Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold (2 page)

My dad is a warm, lovely man and Carmel and I were definitely daddy’s girls, but he was strict too. If we ever did anything wrong then we would make sure we did it when he was out. Both of us were smacked by our parents but, to be fair, we probably deserved it, and we had it a lot easier than some of our friends, one of whom was periodically beaten with a wooden spoon. I think parental discipline is very important, as long as you understand the reasoning behind it, and as long as it goes hand in hand with parental love.

The main source of problems in our house was sibling squabbling. Carmel would steal my clothes and that was enough to light the touchpaper. Once I knew that she had taken a top of mine. I confronted her, she denied it and then I went through her wardrobe and found it scrunched up at the bottom. It sounds insignificant, but nothing is insignificant when you are that young and I went mad.

I gave as good as I got, though, and was far from blameless. My biggest night of shame came when we were still sharing a room. I set the alarm clock and got up in the middle of the night.

‘What are you doing?’ Carmel asked sleepily.

‘Oh, me and Mum are going on holiday,’ I replied nonchalantly.

‘Can I come?’

‘No, it’s just me and Mum,’ I said as I put clothes into a suitcase. Of course, we were not going anywhere and I just wanted to upset her. I feel terrible about that now, but it hints at the nature of our relationship then. We did have plenty of good times, but it often ended in further tears and a sour atmosphere. It was like that when we were jumping across the divide from her bed to mine, and we were both a mix of smiles and fun, right up until the point when she went straight into the wall, her nose exploded and she was left covered in blood. Eventually, as I got older, it was decided I needed more space and so I got the attic room and moved out.

It was hard for Mum because she was working in residential rehab and could be on a shift pattern that meant we got home from school as she was leaving for work. It meant we spent a lot of time with Dad, who was self-employed and able to be flexible. I think his background, being separated from his own parents by thousands of miles, was a contributory factor in that. He did not want us to be another splintered family. We are very close, even if the only photograph I ever had on my bedside table when I was a child was not of my parents or my sister, but of Will Smith, the actor. I later had the opportunity to appear with him on
The Graham Norton Show
just before the Olympics, but had to decline due to training – I am and always will be gutted.

Even though he had been living in England for so long, Dad’s Jamaican roots often influenced our daily life. That was certainly the case in the kitchen. He cooked a lot and much of it had a Caribbean flavour. So he would cook ackee and saltfish, the national dish, or an array of exotic fare like curried goat and pig’s trotters. Mum would cook more conventional dishes, but would always make sure that we were eating healthily and not living on convenience food.

A particular favourite of Dad’s was kippers. I would get this nauseous sensation when I smelt these waves of kipper essence wafting up the stairs and through every part of the house. There was no escape. He would clean the grill pan, but the flavour infused everything and so I would find myself eating fishy toast. To this day, I still don’t like fish as a result of being scarred for life by Dad’s kippers.

By contrast, Mum says the secret of my success is a load of old tripe. Literally. Dad used to have it with onions every weekend, and I was weaned on liquidized tripe and milk. A quarter of a century later I appeared on
A League of Their Own
, a panel show with a sporting theme, and they had caught wind of my old diet. A pint of tripe was placed on the desk and the guests were dared to drink it. I shuddered and shied away from it, whereupon Andrew Flintoff, the former cricketer, picked it up, downed it, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and declared: ‘I’ve had worse.’ He managed to spill some of it on me as he quaffed away and I revisited my childhood disgust.

Mum always says that I was a demanding child who was never satisfied and could create an argument anywhere. ‘Once she’d done one drawing it would be, “Right, what’s next?”’ she recalled in an interview. ‘I took her to nursery and, even before I’d left, she done all the activities and it would be, “I’m ready to come home now.” She always needed entertaining. She was hard work until the age of three. She always wanted to do what she wanted and so, as a baby, she cried a lot. The very young years I found hardest. I thought it was because I was a bad mother.’

My mum also says that she thinks she may have passed on the competitive gene. Dad was quite sporty and, like most Jamaican kids, did some sprinting, but Mum admits she is competitive on a petty scale. If my leg is hurting, her hip hurts more. Her cake will have to be better than my cake. They joke that I am adopted, but I am an individual mix of my parents’ different personalities and cultures.

Even though we did not have a lot of money, and spent our childhoods dressed in clothes from charity shops and hand-me-downs, my parents never allowed us to feel that we were missing out. At Christmas our friends would often get lots of expensive presents, but we would have lots of little things instead. The thought counted more and I felt some parents were just trying to compensate for not being there. For us, Christmas was always a special time, whatever we had, which is why Dad got into such severe trouble one day when he left the wardrobe doors open and we saw all the presents lying there. Mum was furious as secrets were exposed, but for the most part we were a practical family wrapped up and bonded by circumstance. If we rarely went on holidays because of the finances, we did not mind, and when we did make it to Abersoch, in a cramped caravan, with our grandparents in tow, that was a bonus.

Mum had a friend called Michelle when we were little. She had two children, Libby and Eddie. Libby was Carmel’s age and Eddie was two years older than me. We did a lot together as Mum was a firm believer in wearing out your children, so there would be lots of trips to the country in Michelle’s undersized Fiat Panda, kids on knees, no seat belts, picnic in the back. I hated the walking, but I was six and hopelessly in love with Eddie.

He had long blond hair and was as cute as they come. ‘We’ll get married one day,’ I’d think as we held hands. I have a vivid memory of writing lots of Valentine’s Day cards to him, but then hiding them away and never sending them, undone by shyness.

My closest girlfriend was Charlotte. We met at infants and remained best friends through school, university, sport and adulthood. I would follow her around and do whatever she wanted to do. ‘Don’t be a sheep,’ my mum would tell me, but I ignored her and joined the brass band, playing the trombone, not through any great love of music, but because Charlotte played the cornet. I also had a close friend, Lorna. Both of us had a fixation with the film
The Bodyguard
, and especially Whitney Houston. I was about twelve years old when I decided I would cut my hair like hers, so I began to hack away. The results were devastating, an uneven mess that was more like a crew cut. It was the worst hairstyle I’d had since I had a Mohican as a baby and Mum had to spend ages trying to make it right and consoling me.

In 1993 my parents sent me to Sharrow Junior School. In terms of academic results it was not the best, but Mum was keen for me to go somewhere that had a rich mix of races and cultures. I think she felt that was more important in those formative years. I now think that was a shrewd decision, because children can be unforgiving about differences, picking them out and using them as sticks to beat you with. I knew that because I was still the smallest in the class and I became more self-conscious about it as the years went by. Swimming was a particular ordeal, and in my mind now, I can still see this young, timid wisp standing by the side of a pool in her red swimming costume quaking with anxiety.

I was small and scraggy and that was when the bullying started. There were two girls who were really nasty to me. They did not hit me, but bullying can take on many forms and the abuse and name-calling hurt. The saying about sticks and stones breaking bones but words never hurting falls on deaf ears when you are a schoolkid in the throes of a verbal beating. At that age, girls can be almost paralysed by their self-consciousness, so each nasty little word cut deep wounds. I went home, cried and wrote in my diary. Perhaps it would be nice to say that one day I fought back and beat the bullies, but I didn’t. It festered away and became a big thing in my life, leaving me wracked with fear about what they would say or do next.

It got to the point that I dreaded seeing them at school. And then we moved onto secondary school and I found out that they were going there too. The dread got deeper. Later, I did tell my mum. ‘They are only jealous of you,’ she replied. But jealous of what? I could not understand it. I tried to deal with it myself, but that was impossible. I would rely on my diary and hope for the best, but that was not much of a defence against these scary girls who were dominating my thoughts. And then, around that time, my mum saw an advert for a summer sports camp at the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield. It was my first taste of sport and it would be the first tentative step towards fighting back and getting my own quiet revenge on the bullies.

I
was in a hurry. What can I do now? What can I draw next? When can we go home? I hurtled through everything at breakneck speed, fuelled by impatience and boredom. It was a lot for Mum to deal with. Her work was stressful and involved a lot of emotional investment. It is the same now that she is a manager for the Turning Point charity, working with those affected by drug and alcohol addiction. She has always been a caring person, but she was at her wits’ end in the summer of 1996, so the Aviva Startrack camp was a godsend.

I went down with my sister Carmel, and our friends Libby and Eddie. I was anxious because there seemed to be hundreds of kids there, and I sat on the cold stone steps feeling nervous and insecure. The abiding memory of that first day now is the smell of the track. It is hard to describe, but it is special – not a sweaty staleness, but something unique to athletics. I dragged it in and never forgot it. Before long I was smitten. There was a range of coaches there, and we were split into different groups and spent two weeks trying all the different events. For someone prone to a short attention span, it was varied and fun. When the sun came out and baked the infield, there were water fights and a lot of laughs. This is when I made friends with Lorna and we were both completely hooked.

Carmel was less enthused. She sat on the steps at the Don Valley chatting to people; she didn’t really care for the activities. She was always more social than sporting and, when she came to secondary school, would try anything to get out of PE lessons. I don’t know how she managed it but she even convinced Mum to write her notes a few times to get her excused. I think it is important to stress that, while championing the merits of sport and an active lifestyle, you have to remember people are different. Not everyone likes sport. Some people hate it. Even I’m not that interested in watching it. I like doing it but I have never considered myself a sports nut and I don’t have an evangelical belief in spreading the gospel, because it is all about finding what you like and want to do.

Carmel did not much care for school in general back then. We had gone to King Ecgbert’s School in the little village of Dore in South Sheffield. Ecgbert was reputedly the first king of England and Dore was a much posher area, so it was a step up for us. The local school had a bad reputation and has since been knocked down, so it was a choice between King Ecgbert’s and another. As far as I was concerned, there was no debate, because my good friend Charlotte was going to join her sister at King Ecgbert’s and that sealed the deal. I started in September 1997. I was still terrified on the first day. I was not a confident child and almost froze when my dad asked me to go and get the paper from the corner shop one day.

‘On my own?’

Dad barely looked at me. ‘Yes, here’s the money.’

He knew I needed to shed some of my inhibitions, but I still remember going to big school and being frightened. There were two buildings, Wessex and Mercia, separated by a changeover path, and as I was edging along it one day, I heard an older girl say: ‘Oh, look at her, she’s so tiny and cute.’ That made me feel ten times worse.

Sport, though, was becoming an outlet for the insecurities and I found I was good at it. Mick Thompson and Andy Bull were two of the Startrack coaches who first thought there might be the semblance of some ability. They said they could just tell. You watch children running and they all do it in different ways, but some of them are fluid and natural. I won a free pair of trainers at the Startrack camp and came home enthusing about it. Grandad says that, after that, I was always asking him to time me in the garden. Andy, who went to the same school and later became my boyfriend, says he remembers me running between the Wessex and Mercia buildings, timing myself. I think he is exaggerating, but I had got the bug, and when in 1996 Mick asked me to start training at Don Valley once a week, I said yes.

I had tried other things. Charlotte played basketball and so I gave it a go too. We played for the Sheffield Hatters junior team, but I was rubbish. I also realized that I was not cut out for team games. There was a nice sense of camaraderie and I liked the fact we were all in it together, but I much preferred being in charge of my own destiny. When things go wrong in a team, you can always shift the blame onto someone else, but I thrived on the sense of responsibility and control. Perhaps it was being the first born, but I liked athletics from the start and did not want to do anything else.

Gradually, I became more popular. The two bullies were still there, but if I was talking to anyone going through something similar I would stress that things change quickly. It does not seem like it at the time, of course, with every week an endless agony of groundhog days, but it soon fades. I slowly made friends and the tide turned. The same girls who had bullied me now wanted to be my friends. It was all part of that whirlpool of hormones and petty jealousies that is part of being a young girl. Now I do not think they were inherently nasty people, but I know what I have done with my life and I think I am in a better position.