Humble Pie

His favourite punishment was the belt. You’d get whacked for something as innocent as drinking his Coke. I would get completely fucked over for that sort of thing. It wasn’t so much the Coke he was bothered about, more that he wouldn’t have a mixer for his precious Bacardi.

Yvonne was born in Birmingham. Next stop was Daventry, where we had quite a nice council house. Then we were off again, to Margate, where, for a time, we lived in a caravan. That was horrendous. We didn’t even have enough money for the gas bottle to keep the place warm.

Then it was back up to Scotland again, followed by another stint in Birmingham, and then on to Stratford-upon-Avon. But Dad couldn’t settle. Off he’d go: to France, or to America. He never sent money home. It was up to Mum to earn our keep. When he came back from abroad, we moved to Banbury, where he was going to run a newsagent’s shop. We lived above the shop, and the guy who owned it was lovely. But Dad was on the fiddle. The owner found out, and we were out on our ears again.

So it was back up to Glasgow. But I was a teenager now, and I decided not to go. The council gave Diane and me a flat, and we stayed put. I was doing a catering course at college, funded by the local Round Table, but, in any case, I don’t think Dad wanted either of us around.

I had crossed a line when I was fifteen. I was going out with a girl called Stephanie, and one night I came back late.

‘Get your stuff out of my house, and go and live with her,’ he said.

‘I’m sixteen next week,’ I said. ‘I can go where I like.’

I’d already been given a big radio for the upcoming birthday, and he threw it at me from the top of the stairs.

‘I can’t believe you’ve done that,’ I said. ‘You know damn well that Mum bought it for me.’

I knew she’d got it on hire purchase, which was costing her £8 a month, and I couldn’t bear it.

‘I’d rather you did that to me than to something that hasn’t even been paid for,’ I said.

He came storming down the stairs. At first, I stood my ground. Then I saw the look in his eyes and I bolted. For the first time, I felt that he really might kill me. I saw something in his eyes that day – a kind of madness.

Once Diane and I were out of the way, he turned his madness to whomever else was there. Ronnie was his pal, mostly, so it was Yvonne’s turn to take the treatment, and Mum was still getting knocked about. She was working in my Uncle Ronnie’s shop in Port Glasgow, and she’d come in with bruised lips and black eyes.

My uncle would say, ‘Oh, Helen, you can’t serve the customers looking like that!’

And she’d say, ‘Well, it was your brother that did this to me.’

But no one intervened. Domestic violence was still seen as a private matter then.

Next, the four of them ended up in Bridgwater, in Somerset. It was there that he committed the final crime and left our lives – almost for good. It’s a time I cannot think about without feeling the blood pulsing in my temples, though I wasn’t even there when it happened.

Dad had had a couple of drinks, but this attack was planned – not some dumb, drunken rage. He came home from work, and Mum was in bed with a mug of hot milk. He poured it all over her, leaving bad scalding to her chest. Then he dragged her downstairs, and the beating started. By the time the ambulance arrived, her eyes were completely closed, her face swollen and pulped. First, she was taken to a hospital, then to a refuge. Dad, of course, disappeared at the first sound of a police siren.

That was when the social services and all the other authorities got fully involved, and a restraining order was taken out on him. He wasn’t allowed anywhere near the house, but when Mum went home, she found everything that she had built up smashed into tiny pieces. He hadn’t left even a light bulb intact. Worst of all, Dad had left a note on the mantelpiece. It read, ‘One night, when you are least expecting it, I’ll come back and finish you off.’

Dad went off to Spain, and I didn’t see him for many years. Then, towards the end of 1997, when I was running a restaurant and already well-known, I got a call from Ronnie. Dad was in Margate. He’d had an argument with Anne, his second wife, and he’d upped and left. I called him on the number Ronnie had given me. I don’t know why. He sounded very low.

‘I’m here to see my doctor,’ he said. ‘Can I see you?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll come down.’

It had been a difficult year. My wife, Tana, and I were expecting our first baby. And I was involved in all sorts of legal trouble over my restaurant. Still, I drove down there. There was something in me that couldn’t refuse his request. I got out of my car and I saw this old, frail, white-haired man with bruises on his face, and marks on his knuckles. I felt stunned. This was the man I’d been scared of for so long, brought so low, so pathetic and feeble.

‘What’s happened to you?’ I said.

‘Oh, Anne and I separated, and I had an argument with one of her sons.’

‘Look at the state of you. Where are you living?’

He pointed at the car park, and there was his Ford Transit van. Inside there were all his possessions and an inflatable camp bed in the back, with awful net curtains in the windows.

We had breakfast, and we went for a walk on the pier, and it was so sad. So I went to the bank and I got out £1,000, and I gave it to him for the deposit on a flat. I thought that at least I could do the right thing by him, and that’s what he did. He got a little one-bedroom basement flat.

On Christmas Eve, he telephoned. Anne was coming over, and they were going to try and fix their problems. That was the last time I ever spoke to him.

After hearing that he and Anne had made up, I booked him a table at my restaurant for the twenty-first of January 1998. Most of my staff didn’t even know I had a father. I’d reinvented myself, I suppose. I’m not ashamed of that. I’ve never tried to pretend anything else. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be like him. And any time I came even close to that, I would put the fear of God into myself.

It was New Year’s Eve when we heard that my father had died. I hated him, but still, his funeral was horrible. Anne organised it in a Margate crematorium that was so characterless, it might have been a branch of Tesco. We walked in, and his songs were playing. It was him singing. To me, that was the worst thing. And then there were so many strangers. We knew no one.

Mum didn’t go, but my sisters and Ronnie did. By this time, Ronnie was a desperate heroin addict, and he had been refusing to go. I was at my wits’ end. Finally, about an hour before the funeral, I gave him money so that he could buy what he needed to get him through it.

How low can you go? Very low indeed, if you’re desperate.

I drove back to London and I went straight back to the kitchen, trying to think only about the next order. I don’t think I’ve ever needed my kitchen so much in all my life.

What did my father leave me? A watch, actually. Everything else he ‘owned’ was on hire purchase. He never tasted my cooking.

‘Cooking is for poofs,’ he used to say. ‘Only poofs cook.’

Chapter Two Football (#ulink_c9f96fdc-a286-519a-ada7-32ecee3cd4da)

It was football, not cooking, that was my first real passion.

Football was one way I thought I could impress Dad. He and my Uncle Ronald were huge Glasgow Rangers fans, and I could see that this might be a way to reach him. I must have been about seven when I went to my first Rangers match. I remember being up on Ronald’s shoulders and the amazing roar of the crowd. It was quite frightening.

Back in Stratford, I was chosen to play under-fourteen football when I was just eleven, and at twelve years old, I played for Warwickshire. Did I enjoy it? Yes, I loved it. And if Dad came to watch, it was a special relief, because at least that meant he wasn’t at home giving Mum a hard time. He didn’t always come to watch, though. Sometimes, he didn’t even ask you the score. I got used to it.

Then, when I was fourteen, I went up to head a ball, and a miracle happened. The ball went straight into the back of the net. Unhappily along the way, the goalkeeper had managed to punch me in the stomach. I went down, and the referee came over, sat me up, and made me do all these sit-ups. I felt dizzy and weird. So he sent me off to get some water. I went to pee, and suddenly I was peeing blood, and two minutes later, I collapsed.

In the hospital, they thought it was my appendix. Then they thought it was a collapsed lung. That night, I was doubled-over in pain. I was in fucking agony. They took me down to surgery, and my spleen had been perforated. They managed to repair the damage, though they took my appendix out as well.

Two weeks later, an abscess developed internally. So it was back into hospital. This time, I had blood poisoning. All told, my recovery took three months from start to finish. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t jump and I couldn’t train. And then, when I started kicking the ball again, I was nervous about going into a tackle. I had lost my confidence.

I remember my first serious game like it was yesterday. Dad was away, and you don’t take your mum to football, do you? It was an English Schools competition – Oxfordshire County against Inner London – held at Loftus Road, the ground of Queens Park Rangers, in London. It was amazing, and all the London players were from the youth teams of Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal. I thought we were going to get hammered, but we beat them 2–1. However, it was a dirty game. I was taken off after a bad tackle to my knee – another injury from which it took me ages to recover.

After I’d recovered, I played in an FA Cup youth game, and it was there that a Rangers scout spotted me. They asked if I’d like to spend a week of my next summer holiday with the club. Fucking hell! It wasn’t just the fact that it was a professional club, it was RANGERS, the one club that would have an impact on the way Dad felt about me – or so I thought. By then, I was sixteen and was pushing the upper age limit for breaking into professional football. It was make-or-break time.

That first week was hard. I had an English accent, so they kicked the shit out of me for that. And they also made me use my right leg, which was fucking useless. We weren’t allowed to rely on only one foot, in much the same way as, in the kitchen, you must be able to chop with both hands. Anyway, after that first week, I just hated Rangers.

I was called back three times. The process was horrible, and I was in two minds about begging for a fucking contract out of Rangers. I was settled in Banbury in the flat with Diane, and I was enjoying my freedom. I had my first serious girlfriend. I’d started working in a hotel. I had a bit of money, and there was always Banbury United if I wanted football. I got about £15 a game.

Mum phoned. She told me to contact my Uncle Ronald.

‘Look, things have moved on,’ he said. ‘Rangers are going to invite you back up.’

He gave me a number to call. I phoned one of the head coaches.