Essex Boy (2 page)

When I was eventually discharged from the hospital, I elected to stay at home rather than face the school bullies. My mother did encourage me to attend but I think she worked out that I had previously been tormented and so allowed me to remain at home. While I had been in hospital my mother had formed a relationship with a very decent man named John Winter and shortly after I was discharged from the hospital they married. I really liked John; he was a kind, considerate, well-meaning man who treated me as if I were his own son. Sadly, he passed away in 2000. He had been suffering from a peptic ulcer, which is an extremely painful but treatable disorder. Unfortunately, John’s ulcer eroded one of his blood vessels, which caused gastrointestinal bleeding from which he died. Soon after my mother’s wedding, my father announced that he had also met a woman and intended to marry for the third time. Fortunately for my father, although possibly less so for Beverley, his bride, the number three turned out to be lucky and they remain married to this day. I must admit that the very thought of watching
The Jeremy Kyle Show
these days fills me with horror. I half expect that every mystery father they say is waiting in the wings to meet a long-lost offspring will be mine.

My absence from school attracted the attention of the local authority and they threatened all sorts of legal action against my mother if I did not attend. My mother’s pleas for understanding fell on deaf ears and so, with a heavy heart, she was forced to pack me off to school each morning. Once I was out of her sight I would make my way to the local church and hang around the graveyard or, if it was raining, I would seek shelter and warmth in the local launderette. I wasn’t a ghoul or some sort of morbid weirdo; I chose to hide among the dead simply because I couldn’t be seen from the road and few people ever ventured into the church grounds. Even if they did, they were so preoccupied thinking about their dearly departed that they rarely even noticed me.

At the age of 15, I left school without any qualifications or indeed much basic education. Hands up, I admit that I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box, but I had done something few other kids my age had ever done: I had stared death in the face twice and walked away to tell the tale. As I grew older, the knowledge that I had survived such an ordeal, not once but twice, gave me great confidence and a strong belief in myself. If I was strong enough to cheat death, I knew that I had the inner strength to face any adversity, and so I vowed that nobody would ever get away with bullying or intimidating me again.

The first job I had after leaving school was cutting cheese into blocks, for which I was paid the princely sum of 50p an hour. I suppose that potential employers regarded me as thick and so it was a case of doing what I was given rather than choosing a career. I wasn’t cutting cheese for long. A friend of the family offered me a job rubbing down cars prior to their being re-sprayed and I gladly accepted. The hours were long, the work repetitive and exhausting, and so after just a few weeks I walked out.

My illness, appearance and reluctance to attend school had alienated me from other children and so I didn’t have any true friends to speak of. I would roam the streets alone, gazing into shop windows thinking of all the things that I could buy if I had money, but I no longer had a job and, therefore, there was no chance of me obtaining any. It then occurred to me that if I did my shopping when the stores and shops were closed, money would not have to exchange hands.

The first place I ever broke into was Oxfam. In my defence I didn’t commit the crime for my own benefit. I had been walking past the shop one day with my father when he pointed to two vases in the window and said that he liked them. I didn’t have the money to buy them for him, so I decided to break in and steal them instead. That night I tipped all of my father’s tools out of a canvas holdall, jumped onto my bike and headed for the Oxfam shop. After parking near my intended target, I checked that the road was clear before jogging across and into the Oxfam shop doorway. People had left bin liners full of old clothing at the door and so I tore one open, took a jumper out and went in search of a house brick. I soon found one of a suitable size, wrapped it in the jumper and smashed the glass pane in the shop door. While I was doing this a man walked past, so I dropped the jumper and went after him. ‘Excuse me. Have you got the time, please?’ I asked. The man looked at me as if I were something disgusting that he had just stood in and continued to walk away. Fuck him, I thought, before running back to the shop.

I climbed through the broken window and put the vases into my holdall. I glanced across the road to ensure that nobody was coming and noticed that a man was trying to steal my bike. I clambered back through the window and ran towards the would-be thief but he saw me coming and made off in the opposite direction. Muttering something about fucking crooks and nothing being safe unless it’s nailed down, I climbed back into the shop. Behind the counter I found a large glass cabinet, which was locked, so I picked up a bowl and threw it as hard as I could in an effort to smash my way into it. The bowl hit the cabinet, bounced off and narrowly missed my head before smashing on the floor. I knew that I was making too much noise and so I picked up 75p off the top of the till, put a can of crazy foam in my holdall and made good my escape.

After successfully committing such a petty crime, there was only one way that my criminal career could go and that was up. Soon I was carrying out burglaries at off-licences, builders’ merchants and post offices. If I couldn’t get my hands on hard cash when committing a burglary, I would take anything that I thought I could sell later. One time I filled two black bin liners with cigarettes and hid them under a shed at a local bowling club. I asked around to see if anybody was interested in purchasing the goods that I had stolen and one local entrepreneur agreed to buy the lot. As I walked away from the bowling club with the cigarettes, a police car happened to pull up alongside me and so I ran. As I made good my escape, one bag burst open, spilling all of the boxes of cigarettes out onto the road and so I dropped it and continued to flee. Glancing over my shoulder, I could see that a police officer was in pursuit and so I turned down an alleyway only to be confronted by a wrought-iron gate with a sign that read ‘Beware of the Dogs’. I had always been terrified of dogs and so rather than risk being chewed I gave myself up to the gasping officer who had pursued me. I was promptly arrested and charged with theft.

I don’t know if a passer-by had stopped and picked up the boxes of cigarettes that I had dropped, but they certainly disappeared while I was in police custody. The charge sheet that I was given stated that I had stolen 50 boxes of cigarettes when I knew I had in fact stolen nearly 200. You can’t trust anybody these days! I hope they choked on them.

Staring out of my bedroom window at the rain one evening, I decided that I would venture out to a local bar to play pool. I didn’t usually play the game and I have no idea why I felt such a sudden inexplicable urge to begin, but something inside told me that I should do so. Looking back, it was probably boredom; people do the funniest things when the mind is idle. The only thing that prevented me from curing my craving was the fact that I didn’t have any money. Close to my home was a corner shop that I had considered robbing for quite some time. Fondling one of my father’s old pool cues, I told myself that there was no time like the present, and so I tore the sleeve off my jumper, cut two eye holes in it and selected a large knife from the kitchen drawer. I had no intention of cutting or stabbing anybody; the blade was going to be used merely as a tool of persuasion. When I went downstairs, I hid the knife by the front door, pulled my makeshift balaclava onto my arm, put on my coat and went to leave the house. As I was walking through the front door, I picked up the knife and pushed it up my sleeve in an effort to secrete it. At that very moment, my father walked up the garden path.

‘What are you doing with that?’ he asked.

‘I’m going to make a cash withdrawal. See you later,’ I replied.

When my father saw my mother, he told her what he had seen and what I had said to him. ‘That boy is stupid going out with a knife,’ he said rather philosophically. ‘He’ll get himself into trouble.’

Standing outside the corner shop, I adjusted my home-made balaclava and looked up and down the street to ensure that no have-a-go heroes were in the vicinity. Moments later I burst through the shop door. The lady behind the counter began to scream. I ordered her to open the till but my words fell on deaf ears; she continued screaming and ran from one end of the counter to the other. I chased her back and forth, shouting, ‘Open the fucking till. Open the fucking till,’ but she was clearly not listening, nor was she prepared to comply with my demands. When she began to call out, ‘Peter, Peter,’ I panicked, as I assumed that somebody else was in the rear of the shop. A dog began to bark and seemingly from nowhere a heavily built male appeared from behind the counter. I had no intention of getting involved in a fist fight and so I turned and ran out of the door.

When the police arrived at the shop, the lady gave them a detailed description of the miniature robber, and triumphant officers were knocking at my front door within minutes. At the age of eighteen, I was still only five feet tall, which is why I was given the nickname ‘Nipper’. Doctors had explained that the treatment I had received for leukaemia may have affected my development and so there was no guarantee that I would ever grow any taller. Fortunately, they were wrong and I did gain six inches over the next few years. Unfortunately, in the meantime I was the most distinct-looking teenager in the Southend area.

My mother invited the police into the house and as soon as they set eyes on me I was arrested for attempted armed robbery. I asked if I could fetch my coat before departing for the cells and as one of the officers escorted me upstairs I heard my mother say to his colleague, ‘Oh yes, Steven did go out with a knife about that time. His father was really unhappy about it.’ My escort looked at me and smiled.

I knew that there was no point in denying the offence and so I simply said, ‘It wasn’t worth it, was it?’

The officer laughed and replied, ‘It never is, son. It never is.’

When I was interviewed about the offence, I made a full and frank confession before being charged with attempted robbery. The following day I appeared in court and was remanded in custody to Her Majesty’s Prison (HMP) at Ashford, in Kent, to await trial. This may sound somewhat bizarre to many people but, like my stay in hospital, I actually found myself enjoying the experience. For the first time in my life I wasn’t being bullied, I had like-minded friends and everything I needed was provided for me. When I appeared in court for sentencing, the judge ordered that I should serve two years and three months’ imprisonment. I was 18 years of age. I certainly didn’t need to invest in a pair of sunglasses because my future was looking far from bright.

The morning after I was sentenced, I was transferred to HMP Chelmsford, home to lots of young men from the Southend area. The first face I recognised when I entered the jail belonged to a man named Malcolm Walsh, from Leigh-on-Sea. I had occasionally attended school with Malcolm but I wouldn’t have described us as friends. Because we did recognise each other, Malcolm and I exchanged pleasantries and after a few brief conversations found that we had a lot in common. That is, we both made what little money we earned from committing crime. In the weeks and months that followed, our friendship grew and we spent a lot of time together. I was released from prison two months before Malcolm. On the morning I walked to freedom, we had both vowed to keep in touch but, apart from exchanging letters for the first two weeks, neither of us bothered to keep our promise. Three months later, I bumped into Malcolm at a pub called The Carlton, in Leigh-on-Sea. It was a chance meeting but we soon rekindled our prison friendship and became partners in crime. Malcolm and I earned a dishonest living committing burglaries, an occupation I now concede is vile. Like all criminals, we tried to justify our immorality by telling ourselves that, despite the fact that we were breaking the law, we were not all bad. For instance, we had pledged never to break into people’s homes, but breaking into their businesses and stealing their cars was deemed acceptable. We never stopped to think that the people whose homes we spared could have been the very same people who owned the businesses that we looted. The money that I made from our unscrupulous activities brought me relative happiness, but Malcolm was described by those who knew him as ‘the most miserable bastard in the world’ because he never did smile. I have no idea why he was so emotionless but he possessed only one facial expression: serious. Looking back, we were an odd couple because unlike miserable Malcolm I was always laughing and joking with people.

One New Year’s Eve, I had argued with my father about something trivial. I cannot now recall the root cause of our dispute but I did end up sleeping at Malcolm’s flat that night. As revellers welcomed in the New Year, two armed, masked men burst into a petrol station in Leigh-on-Sea. Brandishing their weapons, they ordered the staff to open the safe and made off with an unknown quantity of cash. Later that night, through an acquaintance, I was asked to dispose of a briefcase that the robbers had used. The following morning, Malcolm drove me to a landfill site and I threw the briefcase, which was full of papers from the garage safe, into a pond. We stood watching and waiting for the briefcase to sink but the fucking thing floated out to the middle of the pond with the grace of a swan. Bricks, rocks and even a huge paving slab failed to sink the briefcase and so we eventually gave up trying and drove back to Malcolm’s flat. Unbeknown to Malcolm and me, one of the men working at the landfill site had been watching us. He had taken a note of Malcolm’s number plate and, after we’d left, he had retrieved the briefcase from the pond using a mechanical digger, then phoned the police.