Memoirs of a Karate Fighter (4 page)

But despite his criminal activities and all the pain he had caused me, I had a grudging respect for Dalton. He was a man of his word and I admired his no-nonsense attitude to life that had made him a popular
figure in the
dojo
. His first brush with the law came when he was arrested for a crime that he had not only not committed, it was a crime that had never taken place. Even though he walked from the court a free man, the experience embittered him. This type of incident that had pushed Dalton toward a life of crime was happening more frequently. It seemed that every week someone I knew had a similar tale about a black man who had been wrongly stopped or arrested by the police. Experiences like Dalton's had helped to spread feelings of distrust and a notion that a whole community was under threat. For men of my age it stoked anger and resentment and put a little spite into the techniques we practised. Therefore, rather than seek the help of the police, people I trained with increasingly took the law into their own hands. Following the actions of Jerome and Ewart when they rid the nightclub of trouble caused by criminal elements, there had been several occasions when the assistance of the YMCA karate club had been sought by people who had been either threatened or burgled. The club's reputation was growing because of events outside of the
dojo
as well as those actions within it.

Following a couple of
katas
as part of a warm-down session, the lesson came to an end with the two usual bows from a kneeling position. In Japanese martial arts there is the saying:
‘Rei ni hajimari, rei ni owaru.
' It means that the training must begin and end with a bow. It is important for discipline to be maintained within any
dojo
, but particularly when it contains thirty-odd young men imbued with too much pride and too much testosterone. The bows at the beginning of every session signalled that we were entering another world, in which animosity and anger were to be put to one side; and within that period between the bows we were followers of
bushido
. The fact that it was a Japanese code also reminded us that our instructors were no longer to be considered our peers while we were in the
dojo
and that in some way they were merely echoing the strictures that had been laid down by the countless generations of martial artists who had gone before them. Consequently, we submitted ourselves to punishments that in any other context would have been unacceptable to us.

“Some of us must think they don't need to train,” Trog muttered as he walked by. There was an ill-founded air of superiority about Trog that got on everyone's nerves, even those of the instructors – a couple
of times he had been taught a very hard lesson after questioning a technique that had just been shown to the class. But even in his pain he displayed a superior attitude, seeing his punishment as a demonstration of the effectiveness of a technique that the instructor now had his permission to show to the rest of the students. “Shut your big mouth, Trog.” I replied. “I wasn't the one fighting like a pansy.”

“We'll see who's a pansy next time we spar,” the Trog said, in a vain attempt to save face.

Leslie rushed past me on his way to the changing room and said something to me which I did not quite hear. I was too busy watching Ewart rebuking Clinton for his performance against Trog. Ewart made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that he expected better from his younger brother. But talking was not enough for Ewart. He demanded the highest levels of skill and effort from everyone in the
dojo
– but particularly of those of us who were related to him. I felt uncomfortable watching as Clinton sparred with Ewart. I winced with each punch that struck Clinton's already bruised body. Each blow Ewart dealt was a warning of the consequences of failure.

Once they had finished and Ewart had left, I walked over and placed a hand on Clinton's hunched shoulders when I saw how gloom-laden he was. I asked him what had gone wrong during training.

“Besides Ewart thinking I'm useless?”

“You and everyone else below black belt,” I said, in an attempt to offer him some comfort.

He laughed and playfully punched me in the stomach. “I can't seem to get my fighting right,” he said, “nothing I do lately seems to work. Trog was all over me today. I just couldn't keep him off.”

I felt my eyes water as I tried to mask the discomfort his light tap on my belly had caused me. Fate had definitely smiled on me that night in preventing me from training. “Is that all you're worried about?” I said, trying to lighten his mood. “Here's me thinking you were just distracted.”

“What do you mean?” he replied, glancing at me quizzically.

“You know, the girls were standing on the corner outside and while you were sparring you were wondering how much they would charge a really ugly guy like Trog.”

Laughing out loud, we made our way to the changing room. Leslie rushed towards us, pulling dry clothes over his still wet body. He said to me, “Don't forget, tonight we have two nice-looking girls waiting for us. I told them we would pick them up for nine.”

I had completely forgotten about the double-date Leslie had previously arranged for the two of us. I suspected he had only involved me because the car he had recently bought was not yet roadworthy and he needed a lift. Although I knew Leslie would object, I felt Clinton would benefit from tagging along and as he got changed I told him he needed to come with us for a relaxing night out.

Clinton was chuckling while Leslie was cursing as the three of us finally clambered into my car.

AT NINETEEN I struck out for independence and got a place of my own, although this was not entirely by choice. On learning that a friend of his was planning to return to Jamaica, my father suggested that I should take over the tenancy of his flat. It was on the twelfth floor of a high-rise block on the other side of town, about five miles from my parents' home. Dad was showing me the door, in a gentle, roundabout way, mostly because the house in which I had grown up had become too small for the six of us, particularly as I was the only boy and so had a bedroom to myself. As my three younger sisters became adolescents and had started to bicker in their cramped space, my presence in the home was viewed as problematic.

I did not mind in the least, and Clinton and Leslie positively
celebrated
when I told them the news – they still lived with their parents and had notions about turning my second bedroom into some sort of ‘love nest'. I made sure that never happened. The flat was empty but for a bed, a wardrobe and an old three-piece suite, and I had not got around to putting much more furniture into it. The floor remained uncarpeted and was covered by hard, grey, vinyl tiles and the only source of heat was an ineffectual two-bar electric fire. My own ideas about using the flat for romantic liaisons had also come to nothing. I had recently split up with a girl I had known from school and there was a part of me that felt
as empty as my flat. But I turned my life of temporary solitude into an opportunity to train even harder. I used all the empty space as a training area, I ran up and down the flights of stairs rather than use the lift and I went out for either early morning or late evening runs. I pushed myself, just as I imagined my rivals for a first team place were pushing themselves. At the YMCA every member trained on their own but would nearly always deny doing so: it was part of a psychological contest. It was not unusual to hear someone comment that the only training he did was in the
dojo
– the implication being that any improvement he showed was due to having more natural talent.

But despite having my own place, my lifestyle was not completely
independent:
on the way back from the factory, I still called in at home for a meal my mother prepared for me every evening. What I missed most were those Sunday mornings when my father would cook breakfast whilst singing over and over again the few hymns he knew. The smell of fried food, and those sounds, from the comfort of my bed, were some of my happiest memories. The aroma of fried bacon became evocative of the times when I was secure within those four walls of the family home.

But the sense of security a middle-class area afforded me had gone. As a small child I had lived in a house that did not even have a bathroom but my parents worked hard so we could move out of such squalor and into a more salubrious neighbourhood. Now I was back to living in a far less affluent suburb – and away from my friends and family. And more troubling than that, I was one of only a handful of black tenants in a locality where the racist National Front was active, and in a block of flats where there was a gang of skinheads who had a reputation for what was called ‘Paki-bashing'. I had yet to see any of them, although I had seen ‘NF' sprayed onto a few walls, but I was told that they lived somewhere in the floors above me. But the first incident I had heard about that had some kind of racist motivation was an argument between two white tenants. Karen was a young single mother who had a flat next door to mine. She had returned to the communal laundry room in the basement to find that an impatient young girl had emptied her freshly washed clothes onto the floor so that she could use the machine. Harsh words were exchanged but when the girl made a derogatory remark about Karen's mixed-race child a punch to the mouth brought the heated
argument to an abrupt halt. The trouble then escalated when the girl's boyfriend, parents and, finally, the police intervened – but not before the latter had mistakenly come to my door.

One of the policemen had asked me if I had encountered any trouble; he did not say what kind, but I had an idea of the type of trouble he was referring to. We regarded each other with mutual suspicion, so much suspicion on my part that, rightly or wrongly, I thought that his enquiry was intended as a kind of threat.

I did start to wonder if my father's friend had been totally straight with us about his reasons for leaving the flat, but the menacing atmosphere was also something I used to motivate me to train as hard as I could. In the
dojo
we were often reminded to maintain
zanshin
– an awareness of our opponent – when working in pairs. After the cop had left, I vowed that I would not be caught unawares.

I had not been in my new home a month when that promise I had made to myself was first tested. I was feeling bloated from the huge bowl of Jamaican soup my mom had cooked for me. As mothers' do, she had guessed correctly that my flat was still empty of any homely touches and had insisted that I took two boxes of items that I thought were mostly junk. I thought the load was too much for me to climb the stairs, so I awkwardly balanced the boxes on one knee as I pressed the lift call button. The doors groaned as they slowly opened. The man who stepped out took me by surprise: he was about my build; height and age; and his hair was cropped short like mine but the colour of our skins were different. I wore the YMCA's blue tracksuit; he was dressed in a skinhead's uniform of a blue denim jacket and jeans that were held up with braces so that the turn-ups barely reached the tops of his shiny Doc Martens.

For a few moments we stared at each other. There was instantly a hatred between us that I could almost taste. The skinhead's eyes communicated that on another day (most likely if he were with his gang) he would have tried to do me physical harm. I responded with a glare that conveyed that I was convinced that if he attacked me I would come very close to killing him. But this was not the right time for him. I wanted to drop the boxes and pummel him for what he represented because I had heard and seen too much about what skinhead gangs had got up to around the town. But they chose their victims well and a man like him
would rarely look for violence on a one-to-one basis, unless the victim was much smaller and frailer than I was. He was still staring at me as the lift doors slid shut and I renewed my vow that I would not be caught unawares again.

As he had done when I was living with my parents, after the fighting class on Saturdays my cousin Clinton would call during the afternoon and we would go for a run together. We ran for several miles, until we found a patch of ground where we could stretch and throw a few techniques before heading back. But because of my chest injury, after less than a mile I was struggling – more than usual – to keep up with him. Clinton was a superb athlete, whose long, supple legs could keep moving at the same fast pace for many, many miles. I too had made it into the school's track and field team but four hundred metres was about as far as I could go competitively. There were many times when in keeping up with Clinton that I had developed severe stitches, but I had refused to halt and ran through the pain. But what I was suffering right then was far more painful than a stitch. Clinton had run another twenty yards before he realized that I was no longer at his shoulder. He looked back and saw that I was bent double before he jogged back to me.

“What's up?” he asked.

It took a while before I could find the breath to answer. Finally, I gasped, “Kick … Jerome … nurse at work … says it's a cracked … sternum … Don't say anything … about it to anyone … at the club … Okay?”

“Do you think it can heal in three weeks?” Clinton asked, his mind automatically turning to the British Clubs' championships.

“It'll have to,” I replied. Clinton wanted to go back to the flat but I insisted that we jogged to a nearby park to practise a few techniques. We pulled on our hand pads and started off by throwing
gyakuzuki
punches at one another's bodies. I kept my non-punching arm fastened over my solar plexus, while Clinton allowed me to hit him in the stomach. When his turn came, his punches fell six inches short. I told him to hit my forearm as he needed to get his distance right and I needed to know if my arm would provide adequate protection. His first punches were light,
too light to see if my arm could absorb fairly heavy impact. “Harder, Clint,” I growled at him, “you're punching like a fairy.” The next few punches landed with a little more force but I still had to find out what I could take. “No wonder Trog was taking liberties with you,” I said to provoke him. His next punch had me shuffling backwards.

“Was that hard enough?”

I grimaced and told him it was.

Back at the flat we discussed the merits of body armour. When karate was first practised in Europe there was little protection for the
karateka
while sparring. The Japanese instructors had set their faces against protective padding and said that any sort of barrier between the fist and its target made the art of focusing the blow (
kime
) much more difficult to master. In the early days, a few fighters used soccer shin pads tucked inside elastic bandages as it was quite common for a shinbone to come into contact with the bony, sharp end of an elbow while sparring. Such an injury made it difficult to walk, never mind train. Some of the instructors in the ‘pro-pain' lobby reckoned that such injuries would deaden the nerves in the leg and it was often pointed out that Thai boxers kicked tree trunks to achieve the same effect. Quite simply, there was a widely held opinion that pain was something to overcome, and the more frequently
karateka
experienced it, the sooner they would learn to cope with it. But Hironori Ohtsuka had favoured the use of padding back in the 1930s when he first experimented with the idea of karate contests, and so European
dojos
gradually accepted it as a training aid during the 1970s, even though some competition rules forbade its use.

But my chest needed protection at a time before body armour (as used by Olympic taekwondo competitors) was readily available. With Clinton's help I put on the bandages Brenda had given me and inserted a bathroom sponge to cover my sternum. I then asked Clinton to punch it. He twisted his mouth as if to signal that I was a damn fool, and gave me a
half-hearted
punch. “That obviously doesn't work,” he muttered, on seeing how much my face had creased with pain. I needed a foam of greater density and it was not long before I was pulling apart a cushion from one of my armchairs.

With the aid of a bread knife I cut the thick foam down to size and stuffed it into the bandages. Clinton burst out laughing and made a comment
about the attractiveness of my bust size. Not to be deterred, I told him that it would flatten when the bandages were tightened. I imagined the following scene must have been reminiscent of a Victorian lady having the strings in her corset pulled. After having my chest so constricted that I could hardly breathe, I could see that Clinton remained unimpressed. “It won't look so noticeable once I have my
gi
on,” I said, as I went to fetch my jacket.

Clinton reluctantly conceded that if I wore a t-shirt under my
gi
the protective padding would not be so obvious. “But why not just say that you're injured, or take a week off?” he asked.

Rivalry within the YMCA club not only made us deceitful about the amount of training we did away from the
dojo
, it also meant that it came as second nature to exploit any perceived weaknesses in other
karateka
. If someone came to train with a bandaged ankle, few in the
dojo
would have any compunction about hitting it with an
ashi barai
foot sweep. Just as in the streets, there were no favours given in the
dojo
. If it had been anyone else suggesting that I took time off I would have been suspicious about their motives, but Clinton was my closest friend and training partner – not a rival. “Clint,” I warned him, “I'm not saying anything and you've got to promise me that you won't either. Look, the fact that I'm moving around at all means that it can't be too badly cracked. Maybe it's just a deep bruise.”

I began to take off the bandages and he said, “Those won't work.”

“Have you a better idea?”

“Yeah, I think I have,” he replied. “I think I got something that will keep the padding in place if you're going to be so stupid as to try and train on Tuesday. That's if you're not so crazy as to try and do the run tomorrow. That would finish you for sure.”

I had barely managed a mile with Clinton and on Sunday mornings the club met for a run that was at least six times as far – and then followed by an hour of gruelling training in the park. The next run would be the last before the tournament and as much as I hated to admit it, there was no way that I could manage such a run in my state. Despite my temptation to do otherwise, I accepted Clinton's warning and said that I would see him next at the
dojo
. “Enjoy the run,” I said, knowing he would, “and bring that thing with you on Tuesday.”

I had managed to resist visiting the factory nurse Brenda. While I was tempted to seek her out for another couple of painkillers, I knew she would ask me about the promise to see my doctor that I had failed to keep. There had been many mechanical breakdowns to keep the maintenance crew busy and I had neither the time to think about the injury, nor the opportunity to do any sort of practising with Mick. It did confirm to me that while the pain was definitely physical, it was my mental attitude that dictated how much it impaired my movements. By the time of my next visit to the
dojo
, I was convinced that I was on the mend and that I could get through the next training session without too much difficulty.