Memoirs of a Karate Fighter (20 page)

ANY FEELINGS OF satisfaction brought about by my victory at the Cumbria Open championships had been tempered by the news that Clinton had been readmitted to hospital. As I feared would happen, when his girlfriend had dumped him he had suffered another psychotic episode. Clinton's deterioration had been quite slow at first but to me it seemed that every time he went into a hospital the rate of his decline accelerated, and his chances of making a full recovery became even more remote. He was always heavily sedated and unresponsive when I visited him in the psychiatric ward, but I when I showed him the impressive trophy I had just won, a smile flickered across his bloated face. “Me and you will be training again soon,” he whispered hoarsely.

For me, life had largely remained several sequences of routine – but unlike some acquaintances I had known from school and who now languished in prison, at least the nature of the routines was mostly of my own choosing. Three years had gone by since that win in Cumbria and Clinton's hospitalization – and the world had not stood still. While I recognized what had remained constant in my life, I was also acutely aware of the things that had changed.

One of the major changes was that Hilda, Nadine and I had moved from our high-rise flat to a modest semi-detached house not far from
my parents' home – but not before one last encounter with the gang of skinheads who lived on the top floors. I had come across them individually or in pairs intermittently and nothing more than baleful stares had ever passed between us. As time went on – and I had got myself a better car and another place to live – the bad feelings I had toward them lessened. I figured that Declan Byrne had probably got it right when he had said that I had jumped to all sorts of hasty conclusions about them stealing and burning my old car. Any thoughts of retribution had drifted from my mind – until the night I returned to the flat to check for post a few days after we had removed the furniture. As I went back to my car thoughts of visiting Clinton on the way home meant that I had not taken much notice of the raised voices that came from somewhere beyond my peripheral vision. “Hey! I'm talking to you, you black bastard!” someone shouted.

I finished unlocking the car door before pivoting around to see four young guys on the other side of the car park. The skinhead I had seen first that day in the lift, shortly after I had moved into the flat, was amongst them. He had allowed his hair to grow a little longer but other than that he had not changed much. He led the other three toward me. At his shoulder was a man who was slightly larger; his pudgy face contorted with hate. Maybe they had waited this long because somewhere in their befuddled minds they had figured that now I was no longer living in the flat there was less chance of any acts of retaliation from me. The car door was unlocked and I had the option of jumping in and driving away but my running away days were long over. In a move that subconsciously mirrored that of Jerome's when he had confronted with the huge, armed man outside the Rising Star, I took two steps forward to meet them. The pair at the rear dropped back slightly on seeing this. I knew then that they were only going to get involved if they had a chance to kick me while I was on the ground. The two at the front were now up on their toes, bouncing on their heels as they walked. Pudgy-face threw an empty beer can to the ground but all I did was fix my eyes on the guy who now had his arms wide open. He snarled: “C'mon then! C'mon then! C'mon then, you black bastard, c'mon let's have some aggro!” There was obviously a lot of pent-up animosity that had built up within him since our first encounter at the lift. I took another step forward, knowing
I would have to take him out in one. I let my arms drop and gave them a small shake to make sure there was no tension in them. Now I could see his lips move and the small droplets of saliva that were ejected from his mouth, but I heard no sound. Something strange was happening to me: I felt no fear, no anger, but a weird sense of tranquility had seemed to envelope me. He made his move, in slow-motion I thought, and I was only aware of one of his hands moving as I drove my fist upwards. There was a crack of bone meeting bone as the force of the blow lifted him off his feet. He landed with a thud, but I was already pivoting and throwing my other fist into the pudgy face. My knuckles exploded onto the point of his jaw. His reaction to being hit was slightly different: he let out a soft groan as he bent at the knees before flopping flat onto his back. His body shuddered briefly and then went completely still on the tarmac. The other two who were following them stopped in their tracks. Suddenly, they looked younger, smaller and a lot more scared. I was about to tell to them they could walk away if they so wished, until the glint of metal on the ground caught my eye. A knife had spilled from the hand of the first skinhead as he hit the tarmac. I picked it up, before anyone else did, but as I straightened that weird feeling of being at peace instantly evaporated. I became incensed and started to swear at the skinhead who was still lying unconscious. So this bastard was about to try and make my little daughter fatherless. For one microsecond I thought about making a mark on his body or face with the knife so he would always have to live with a reminder of his murderous intentions. Old school friends of mine had done time in prison for stabbing people, one had actually killed a man, and until that moment I had not understood what had impelled any of them to drive a blade over and over again into another human being. But now I knew: the driving force behind their actions had been one of pure and undiluted hate; they had been caught up in a moment in which there been no thought of the consequences. When the moment passed – and the discipline I had acquired from my karate training took over – I held up the knife and said to the two left standing, “When they wake up, tell your mates they were lucky tonight. But if any of you ever pull a knife on me again, I'll leave it somewhere in you. Do you understand?” The pair nodded and I got into my car. It was not until I pulled up outside our new home did I become aware of how much I was sweating, and
how my hands were shaking. At first, I cursed myself for being so reckless; for allowing pride to prevent me making my escape as the four guys had shouted at me. I looked up to the light in the bedroom window and imagined Hilda and Nadine up there in their new, safer surroundings , thinking how I had risked our futures together because the little boy within me did not have it in him to run away anymore. I sat in the car for another half an hour doing my best to compose myself, before throwing the knife down into a drain and going inside.

The change of location had a dramatic effect on our relationship. Hilda was now a more positive person, a fully qualified nurse, whose newfound optimism had led her to embark on a midwifery course. Both of us had matured in a way that helped us to understand each other's viewpoints a little more. Nadine was now a rambunctious toddler who was attending a local pre-school nursery and in her interactions with other children she had blossomed. As a family, we had grown together.

There were major changes in my work too. Arches closed in 1983 after it had degenerated into the last refuge for all the thugs in town who had been barred from every other establishment. But it was not to be the end of my working on nightclub doors. Fuelled by the desire for furniture for our new home and a newer car, I clambered aboard the capitalist treadmill like a well-trained hamster and began to work at several clubs. It was during those times that I realized how touchingly naive, and somewhat amateurish, we had been while working at Arches. The world of the professional doorman was a great deal murkier, and as I gradually found out, it was a place inhabited by drug-dealers,
steroid-abusers
and police informers.

It was the one aspect of my life that troubled my conscience more than any other. In some cases working as a doorman was as nasty and as dangerous a job as they came. The nightclub foyer is often inhabited by emotionally stunted men, who while not very brave, are capable of extreme violence. During my time on the doors I had seen some unpleasant things – like a man having his face destroyed by a piece of timber until it looked like a mound of raw and bloody steak while four men took turns to jump on him as he lay unconscious, in what the
newspapers
described as a ‘turf war' between two rival gangs of bouncers. Initially, I'd had few qualms, but as the violence continued I began to feel 
that most of it was to do with feeding egos and garnering reputations. My perception about violence and the feelings it once stirred within me had finally begun to change. Where there was once exhilaration was now a slight nauseous pang. Yet although some of it turned my stomach, it was not enough to make me discontinue my work as a doorman. Maybe it should have done. What kept me working in such places was chiefly the money, but it helped that I also felt one step removed from what was going on around me. I was not like these men, I told myself. But one evening, as I was getting ready to do another stint on a nightclub door, I looked down to see my daughter playing with one of her dolls. The sight was so captivating that I sat down. As I watched her play, I wrestled with my conscience and once Nadine was tucked up in bed, I did not bother going out to work. From that moment I had finished with working on nightclub doors.

As for my work at the factory, I repaid the personnel manager's faith in me and passed my Higher National Certificate examination with flying colours. Mr Pearson then had me moved from the maintenance department to the management offices. My promotion did nothing to disguise the racist structure of the management within the plant; as I was the only black person in the offices, my presence only served to highlight it. I wish I could say that I entered my new position feeling like a trailblazer, or that I was making some sort of statement about equality. In reality, I was an extremely tentative young man whose biggest priority with regard to work was how much it would pay into my mortgage. Upon his
retirement
, and before he left the factory for one last time, I assured Mr Pearson that I had no intention of quitting. I remained grateful to this
quietly-spoken
man who had profoundly altered the course of my life.

A second departure from the factory prompted me to reappraise some aspects of human behaviour. Mick Davies told me he was leaving. “No offence,” he said, “it's nothing personal, but I really can't work under you.” I thought I understood how he felt. I was once his junior and now, nominally at least, I was his senior. To most of my former colleagues in the maintenance department, I was a treacherous ‘scab' whose promotion had the ring of thirty pieces of biblical silver about it. I shook Mick's hand and I was sincere when I wished him well. We had shared good times and although we had grown a little distant from
one another, what we had experienced was only the normal ebb and flow that is the nature of human relationships.

Similar ebbing and flowing had gone on within the YMCA karate club. There had been growing tensions within the
dojo
and matters came to a head after Jerome Atkinson won his world title at the end of 1984 in Maastricht. I had taken a special pleasure in his victory when I found out that the man he had beaten in the final was the same one I had lost to in the European under-21 championships. But I also recognized that years of gruelling training had taken their toll on Jerome's body, particularly his knees, and it was only with the aid of two cortisone injections that he had been able to compete that day. When he returned to England, he told Eddie Cox that the world championship final had been his last bout and he was not going to put his health at further risk by competing again. The YMCA had been invited to compete in a tournament the following week but it was not until we were at the venue that our sensei told us that Jerome would not be fighting with us. The air, particularly that which came from my cousin Ewart, became thick with recrimination and acrimony. Eddie Cox's unexpected news had left the team completely demoralized. For the first time in years, we were eliminated in the early rounds and Ewart never fought in a karate tournament again.

From that day, the Wolverhampton YMCA karate club existed in name only. We went through the motions for another two years but we were never again to recapture our glory days. The spirit and camaraderie within the club had gradually vanished. People, times and karate itself had all changed and although some of the faces remained, many more had left and the end of the fad known as the ‘kung fu boom' meant that fewer young men were inclined to enter and put themselves through the rigours of karate training. Those of us who had trained together as youths were now young men who wore black belts around our waists. Leslie, as usual, seemed to emerge from the chaos within the YMCA unscathed to win three British championships and a European title at lightweight. He was, to any neutral observer, favourite to win a world title in 1986 but an appearance in court led to British karate's governing body imposing a ban which disqualified him from competing at international level. The man who went onto win the world title at Leslie's weight was a competitor
who he had beaten many times, and it only served to confirm my belief that the wild side of Leslie's nature robbed him of more things than it helped him to achieve. And although I continued to do well in competitions, I did not do as well as Leslie; mostly because of a double dislocation of my shoulder which required an operation and a snapped Achilles' tendon. The injuries were very painful signals that my body was neither willing nor able to continue to suffer the severe punishment I had put it through for over a decade. The club had been like a family to me and it was too much to expect that the relationships within the confines of the
dojo
could continue in the same vein. As my father had said to me as I had left the home in which I had been brought up: two bulls cannot reign within the same pen. Perhaps, then, it was unreasonable to expect that a dozen bulls could remain, never mind reign within the same enclosure.