Hateland (3 page)

    He ran out and caught me halfway up. He laid into me with a vicious fury. I ended up at the foot of the stairs curled into a ball to protect myself from his kicks, which were aimed at the small of my back. I thought he was going to kill me. My mother screamed at him to stop. Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain and my legs went numb. I began shouting, 'I can't feel my legs! I can't feel my legs!' Only then did he stop. He tried to get me to my feet, but I kept collapsing. My mother ran out to call an ambulance.

    As I lay on the floor waiting for the ambulance, my father knelt down beside me. He pulled my head up by the hair and said, 'Say you were playing and you fell down the stairs on your own or I'll fuckin' kill ye.' And that's what I told anyone who asked. Fortunately, nothing was broken, but the discs in my spine were damaged in a way that even today causes me pain.

    I started going to Codsall Comprehensive, a school of around 1,200 pupils. I'd have fights with other boys almost every day of the week. If I came home with a black eye or another mark on me my father would beat me and offer me the only bit of fatherly advice he ever gave any of us: 'Don't let people get away with hitting you. If they're bigger than you, hit them with something.'

    We all started following his advice. My brother Paul got into a fight in a pub car park with a gang from another part of town. He ran at them with two screwdrivers, one in each hand. He stabbed three people before being beaten to a mess. He served two years in Borstal. The eldest, Jerry, took on a group of men in a pub.

    He'd armed himself with a pair of large mechanic's spanners and started clubbing all round him. The police arrived and he clubbed one of them too before being overpowered. He'd given one of the men a fractured skull; a policeman had a shattered knee. Jerry was sent to prison. All of us, under my father's tutoring, had developed a capacity for extreme and awful violence. It set us apart - and set us against the world, especially the world of authority.

    I never felt English growing up, although I suppose I never felt properly Irish either. With everything else that was going on, I didn't spend much time agonising about that aspect of my identity. I knew my roots were in Ireland and I felt comfortable around Irish people. In a sense, I lived in an Irish-Catholic world, although there was no flag-waving paddiness. I was a so-called 'plastic paddy' (the less-than-welcoming Irish term for people born in England of Irish parents).

    At school at first, I encountered some anti-Irish abuse - 'thick paddy', 'Irish drunks' and that sort of stuff. It didn't last long. A good punch in the head tended to discourage repeat offences. I used to hate the superior attitude of some English people and their nauseatingly deluded belief that the whole of the world somehow looked to England. They'd try to make me feel inferior, which infuriated me, because I knew I wasn't inferior to them. I also hated posh English professionals who'd talk down to my mother as if she were stupid.

    'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland began to float on the margins of my awareness. I remember 'Bloody Sunday', the day in January 1972 when paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed Catholic men and boys on a civil rights march in Derry. My one clear memory comes from watching television and seeing a priest crouching over one of the victims, waving a blood-stained handkerchief. I can recall this event being met with jubilation by some people in Wolverhampton.

    Around this time, while on holiday in Ireland with my family, an Irish teenager broke my nose with a punch at a youth-club disco, calling me an 'English bastard'. I didn't take his attack personally I seem to remember thinking it was natural for an Irishman to want to punch an Englishman. Despite my 'empathy' for my attacker's motivation, I returned to the disco with a mob of my Irish cousins and we gave him and his mates a good beating outside.

    The first time 'the Troubles' really registered, though, was when the soldier son of a family in our street was shot and wounded by the IRA in Derry. The news caused great shock and excitement in the village, and I remember a ripple of anti-Irish feeling. Around this time, I had a slanging match with some of the wounded soldier's family. I started shouting, 'Up the IRA!', presumably to wind them up, because I can't remember being especially supportive of the Provos or even very aware of what they stood for.

    However, I met the wounded soldier in a pub a few years ago and he remembered me as far more pro-IRA than I remember myself. He told me I'd also thrown stones at him as he recovered and shouted, 'You British Army bastard!'

    I suppose my gut instincts were certainly pro-republican, and I did have a sense of northern Irish Catholics being underdogs, though I can't say I had any real political consciousness. I tended to sympathise with anyone who fought authority, so people who threw petrol bombs at the police and army seemed like my sort of people. I was constantly in conflict with teachers. Whenever anything punishable happened, I was rounded up as the usual suspect. I did get up to a lot of mischief, but I also found myself blamed for things I hadn't done.

    After the window of the school coach was smashed, I was unjustly fined for the offence. I had to pay the fine over three months in weekly instalments. The money came from my part-time job killing turkeys at a local farm. I despised the teachers and I despised their justice, just as I despised the woman who'd 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?' I hated the bitch.

    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 wasn't caught. For the next eight weeks as I handed over my money I used to smirk at the woman and ask, 'Have they caught anyone yet?'

    I soon started coming to the attention of the police. They began arresting me for, and charging me with, various petty offences. A conviction for using 'obscene language in a public place' got the ball rolling. I was charged by a desk sergeant who, calling me 'a little fucker', accused me of causing 'fucking trouble'. I was subsequently fined five pounds by a magistrate who lectured me about bad language.

    My second criminal conviction was for an even more laughable offence. At the farm where I worked part-time, breaking turkeys' necks in a cone-shaped metal bucket with squeeze bars, I found a broken wristwatch on the floor in the yard. It only had one hand. I was subsequently arrested by a policeman who assaulted me and charged me with 'theft by finding'. A magistrate later fined me thirty-five pounds and gave me a lecture on morality.

    In my adolescent mind, all I could see was that the forces of law and order could hound a boy for petty irrelevancies, but couldn't intervene to prevent a man battering his wife and children half to death. Rage and resentment stewed inside me. School was a farce, the law was a farce, 'normal' life was a farce. But I wasn't going to take their shit for long. I planned to hit back.

    I carried out my first street robbery when I was around 13. It became a regular pastime of mine. Our targets were usually teenagers our age or thereabouts, but we weren't averse to robbing adults. Life became a non-stop cycle of violence. One Saturday afternoon in 1973, I was on my own in Wolverhampton town centre when I saw a group of around 20 skinheads on a sinister stroll. They wore high-leg, cherry-red Dr Marten boots, white Skinner jeans and Ben Sherman checked shirts. Tattoos decorated their arms, heads and, in some cases, faces. Chanting 'There ain't no black in the Union Jack. Wogs out! Wogs out!', they jostled blacks and Asians on the street. The occasional young man who offered resistance would be punched and kicked to the ground, then steamed by the entire mob.

    I was shocked. I'd never before witnessed such mayhem. I followed the skins, mesmerised by the effect they were having. Shops closed rapidly, taxi ranks emptied and six or so policemen just looked on helplessly. More teenagers, middle-aged men, bikers and even a postman joined the lawless procession. The group of 20 swelled to 50. Their bravado swelled too. Someone kicked in an Asian shopkeeper's window. The sound of smashing glass seemed to act as a signal for the mob to go on the rampage.

    Everyone started running. Shoppers were knocked flying, more blacks and Asians were beaten up, small shops were swiftly ransacked. I saw one black youth run into a shop doorway in a bid to escape. He tried to open the shop door, but the terrified female assistant had already locked it. She stared out the window in horror as four skins and a middle-aged man attacked the youth. They kicked and stamped on him as others looked on, chanting, 'Pull, pull, pull that trigger. Pull that trigger and shoot that nigger.'

    I hadn't hit anyone or smashed anything, but when a couple of police vans pulled up, sirens wailing, I ran with the mob. Officers leapt from the vans and gave chase. I ran into a large department store with six of the skins. Two ran down into the food hall in the basement. I got into the lift with the others. We went up to the top floor. The skins were hyped up. I felt flattered when they talked to me as if I were one of the gang. They asked me if I was 'all right'. I said I was, although I hadn't done anything to make me feel otherwise. They talked excitedly. When one paused for breath, the next would chip in, 'Did you see me do this? Did you see me do that?' They all laughed like hyenas after a feed, revelling in the chaos they'd caused.

    We decided to take the stairs back down. As I was dressed in 'normal' clothes and had a 'normal' haircut, they asked me to walk down in front of them to check each floor for police. Once outside, I jumped on a bus home, though not before one of the skins had given me a National Front sticker. It was decorated with a Union flag and contained a slogan about hanging IRA terrorists and muggers (black muggers, of course, which was a relief as I was active in that field myself). As I looked out of the bus's upstairs window at the aftermath of the chaos, my whole body buzzed. I felt like a fugitive, but I'd done no wrong. The skins' sheer lawlessness shocked and delighted me. They'd strolled down the street in broad daylight, assaulting people and destroying property, and the police hadn't dared take them on till they'd had plenty of back-up. I knew little or nothing about their politics, although obviously I'd gathered they might be anti-black. I just loved their utter contempt for authority and normal society.

    Later, I rang the London telephone number on the sticker. An answering machine informed me I'd telephoned the headquarters of the National Front. The man's voice asked me to leave my name, address and telephone number, which I did. Thereafter, I received newspapers, magazines, stickers and leaflets urging me to write to 'other nationalists', join other groups, go on marches and generally support the struggle to rid the land of 'foreign invaders'.

    The angry, hate-spitting tone of these publications struck a chord with me. I liked the way they seemed to defend my right to behave in an anti-authority way. However, most of the writing about political issues such as repatriation came across as gobbledegook and I lost interest. Politics weren't really for me. I couldn't be doing with that shit. I had more than enough shit in my life already.

    My mother had told me after junior school that I should make a fresh start when I started at secondary school, but I was fighting the other pupils within hours of getting there. Thereafter, I fought daily, 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, though without much success.

    In order to pay my fines and buy some decent clothes, rather than the rags my father occasionally provided, I needed to increase my income. My part-time jobs, legal and illegal, weren't sufficiently remunerative, so at school I branched out into other areas. My money-making scams included selling alcohol from the cloakroom loft. I also had a team of shoplifters who'd steal to order for me - some of the orders having been placed by parents, including one for a lawnmower.

    Money and extreme violence gave me an exhilarating sense of power. The kid who'd always been told he was a nobody had become a little somebody. I revelled in my new-found status. Towards the end of my school career, I appointed myself Lord Chief Justice of a kangaroo court designed to bring to trial those fellow pupils who'd committed 'offences', real or imagined, against me and my friends. I wanted to dish out unjust justice to the mummies' and daddies' boys I hated.

    These trials would take place several times a week on the school field. Punishments included fines and beatings. If someone displeased me, I'd say, 'Pass me my gown. I feel a fine coming on.' The defendant would usually be dragged to the field with violence. My friend Hughie prosecuted, my friend Stan acted for the defence and I sat in judgment. None were ever acquitted. One boy called Mosley - coincidentally the name of the pre-war leader of the British Union of Fascists - committed some abominable offence, the details of which I've forgotten. Perhaps he'd failed to hand over his dinner money on demand. Maybe he'd failed to show sufficient respect to his betters. Whatever it was, it was a crime so heinous it demanded the ultimate penalty. I sentenced Mosley to hang.

    A pulley protruded from the ceiling of the science lab. I tied a rope to the gas taps, ran it through the pulley, then placed a noose round the neck of Mosley, whom Stan had forced to stand on a wooden stool. The condemned boy seemed to accept his fate meekly. I then ordered Hughie to carry out the sentence, but he wouldn't. So I kicked the stool away myself. I thought I'd arranged the rope so that Mosley's feet would hit the floor, and he wouldn't hang, but I miscalculated and he dangled about three inches above the floor, kicking and gurgling. The rope had begun to choke the life out of him.

    Fortunately, the teacher came in and swiftly lifted Mosley onto a desk. He had ugly, red rope-burns on his neck. The headmaster caned me and Stan on stage in front of the whole school.