Eric Bristow (4 page)

That would make them even angrier, so they’d up the ante. I knew I had got them then, and when I beat them they would have no excuses. They couldn’t get the hump with me because I’d just say: ‘I told you that you weren’t good enough to beat me.’ I’d get them with this every single time.

Sundays became a ritual for Dad and me. He took me down the pub every Sunday. There was one poor bloke in there who was quite good at darts and offered to play me for sixpence. I gave him the usual nonsense about him not being good enough and ended up playing him for a pound. I beat him, turned to him and said, ‘See, I told you you were rubbish. I told you that you weren’t good enough to play me.’

My dad was in the corner drinking and thinking: Here we go again. This bloke wanted to double it up to two pounds, and no matter how rubbish I said he was, he just wouldn’t let go. So I beat him, and I beat him, and I beat him and eventually he ended up owing me £256.

I said: ‘I’m not playing you for £512.’

When was it going to stop? The bloke was gone, he was begging me: ‘Please, just one more game, just one more game.’

And I said: ‘No, no, bollocks to you.’

I took everything he had off him in the pub, which was thirty or forty quid. He paid me a few twenty quids over the next couple of months and that was it. I never did get the full amount.

When I was fifteen I played for the Arundel’s dart team. Three of our team were deaf and dumb. There was a family of them and I used to love them. They were great people, and strong as an ox. If you have something wrong with you, you seem to build up on other things. These guys were huge. Nobody messed with them, and because of this nobody messed with our team and that was a good thing because it kept me out of trouble. There was one league, we played 1001, and it was an eight-man team. They put me first man. I used to have to start on a double, so I started on double six. That got me off straight away and bang I’d be murdering the opposition.

Away from the pub I was working. I had a number of jobs, all in a short space of time. I was at MFI for a while, sometimes selling in the shop and other times delivering goods in a van. I worked with a bloke called Ron who was nutty as a fruitcake. He had about six kids and his wife didn’t have one of them in hospital. He firmly believed a woman’s place was in the home, and
more
specifically in the kitchen, and shortly after she’d given birth upstairs he’d say to her, ‘Right, well done love, now pop down to the kitchen and make me a nice cup of tea.’ He was old school. She may have had the baby but he still expected his dinner on the table at half past five and his shirts washed and ironed.

I also worked in the City as a proofreader for the newspapers. I had to make sure the spellings were right and commas were in the right place, that sort of thing. I did that for two or three months then quit, mainly through boredom. Another job I had was at a clothing factory, bringing the cloth from the vans. This was where I met Sully. We used to go in to work on a Friday or Saturday in our baggiest clothes, nick a suit, put it on underneath and walk out with it at the end of the day. I must have been the only fifteen-year-old in the country with thirty-five suits in his wardrobe. Another lad who worked there was the real pro. He’d steal suits, wear them, then walk into offices carrying a briefcase and looking the works. The people there didn’t bat an eyelid because he looked so smart. They thought he was a businessman who’d come to see their boss. Once inside he’d start rifling through the desks, taking whatever he could. I saw him come out of places with all sorts of things, including people’s lunchtime sandwiches. He would’ve made a fortune today with laptops and things like that to steal. At the factory I was the cloth room boy, and if the cutters wanted to make suits upstairs
they’d
tell me to bring up a thousand yards of this or that. I’d take it up there and they’d cut the suits in the cutting room.

I was earning twelve quid a week when I was fifteen, but by that time I was playing a tournament on a Friday and more often than not I’d win it and get fifty pounds. Then I’d play another tournament on a Saturday, maybe a singles tournament for sixty pounds, and another on a Sunday for say forty pounds. I was winning one or two of these every other weekend, so that was the end of the jobs. What was the point of working all week for twelve pounds when I could earn about fifty pounds a week playing three days of darts? I became a full-time darts player and hustler, making money from the darts tournaments and from the people who challenged me at these tournaments or in the pub – this could have been at pool as well because I was also good at this game and I won quite a bit of cash playing that too. I played darts in a Monday league, Tuesday league, Wednesday league, Friday league and for one called the Loughton League. In this league was a team from the Bank of England and we played them at their main HQ. Every year it became a bit of a jolly boys’ outing for the pub and we’d get coachloads of supporters coming to watch us, not because we were good or they wanted us to win, but because the bar was subsidised and you could get things like double vodkas for five pence or a pint for two pence. It was party night for them, regardless of
whether
we won or lost. They couldn’t give a toss about the darts if truth be told. They didn’t go to any other away games.

In the summer the leagues finished, and that was when my attention turned to girls. I met my first love, Pauline, when I was sixteen. She was beautiful, and she thought I was magic. We hit it of straight away and had a brilliant time. Then, towards the end of summer, the Monday league restarted so I couldn’t see her that night, a little later the Tuesday league began, then the Wednesday league, and she said to me, ‘When can I see you?’

‘How about next summer?’ I replied.

She may have been my first love but darts came before everything – and that was the problem. I couldn’t have any relationships with girls because I just didn’t have the time; the only love affair I had was with darts. I’d meet girls, sleep with them and they’d ask me, ‘When am I going to meet you again?’

‘You ain’t,’ I’d reply.

Darts was much more important. Nothing intruded on my darts. When I worked for MFI I’d barely started the job before quitting. Their busiest day was Saturday and I’d be travelling on Friday night to play darts on a Saturday so I told them I couldn’t work then.

My boss said, ‘If you don’t work on a Saturday you’re sacked.’

‘I’ll get my cards now then,’ I said, ‘because I’m off,’ and that was the end of that.

I played for the Arundel Arms for about eighteen months and then the whole team moved to another pub close by called the Red Lion. We had a nice little room at the back of the pub where we could play darts and practise. At the front, in the main bar, it was chaos. On a Thursday the place would be heaving with Irish – in those days you got paid every Thursday, so they’d be in the front drinking and our lads would be in the back playing darts. Every week these Irish lads would kick off. There’d be mass brawls inside the pub and on the pavement outside. Then they’d be back at the bar minutes later, bloodied and bruised with their arms rounds each other, knocking more booze back! Because of this the turnover of landlords was high. Some just couldn’t cope – and added to this many of them would end up getting robbed or beaten up by the customers. Our darts champion Brian Kearney, who was a good mate of mine but has now died, used to get in with a new landlord and help serve behind the bar. Once he’d got on friendly terms, and he did this to every landlord who worked there, he’d take him out for an Indian, and while they were at the restaurant Brian’s accomplices would be in the boozer robbing it. It was the norm: every few weeks we’d be playing darts and you’d hear Brian say, ‘I’m going for an Indian tonight, lads.’ I’d say, ‘For Christ’s sake, here we go again.’

One bloke came in, yet another new landlord, and he had these two big Alsatian dogs with him, fierce beasts
they
were, but I never got to see this guy. He moved in on a Tuesday and announced to the whole pub, ‘I’ve heard same of your landlords here have been done over a few times. Well, you won’t fucking do me with these two Alsatians here.’

The following night word got round that the new landlord thought he was a bit of a hard nut, so this geezer walked into the pool room, took the cue off a bloke who was playing, walked through to the front of the bar where the new landlord was serving and smacked him straight across the top of his head with it. He split his head right open and fractured his skull. As the landlord lay slumped on the floor his attacker said to him, ‘Where are your fucking dogs now, pal?’

The Alsatians were locked in the back. They couldn’t exactly roam around the bar. This poor bloke only lasted a day and a half.

Not all the landlords before that were bad. We had this great couple come in who were gay. They were fantastic and within days of them arriving we had the cleanest pub in London. They were there with their feather dusters and cleaning cloths, a bucket and a mop. The pub didn’t have a speck of dust in it all the time they ran it. One of these lads had a false arm. All our darts team knew about it, apart from Brian. We were all in the pub one night having a bit of after-time and Brian got a bit rough with this gay and started pulling him about. He was having a laugh, but going a bit over
the
top, as he was inclined to do when he’d had a few beers. He ended up pulling this gay by the arm and it came off in Brian’s hand. Brian just stared at this arm in bewilderment. His face went white and his mouth opened but no words came out. He honestly thought he’d pulled this bloke’s arm off. He looked at it for about half a minute and said, ‘What the fuck?’

The rest of us were gone. I was on the floor rolling about with laughter. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen. In the end the one-armed gay landlord said, ‘Give me my arm back,’ snatched it off Brian and put it back in the socket. Brian looked at him like a dog does when it’s trying to understand his owner, his head tilting one way and then the other. I was desperately trying not to wet myself.

But Brian was the Red Lion. He was its main character, the guy you always looked forward to seeing when he walked through the door, and he sorted out a few problems there.

We had this old bloke in the pub and he was a real nasty sod, a bit mean like TV’s Steptoe. On Thursday nights, when the Irish came to the pub with their money, four of them would play cards. Every week they went through the same routine: they’d play cards, drink, drink drink, fight, fight, fight, make up, go to the bar, large vodka, large vodka, large vodka, large vodka, and back to the card table. This old bloke was the pot man, which meant he collected the empties in return for a couple
of
free pints. When these Irish got so pissed they didn’t really know what they were doing, or when they were fighting each other, this old bloke would pinch one of their vodkas and down it in one before putting the glass back on the table. Brian, who occasionally worked behind the bar at this time, spotted this old sod doing it, so he got a vodka glass and filled it with white cleaning fluid and put it to the right of where this pot man normally stood at the bar. Sure enough this old sod spotted what he thought was an untouched double vodka, picked it up and downed it in one. His face said it all. He was in agony, it burnt his mouth and his throat and he only just managed to open the toilet door to throw up. There was spew and excrement all over the place. It nearly killed him, but it did teach him not to steal anyone’s drink again.

Brian also taught this other bloke a lesson. He was a white witch, a real weirdo who played darts for us, and he had this dog which he kept in the back of his van and never let out. This mad dog wasn’t treated right. It’d get a tin of dog food and some water in the back of the van, and would be left in there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Its muck would be thrown out of the van into the road. This used to upset me, so I’m glad he got his comeuppance. Brian got him because he was a greedy sod. He played in the Thursday league for us and at the end of the game the sandwiches came out. This bloke would take more than his fair share, and
then
if there were four sandwiches left at the end he’d grab them all and stuff them down his throat. This happened week after week until Brian decided enough was enough. He got some toothpicks, snapped them into pieces and put the little bits in the sandwiches, warning the rest of us not to touch them. This white witch immediately went for these sandwiches, started chewing them, and screamed as a toothpick went straight through the roof of his mouth. There was blood everywhere. He was in agony, desperately trying to prise this pick out of his mouth but having no luck. He had to go to hospital in the end. It taught him never to steal the sandwiches again.

Later in life Brian became a train driver, but that did him in. A couple of people jumped in front of his train on two separate occasions and psychologically he couldn’t handle it. He had to go and give evidence to an inquest and talk about the ordeal in front of the grieving family. It traumatised him for life; he was never the same bloke. It broke him mentally.

The rest of the guys I played with were just normal fellas. There was Les Rothwell who was happily married with a couple of kids; Robbie Tarr, who worked in a printing factory; a clever bloke called Clive Jennings who ran a bookies; and a lad called Nigel who worked on planes, testing the stress on wings – I could never work out how aeroplanes wings didn’t snap off mid-flight and I nearly wet myself during one bumpy flight, but
he
said to me, ‘What are you worrying about? It’s impossible to snap a wing off a plane. It doesn’t happen.’ Comforting words, but I still haven’t fully conquered my fear of flying.

Then there was our treasurer Tony Miles, a lovely old bloke who couldn’t play darts but used to love coming out with us. He was a wealthy businessman, so we knew we could trust him with the money. In all the pubs in the league each player would pay their subs every week, and anything the team won would be shared out at the end of the year – but every year you could guarantee at least two or three treasurers from other pubs would run off with the money. Our treasurer was retired and wealthy and didn’t need our cash, so we knew he’d never do a runner. A black toe did for him in the end. His toe went black and he ignored it. By the time he went to the doctors they had to take it off, but found gangrene had spread to his leg so amputated that below the knee. However, it just carried on going up and up and up, until eventually he died. What a stupid way to go. If you have a black toe, you sort it out.