gladys and James (‘Jimmy’), became my grandparents.
Jimmy, my granddad, went on to join the Royal Navy and spent most of the Second World War as a Japanese prisoner of war after his ship, the Repulse, was sunk in 1941. He survived, and he and my nan had many children and eventually grandchildren.
Jimmy was a huge influence on my early life. I was always fascinated with his medals and although he rarely spoke of his days in the POW camp, the family – my nan, mostly – would pass on enough for me to understand that he had suffered for all our futures.
From what I can remember, my parents, Pauline and Ronald, lived a somewhat turbulent life in North Wales while I was growing up. Dad worked in a factory but was also a window cleaner. He’d often drink his daily earnings before getting home. Mum was a saleswoman at a kitchen and bathroom hardware shop in the local town. Mum would come home at 5.30 every night to a sometimes already drunk Dad, two teenagers and a very young and energetic me. They did well and I know they only stayed together because of how young I was, but they decided to call it a day once I’d reached my teens.
Enter Phil, my stepfather. Phil met my mother as she was leaving my dad and he really swept her off her feet. Around this time, Mum was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). Fairly stressful times for one lady, I think. What Phil provided for us all was security, care and most of all for my mum, love, something that had probably been missing from her life for some time. I honestly don’t know what might have happened to Mum if Phil hadn’t come along. He’s a very good guy, and I’m glad he turned up when he did.
Mum and I left our house, which was a very pretty property on the side of a rural Welsh hillside. We moved into a two-bedroom council flat in an area of the village that I simply saw as rough. Things were going to be very different. I felt embarrassed that my life had taken such a sudden change. My sister had already moved out with her young family, and my brother Paul used the change in our family make-up as an excuse to start out on his own too. I was now solely alone with Mum. Phil, of course, became more involved as the months passed by, and as a result I bonded with him a lot sooner than Paul and Liza did.
After the break-up my dad took a turn for the worse. He walked out of his factory job, which meant he had to depend solely on his window-cleaning round; he started hitting the bottle more than he’d ever done before in his life. He attempted to take on our old house alone, buying Mum out, but it ended in failure and the property was eventually repossessed. This added to his many stresses, which he kept all to himself. He always had done. Soon he was living in a squat and I would visit him after school most days, often finding him drunk.
While I could, I tried to keep him on the relative straight and narrow. With the help of my school, Liza and I even got him into rehab, but after his second stint he returned to the bottle yet again. Thinking about the dad I knew when I was much younger, a very playful, decent, all-round dad, and then comparing him to what he became while I was in my teenage years fills me with sadness. You’d think it’d be enough to put me off drinking.
In early 2000, I saw a poster in school about the Army Cadet Force, which was opening a new club in the local village. Most of the boys poked fun at the idea, but it really appealed to me. With the many changes going on at home and the problems I was having with Dad, I saw the cadets as a chance of escape. I went along to the opening night with my best friend Ami and we both signed up.
During my time in the army cadets I made lots of new friends from around the region, which stretched from the Welsh border with England and Cheshire to the coastal towns of Colwyn Bay and Abergele. Our group, aged thirteen to seventeen, mixed very well and would unite most weekends throughout the spring and summer. It might be a little unfair to say, but I felt like we were a collective group of slight misfits. We weren’t the cool kids you found commanding the playgrounds in school. We didn’t do the whole hanging around street corners thing; instead, come the weekend, we’d get together at a campsite somewhere and really let our hair down, at the same time learning all about military discipline and structure. On reflection, I can see how much of a winning recruitment tool it was for the regular army.
The trick was to get involved with as many sports and activities as possible, thus ensuring the best chance of going away most weekends. Escape. My friends in the cadets and I took part in as much as possible. In the summer of 2002, I managed to go away an incredible twelve weekends in a row, driving my headmaster Mr Davies up the wall as I needed most Friday afternoons off school to be able to do so. I competed in athletics, becoming the junior Welsh high jump champion; I was part of the shooting team, which got me away for at least four weekends in a row; I competed in endurance, which was the most prestigious activity to be involved with, long-distance marching over hills and mountains while trying to navigate. This is what I excelled in – and it made me very popular among the other cadets.
I also played the side drum in the massed band, which got me away for the remaining weekends of the summer months. It was quite a glamorous role and I mostly played before kick-off at Wrexham FC home games. The boys from school sat in the crowd looking on with interest but would still ridicule me the following Monday for looking ‘gay’ in my uniform banging a drum.
I’d become quite thick-skinned against schoolyard teasing. I’d always been picked on for having a slight Liverpudlian accent. My dad wandering around the village with ladders and a bucket didn’t help too much, either. It was worse when he became a drunk. I remember thinking Dad had become the village idiot, the one everyone could poke fun at – and often through me in the playground.
It was during these weekends of escape that I became friendly with a boy from the coast called Aaron, who was the same age as me. The seaside was about as glamorous as it got in North Wales when you were that age and I remember being a little jealous that he seemed to be constantly on holiday, living by the beach.
It’s one of nature’s greatest secrets: why do people attract? What draws them together? For Aaron and me, at the age of fourteen, we didn’t know but we really liked each other. Neither of us fully understood what was going on but we’d drink Pepsi and eat crisps on a Saturday night and then dash around trying to catch and then tickle the other. We’d go swimming and end up chasing each other around the swimming pool; splashing water and trying to pull each other’s shorts down. It felt completely natural to behave like this. I still had Dad and his problems on my mind, and was always ready for my mobile phone to ring to be told he was dead or something. When I was with Aaron, I could relax. When we fooled around together everything else seemed to disappear. I knew what I was experiencing with him was more than just a normal friendship between teenagers. This was unique. There was a physical attraction between us and I worried that I fancied Aaron. Fancying Aaron would make me gay. I didn’t want to be gay. Being gay was unheard of in our family.
Years later, when I was twenty-one, we bumped into each other in Soho. Aaron was, like me, ‘out’, and living life to the fullest. I was pleased he had managed to break out of his North Wales town. We spoke for hours and he told me he’d come out not long after our summer friendship. He’d realised he was gay and had accepted it a lot sooner than me.
Before I joined the army cadets, I had very few friends. Most youngsters in my area were causing trouble and having run-ins with the local police. I didn’t want to get involved with that. The army cadets came along and allowed me to mix and get out there. I honestly don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully repay what I feel I owe to the organisation; I’d recommend it to anybody.
Most of the boys I became friends with during this time were a little older than me and, by being the kid in the group, I learned about the world through their words and actions. They were much more developed than me and were exploring their teenage feelings. Although I didn’t quite understand it then, now I know it was my sexuality that attracted me to them. As soon as they all hit sixteen, they left to join the army. It was an exciting time for them, but a bit of a sad one for me – I still had twelve to eighteen months of waiting before I could do the same. The instant I could, I walked through the door of the army careers office in Wrexham, and my course in life was set.