Soldier Of The Queen (4 page)

One evening, about a week before Christmas, I found a wrist-watch on the floor in the yard. It was useless - one hand was missing — and I assumed someone had thrown it away. When I got home that evening I gave it to my brother Paul to tinker with, then I changed and went to play football at the nearby sports hall. Later as I was playing football a policeman burst into the hall, marched up to me and said I was under arrest. I found out later that Paul had been outside a shop with his friends when the policeman had walked by and told them it was time they moved on. Paul had said something cheeky like: "No, it's about eight o'clock actually." All the boys laughed. The policeman asked him if he was trying to be funny. He said he was not: it was just that his watch only had one hand. He showed it to the policeman who asked him why he had such a useless watch. Paul said that I had found it at work and given it to him earlier. The policeman asked where I was and Paul told him. Hence, his dramatic arrival at the sports hall.

I was completely embarrassed and bewildered when in front of my friends he put my arm behind my back and frogmarched me to his van. He put me in the front seat beside him. As we drove towards the police station he kept asking me where I had got the watch and I kept telling him the truth. He shouted that I was a liar, then slapped me in the mouth with his glove. I felt frightened because I did not know what I had done to justify this treatment. I leant over and grabbed the steering wheel, forcing him to slam on the brakes. The van skidded and struck the kerb before stopping. He hit me a few times while I shouted that I wasn't going to the police station without my mother. Eventually he agreed and drove to my house. He picked up my mother and drove to the station where I was charged with "theft by finding". At court a magistrate gave me another lecture on morality and fined me £35.

Before I encountered the police I was already hurtling downwards, but far from diverting me to safety, their ludicrous petty-mindedness helped turn my descent into a kamikaze nose-dive. In my adolescent mind all I could see was that the forces of law and order could hound a boy for petty irrelevancies, but could not intervene to prevent a man from nearly killing his wife. Rage and resentment stewed inside me: school was a farce, the law was a farce, life was a farce, but I was not going to take their shit. Unlike my mother, I was going to hit back.

One evening I was walking home from school with a group of seven others. The school coach stopped at a set of traffic lights. It contained around 50 children who lived in outlying areas. They started making faces at us. We all picked up handfuls of dirt and threw them at the coach as it set off. One

of us must have picked up a stone in the dirt because the coach's back window suddenly disintegrated. The next day the headmaster gathered together the children who had been on the coach. He gave them each a piece of paper and told them to write down the name of the person they thought had smashed the window: their anonymity would be guaranteed. Almost everyone wrote down my name. On that basis alone I was found guilty and ordered to pay the £100 cost of replacing the window.

I was enraged: no-one knew, or could have known, who had broken the window. I said I wouldn't pay and walked out of the school. Later that day a truancy officer called and told my father to bring me into school the next day for a meeting with the headmaster. At that meeting I explained that eight boys had thrown dirt at the coach and none of us knew whose handful had contained the stone; surely as we were all in the wrong the cost ought to be divided equally between us? Furthermore, how could most of the children - who were not even looking out of the coach window at the time - know for sure who had thrown the stone? My father told me to be quiet, apologised to the headmaster for my behaviour and said that of course I would pay the full cost. They agreed I would pay so much a week. So for 14 weeks I had to hand over everything I earned from my two jobs. I despised them and I despised their justice, just as I despised the woman who would slide back the hatch at the school office and take my hard-earned money. For the first six weeks she said the same thing: "Oh, you ought to be putting this in the bank, O'Mahoney. Maybe next time you'll think before you act. Do you want a receipt?" Then she would smile sarcastically as she slammed the hatch shut. I could imagine the poisonous bitch going home to her slipper-wearing husband and the two of them laughing at her reports of her witticisms.

One night I crept into the school grounds and hurled a crate of empty milk bottles through the headmaster's window. Then I sprayed blue paint over the school coach. I was not caught and I never told anyone I was responsible. But for the next eight weeks as I handed over my money I said to the woman: "Have they caught anyone yet?" She would say: "No, O'Mahoney. But we will. We will."

I carried out my first street robbery when I was around 13. One afternoon I was in Wolverhampton with a friend called Hughie. I saw a well-dressed boy, perhaps two years older than us, standing by a Mercedes in a back street near the town centre. He was carrying a bag containing the kit for a large model aeroplane. I did not say anything to Hughie, but we both instinctively knew we were going to rob him. I went up to him and asked if he had any money. He looked at me, laughed and in a well-spoken voice said: "Piss off, sonny." With that he pushed me in the chest and I fell backwards into a puddle. I felt gripped by a rage: I jumped up, ran towards him and started punching him in the head, face and kidneys. I spun him around so he was facing the car - it was probably his parents' and he was waiting for them to finish their shopping. I grabbed his hair and smashed his face into the bonnet. I pulled him round to the middle-centre of the bonnet and brought his head down repeatedly onto the Mercedes badge, which soon became flattened and spattered with blood. Hughie was shouting at me to stop and eventually he pulled me off. The boy collapsed limply and his body began to jerk violently. He started writhing on the floor in convulsions. I had the terrifying feeling I was watching someone's death throes. We ran to the bus stop and waited nervously for our bus. We were both panicking and I kept asking Hughie if he had seen the boy moving or breathing as we ran. He kept saying: "He'll be all right. He'll be all right." When I got home I turned on the radio to listen to the local news. Nothing. Then I went out and bought the local evening paper, the
Wolverhampton Express and Star.
Nothing. I was sure I had killed the boy, but over the next few days there were no reports of the attack, so after a while I relaxed. I can only assume now that my victim must have suffered an epileptic fit. I feel revolted, truly revolted, remembering this attack. My upbringing did not justify that behaviour and only partially explains it. I had been turned - but was also for my own dark reasons choosing to turn myself — into a cold and violent thug.

I was always fighting at secondary school, at least for the first few years when there remained people willing to take me on. The teachers tried increasingly drastic methods to lessen my disruptive influence. For a long while I was prohibited from mixing with the other children. At the end of a lesson I had to wait until my fellow pupils had made their way to the next class before I could set off after them along the empty corridors; at breaktime I had to stand alone outside the headmaster's office; at lunchtime I had to leave the premises altogether.

Not that that stopped me from forming my own gang and diversifying into illegal money-making ventures. One was the sale of alcohol from a loft in the school cloakroom. Boys would steal alcohol from home or local shops and sell it to me for cash. I would then sell it on at a profit. The other was a "steal-to-order" shoplifting scam: some pupils' parents would ask me to get them perfume or after-shave to give as presents - one even ordered a lawn-mower from me. So I employed two of my fellow pupils, both competent shoplifters, to get what they wanted for a price. Both scams added to my income, helping to pay my fines while funding my weekly trips to watch Manchester United.

At school I would also use whatever opportunity presented itself to get back at teachers I didn't like. In one chemistry lesson I handed the teacher a test-tube whose top I'd heated over a Bunsen burner. The unsuspecting teacher grasped it in his palm and screamed in agony as the tube attached itself to him, burning its way into his skin. He shook his hand violently to shake off the tube, but it had stuck to his palm. The chemical reaction caused by hot tube combining with hand was still hissing and smoking as the teacher ran screaming from the room.

My best friend at the time was Stan, the son of a policeman. He had been present at my first attempted burglary when I had broken the catch on a local supermarket's store-room window in the hope of gaining access. However, we couldn't get inside and had to be content with reaching in and grabbing what we could - Jaffa Cakes and whisky. Stan was also having problems at home, although these were completely unlike mine. He did not like his step-mother and felt she did not like him. He told me she seemed to care less about him than she did about "Chuckles" - her Pekinese dog with its short legs, broad flat face and long shaggy coat. One day I was in his front room when his step-mother walked in. She ignored us and walked out again. We heard her shout: "Chuckles! Chuckles! Come on!" Chuckles was laid out on a cushion in front of the coal fire. It failed to respond to its mistress's call. She kept calling but must have decided to leave without the dog, because we heard her slam the back door shut. The noise woke up Chuckles, who jumped up and made as if to go out. Stan gave the dog a half-hearted kick which, to our horror, projected Chuckles into the blazing fire. Chuckles's coat appeared to explode into flames. The dog jumped off the fire and ran around the room barking, chased by the two of us who were desperately trying to extinguish the flames. The more we chased Chuckles, the more it panicked: it ran behind the full-length curtains and they too caught fire. Eventually we managed to catch poor Chuckles and smother the flames. We had put out the fire on the curtains immediately, so there was not too much damage there. Chuckles was shocked, but once we had cut off most of the singed and burnt hair, the poor dog looked like a passable imitation of its old self. Thankfully the fire had looked worse than it was: the perfumed scent that Stan's step-mother sprayed on the dog had probably ignited to give a look of fiery intensity, without causing real burning heat. We arranged the curtains in such a way that at a glance you wouldn't have noticed the fire damage. Then we sprayed air freshener to mask the acrid smell of burnt hair. Stan's step-mother never did find out what had happened that day. She saw the burnt curtains, found a burn on the carpet and could tell by Chuckles' new look that something had happened, but Stan, as always, denied knowing anything.

Stan and I got into all sorts of trouble, much to his policeman father's despair. One time we ran away from home to Wales where we ended up in court charged with theft. We were given a 12-month Supervision Order. This experience did not stop us: we kept breaking in to the supermarket from which we had stolen the Jaffa Cakes and whisky some time before. We never got away with much. However, one night we were spotted and someone called the police. We split up as we ran off. I got away, but Stan ended up being caught by his own father, who was on duty. His father — the most decent policeman I have ever known - had to arrest him and take him to the police station. None of us, including his father, thought Stan would be punished too severely, even though he had a previous conviction. However, to everyone's shock, he got sent to a detention centre. But my friend's imprisonment didn't deter me - it just made me loathe authority even more.

No-one ever seemed to question why I was so unruly. No-one witnessed the physical and mental torture I endured at my father's hands. I was just "bad" and had to be punished. But the special treatment I received and my reputation for violence gained me what I thought was the respect of my peers. In fact, it was only deference based on fear. But I liked it. It made me feel powerful — an enjoyable sensation for someone who had felt powerless for so long. People could only see this aggressive couldn't-care-less delinquent; they could not see the confused and frightened child I knew myself to be. I wish I could have broken and poured everything out to someone. Instead, I continued to act out my bad-boy role, because at least that way I could get a bit of adoration and recognition, which is what I craved. I soaked up the attention of my minions. In my mind I felt I was beginning to win the fight against those who tried to impose their authority on me. I thought I was becoming a somebody - a status they had said I would never achieve. In reality I was systematically destroying myself and my future.

At home, throughout my early teens, I would harm myself, gouging my stomach with a craft knife or broken glass. I did not want to feel 1 was being butt by my father and when 1 realised I was I hated my weakness and wanted to harm myself: emotion and pain were for weak people. I had learnt that from my father and he frequently underlined the point: once when I was about 13 1 accidentally cut my hand wide open with a knife while playing. I ran into the house crying with pain. My father looked at me with contempt and said: "What you fucking moaning about? Put your hand here and I'll fucking stitch it." And he did: he got a needle and thread and stitched it. As I moved into my teens my father continued to use me as a punchbag, so I used to try to avoid him. I would sit on the pavement outside the house some nights waiting for every light to go out. When I thought he was asleep I would slip in quietly by the back door and go silently to bed.

In November 1974, four months before my 15th birthday, the IRA blew up two pubs in nearby Birmingham, killing 19 people and injuring 182. My brother Paul was one of many employed to clear up the wreckage. The bombing caused an outpouring of anti-Irish feeling throughout the country, but especially in the West Midlands. We all felt it: my father was attacked at the Wolverhampton tyre factory where he worked. Unfortunately, he was not badly hurt. My mother found people ignoring her in the shops and giving her dirty looks in the street. Even today when something dramatic happens in Northern Ireland she doesn't like leaving the house.