Essex Boy: My Story (6 page)

I had started to adapt to the social thing a bit more, though, and had a group of friends, but I had developed that defence technique that people have, where they go to the opposite extreme of
what they are feeling, and over-compensate to hide the truth.
So you know how they say the person who is the most scared in a confrontation is always the first to leap out with his fists up, and
go, ‘Come on, then, let’s have it!’
In the same way, rather than let people see I was shy inside, and not confident at all, I would act overly cocky.
So at school I developed a
bit of a character as a real Jack the lad.

Once a teacher was trying to tell me off and it didn’t go down well.
I was getting more and more angry, and in the end I picked up a ruler on my desk and hit her, and made her cry.
I’m very ashamed of that, but I couldn’t take being talked down to.
I think the more I felt like I wasn’t being the man I was supposed to be – hadn’t we had to move
house several times because there had been no other option?
– the more I was trying to find other ways to prove myself.
And listening to authority wasn’t on my list of things a man did.
You don’t tell a grown man off like that, so I thought the teacher shouldn’t tell
me
off.
Even though I was young, I was starting to flex my muscles in school.
I thought
nothing of telling a teacher to ‘fuck off’ the odd time as well, when I was especially frustrated, or wanting people to see me being the man.

I’d based my idea of what a man was very much on my dad, and he was a hard man when he was younger.
He had a reputation that meant people wouldn’t mess with him, and in the bad area
we were growing up in, that was a good thing.
People would be like, ‘Cor, I know your dad, he is tough!’
and I looked up to this geezer for that.
So when he told me to be the man of the
house, I thought, ‘Ooh, he is giving me a role and a face, and if it’s like his, I need to be hard.
I’m a fucking man!’

I’d have done anything I thought Dad would – I’d have jumped in a fire if it seemed that is what he would have done.
And, well, as you can see, I took on that attitude in
school as well as at home.

Ironically, it was Dad who was called to deal with me whenever things went wrong at school.
I can’t remember what I had done the first time it happened, but I was sitting
in the teacher’s office, and they told me, ‘We’re sending you home for the day, so we are going to have to get one of your parents to come and pick you up to deal with this.
Your
mum doesn’t drive, so we’re calling your dad.’

And sure enough they rang him, and he came and got me.
I was shitting myself when I got into the car about what he would say, but he just told me, ‘Kirk, I’m disappointed in ya.
I
was halfway through a meeting and I get called out of it and am having to come and pick you up.
The school ringing me up at work like that is embarrassing, I tell ya, so you need to behave from now
on!’

And he left it at that.
And then we had a good afternoon together!
He drove me around the docks and told me about stuff he had done, and pointed things out.

‘See that house, Kirk?
I built half of that.’

‘You like the look of the boat over there, do you?
Only in working order ’cos of me, that is.’

And all that.
I just stared at everything, proper impressed by Dad.
Tilbury Docks is the main port for London, and there is a hell of a lot of stuff to look at: all these huge warehouses, and
containers, as well as all sorts of ships docked up, from fairly average boats right up to huge cruise ships.
There are people all over the place working away and forklift trucks buzzing around.
It
is like a little community in itself.

By this time my dad was no longer in overalls – he had started to dress in shirts and smart trousers.
He wasn’t working on the tools any more, he was now a manager!
He had climbed
the ranks to work in a company that his dad was a director of, called Grayspur Ltd, also based down on the docks.
It was a ship repair and cargo security company that would sort out damaged boats,
and build jetties for them to pull up at, and all that, and Dad was a manager.

We stopped off and he spoke to a few people, then as we were driving he kept having to take calls about deals and meetings and all sorts of things that sounded important, even if I didn’t
understand a word of what he was on about!
He was a real businessman, was my dad.
I sat there a bit in awe, proud to be with him, thinking, ‘Wow, my dad is a real hard worker, a proper man
into business and everything.
I want to be like that.’

I loved to see him working, but it was weird – it felt as though the new smarter clothes gave him an air of authority, like a lawyer or a policeman, so I was more in awe of him and thought
he had to be super successful to be dressing like that.

By the time he dropped me back at Mum’s at the end of the afternoon, I had decided I could think of nothing better than being naughty again.
Until that day I had never got to spend time
with my dad, just me and him, no Stacie, no Daniel, only the two of us.
And while I was still confused and hated him, I loved and admired him too, so I wanted that time alone with him so badly,
even if I hadn’t properly realized it until then.

From then on I decided a telling off from the teacher was worth an afternoon with Dad.
Sometimes, just so he didn’t get suspicious, I would make out I was ill instead of naughty, and that
way he would have a reason to pick me up without it being my fault.
So I would play up to that as well.
The afternoons I spent with him were the same either way, and I never got bored of them.
It
really intrigued me.
It’s just a shame I had to be that bad at school to get to see it!

The other time I did see Dad outside of our weekend visits was on Thursday evenings when I started playing rugby for a local team.
He would pick me up and drive me to the playing fields behind
the bungalow my parents had been living in when I was born.
I must have done OK at the first session, because they asked me to come back and play in a tournament that weekend.
I loved playing.
I
couldn’t believe how much pent-up aggression and anger came out on the pitch.
It was like, ‘What, you want me to be aggressive and go in and tackle the guy?
Actually running and
slamming into him is not only allowed, it’s encouraged?
Fair play, count me in!’

But it was only a temporary release, and it wouldn’t calm me down beyond the rest of that day.
I’d have had to play every day as a professional for that to work!
It was good that Dad
took me along, though, and it was something we were able to talk about.

Of course I could never tell Mum about the times I enjoyed being with Dad, because it upset her.
If I went home saying, ‘Oh, I’ve had the best time!’, she’d tell me,
‘What are you sticking up for him for?
You should hate him, he destroyed our family, ripped it apart!’

But it was especially bad if we mentioned Stacie after a weekend there.

‘What did your Dad make you for dinner tonight?’

‘Nah, he didn’t,’ I’d slip up.
‘Stacie did, it was good.’

Then straight away she would get the hump.
‘Oh, having a good time with her, are ya?
Your dad left me for her and you prefer spending time with her?’

I always got what she meant, and why she was upset, but what did she want us to do?
I’d sit in my room on my own, thinking, ‘Fuck, man, I don’t like Stacie for what she did, of
course I don’t, but I can’t help it if she’s in my life when I’m at my dad’s.
I can’t ignore her all the time, and refuse to eat her food or whatever, just to
keep Mum happy.’
It was such a hard place to be in as a kid.
I don’t blame Mum for being so mad, but I just wish we didn’t always have to suffer for it.

All this time Dad’s business brain was going into overdrive.
Then, sadly, his dad died of cancer in early 1999.
He had told my dad after Nanny Pernod died that he
didn’t think he had anything to live for and, true enough, he soon got sick, and didn’t seem to fight it, but just kept deteriorating.
He went into hospital for chemotherapy, and lost
his hair and put on weight from the treatment.
I hated visiting him because the whole place was just so sad and full of death.
Ever since then I have had a total hatred and fear of hospitals.

Then he moved out and lived with Dad.
I would go round and visit, but he couldn’t talk much.
It was like he was getting older by the day, right in front of our eyes.
I was ten when he died
and that fucking hurt.
I just wish I had known both him and Nanny Pernod when I was older.
I still visit their graves, and talk to them, but I feel like I missed out on a lot of time with them.
Partly because of the divorce, I guess, I didn’t see them as much as I would have liked.
But I hope they are proud of what I have done since – Mum’s parents got to see me on TV
and I know they were.

I also would like to know if they are proud of Dad, as he achieved a lot of his success after they passed away.
Granddad left £500,000 between his five kids.
Not bad for a guy who had to
provide for five children, as in those days his wife wouldn’t have worked to supplement his income.
Dad used some of his money to buy a two-bedroom house to rent out, and some to help set up
his own company.
Now he had moved from welder, to manager, to company director – and he was loving it!
Dad is always in his element when he is deep in work and getting results.
And getting
results he was, in both business ventures.

His own company, Delfini, which made signs, built up quite rapidly.
If you want to know where the name comes from, my aunt used to work for him as a secretary, and she loved dolphins.
Some of
their early work was with Greek companies, and the Greek word for dolphins is
delfini
, so they called the company Delfini MB Services – the MB standing for Margaret and Bernard, a
nod to Dad’s parents.

I remember watching that company grow for Dad.
His first office was this shitty little Portakabin on Tilbury Docks, a proper dockers’ place, tiny with a load of men in there and porn on
the walls.
Then he bought another Portakabin and put the two of them together, and then soon after he bought a whole warehouse.
It was like you could see his company growing and expanding just by
the size of the buildings he was working in, and all this came about because he worked so hard.
Metal was his bread and butter, and it seemed to me that he could build just about anything from
scratch.

He was also really well respected down on the docks.
Whenever I would go with him everyone knew him and would want to speak to him, and they would be good to me just because I was his son.
Even
today if I go down there, although he no longer has a company on the docks, people will still come over to talk to me, and speak warmly of Dad, and call him ‘a proper grafter, one of a kind,
your dad’.
Which always makes me feel proud of him.

But it was the property that instantly took off for Dad.
He hit the market at the perfect time, and started buying and selling houses all over the place, doing some up and selling them on,
renting others out .
.
.
and his profits were growing steadily.
Not that I was to see any of that for the time being.

When I look back on myself as a ten year old, I feel like I was missing certain things.
I don’t know if it was because of the timing of my parents’ split, but I
ended up lacking a few pretty basic social skills.
While Mum had done her best to get us ready for the real world, I had developed some habits and fears that she couldn’t get out of me, and
that she didn’t really know how to change.
For example, I wouldn’t answer the house phone.
There was no way I was going to pick that up, when I didn’t know who was on the other
end of the line.
I would get butterflies in my stomach and feel sick just at the thought of it.

And I wasn’t happy about eating in public.
I felt like people might laugh at the way I ate – not that I had bad table manners – or that I might have a bit of food stuck on the
side of my mouth or in my teeth that I didn’t know about.
It wasn’t so bad at school lunches, as everyone was just head down in their lunch boxes, munching away, but anything more
intimate, like dinner at a friend’s house, was torture.
It is only now that I can see this was the start of anxiety, which became so crippling for me later, setting in.