The Life of Lee (17 page)

The reason I liked the posher dos was that the illegal gambling created a real buzz in the crowd. Before each fight, the men in dicky bows were placing bets on who might win. If you put on a good show and created some real excitement in the room, some of the tables would shout their approval and throw money into the ring for the young fighters. It presented an unexpected problem; frustratingly, you couldn’t pick the money up from the canvas wearing boxing gloves. Even though you might try, there was only limited time to do so, as you were hustled out of the ring by the officials to make way for the
next bout. My trainer, Jack, would scoop up the money from the canvas, and was always strangely flush when it came to buying rounds afterwards.

Because Dad was so often away working, he could only manage to come to a couple of fights. But he still saw boxing as – cue his lecture again – ‘a good, honourable art-form, with proper high-minded principles and sportsmanship.’

Now, Mum had never been to a boxing match before, but one day asked a friend secretly to smuggle her in so she could stand at the back and see what all the fuss was about. This turned out to be a very big mistake …

Naively, Mum hadn’t realized quite how violent a boxing match is, in particular amateur boxing, a completely different sport altogether to the professional boxing one might see on the TV. Amateur boxing consists of three three-minute rounds. As it’s such a short period, the time is limited in which to score points, and so the two opponents are encouraged to go nuts with each other. To the discerning observer, it looks like two Rottweilers set on each other in a back alley.

Unfortunately, Mum only ever attended that one fight. She never saw Wayne or me ever fight again. Luckily, I wasn’t on the bill that particular night – just as well, as I think things would have been worse if I had been. Wayne did fight that evening, though, and that was all Mum could take.

What took place that evening had never been seen at an amateur boxing match before and was never mentioned in our house again. The psychological and physical damage to some of those in attendance that night was
immense – Wayne’s opponent, his training staff and, most of all, the referee. As soon as Mum witnessed Wayne being punched in the face, it made her blood boil. Before you could say ‘Raging Bull’, she had climbed from the back of the room up over tables, chairs and people’s heads, jumped straight through the ropes into the ring and leaped on to the referee’s back.

It caught him completely by surprise. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting a fuming, middle-aged women suddenly to pounce on him and cling on like a limpet while hitting him across the back of the head with a handbag and demanding, ‘Stop that boy right this second from hitting my son in the face!’

Mum then tried to deliver an uppercut to the jaw of Wayne’s opponent as she accused him of cheating. A tense, unnerving atmosphere hung in the air even after a team of bouncers extracted the fingers of her right hand from around the corner ropes and the fingers of her left hand from around the poor referee’s throat.

Her attendance caused much distress for all concerned. As Mum was evicted from the premises, it was explained to Wayne and me in no uncertain terms by the powers that be that our mother would not be welcome at any other boxing event. Ever.

But it showed one thing: Mum cared deeply about us – to the point of trying to land a right hook on anyone she thought was threatening us!

That regrettable – but quite unforgettable – incident didn’t put me off sport, though. In fact, quite the contrary. So desperate was I to be ‘in’ and impress the girls at
school, I was mad keen to try any form of sport. I enrolled with every single after-school sports club. I didn’t care – I signed up for basketball, football, rugby. Being Welsh, Dad always encouraged rugby, but I found out very quickly there was a slight drawback with that particular sport: it frigging hurts. Also, my teeth were telling me in unequivocal terms that they wanted to stay in my mouth. I remember thinking, ‘All my ancestors are Welsh and Irish and all their favourite sports seem to involve getting your head bashed in.’ So I passed on that one.

Instead, I tried out volleyball, badminton – big jokes for me, then a thirteen-year-old wazzock, with the use of the word ‘shuttlecock’ – and javelin. That was a very difficult sport to master. Sprinting like a nomadic tribesman down the runway and holding the javelin aloft, I approached the line that signified I had to give it a good chuck.

Whipping my arm back in readiness, I accidentally jammed the javelin into the ground behind me. As I tried to pull the trigger, so to speak, all I managed to do was throw myself backward in a heap on the ground. It would probably have been a very alluring sight for any girl who happened to be standing around gazing at the runway, but – surprise, surprise – there were none. The javelin was the same as any other item of sports equipment: as soon as I got hold of it, it became completely useless.

Now beginning to despair, I travelled further down the official list of sports with which, based on rigorous scientific evidence, girls might be enamoured. So I had a go at the pole vault. I realized it was not exactly a glamour sport, but I was desperate. David Beckham might be able
to curve a ball into the back of a net from roughly five miles away, but can Mr ‘Sexy Tattoo Stubbly Man’ catapult himself up into the air clutching the end of a giant pole and pointlessly throw himself over a bar? I didn’t think so. I can. Well, I can’t, but I tried.

At the county sports day, I was the only one entering the pole vault that year – well, any year actually. But I was ready to take the inter-school athletics championship by storm and probably pull a few lassies in the process. Why? I had the advantage that no other kid in their right mind would go in for such a dumb-ass-monkey-on-a-stick sport. So being the only competitor, I was a dead cert for a win and the all-important gold medal that I thought I could wear round my neck and prance about with. If anyone should mention it, I would look down as if wondering what they were talking about, and then be completely surprised by the medal hanging there. I was convinced that glittering bauble would become my shiny lure for catching the birds.

At first, everything went exactly to plan. The sports day was very busy. It was bustling with parents who had come to watch their kids in various sports. Disappointingly, my plan soon took a bit of a knock as I noticed the girls-to-boys ratio was a bit lower than I’d hoped. But my reckoning was that once I’d grabbed hold of that pole and belted down that runway like a boy, scientists might surmise, propelled by a huge hormone imbalance, my pole in the air at a forty-five-degree angle, no girl would be able to resist me.

I got a lot of attention from the passing crowd, some girls among them. But I felt that they were showing
interest only out of a morbid curiosity. They were just rubber-necking, eager to witness an appalling accident at the most dangerous stunt they would see for some time. I heard gasps during my purposeful, some might say crazed, run-up and my death-defying leap skyward. I picked up comments such as, ‘Who’s that nutter?’, ‘That’s the Evans boy – he’s berserk,’ and ‘What the f–?’ It probably made a thrilling change from some of the more ordinary sports on show, and I certainly didn’t disappoint the crowd.

I must have got caught up in all the excitement myself – I was lost in what athletes call ‘The Zone’. However, as I raced towards the scarily high bar that I was supposed to soar over effortlessly, I began to think, ‘I don’t remember running this fast in training. Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever doing any training.’ It suddenly occurred to me that I had never done the pole vault before in my life. But by now it was too late …

I didn’t have any time to see the reaction of the gathered crowd, but there was no doubting my ability to thrill and give the stunned assembly exactly what they wanted: a catastrophe.

As I approached the towering bar in front of me, with perfect timing I slowly lowered my pole. At exactly the right moment, I managed with stunningly good aim to jam the end of it into the little cup at the end of the runway and braced myself for take-off.

It must have been the way I was holding the pole because instead of launching me skywards as desired, the end of the pole caught me suddenly with a mind-numbing thud right in the bean bag. The impact gave me an
instant udder full of cauliflower sperms and, instead of going up, I went down, down like a large bag of jelly. I writhed around on the ground for several minutes in complete agony. The assembled crowd were also in pain – from their sustained, rib-endangering laughter at my utter ineptitude.

Typical. The only reason I was driven to this was to relieve a little tension in the very area that took the full blow.

I bet Mr Beckham hasn’t got cauliflower sperms. But, on the plus side, I can now curve one of my balls.

16. How to Win Friends and Influence People (With a Little Help from a Piano)

After a long time being the odd one out at school, a funny thing happened. All of a sudden I was part of the in-crowd. I know, amazing, isn’t it?

I had noticed the piano on my first day at my new senior school. The reason it stuck out during that first morning assembly was that it was the only thing that day which I could relate to. A lot of the kids had already come through infants together, or lived for years in the same neighbourhood. But I didn’t really know anyone, I’d only just arrived, so when I made my way to the back of the hall and sat near the piano, that made me feel a little less nervous. Somehow I knew that if I was near it, I could do something if called upon.

For some reason, the urge to entertain and divert attention away from my inadequate, idiotic self goes hand in hand with a very similar desire to dig a hole and jump in it. Those two conflicting forces have always battled each other deep inside the pit of my character. Whenever I’m faced with any form of threat or potentially embarrassing situation – and it could be something as simple as putting my hand up in class – I desperately want to run, to hide. But, at the same, there’s another feeling that sends bizarre thoughts whizzing around my head and tempts me to
blurt them out. Now, I call it performing. But the more stressed I get, the more these two urges struggle for prominence.

For years, I had odd, surreal and rebellious thoughts, but kept them locked away because I didn’t want to be misunderstood and was worried I might say the wrong thing. And so I would just sit in class like your average lobotomy patient who’s missed his day’s medication. Not listening to anything the teacher said, I would simply be staring down at my empty book, fretting, hoping, willing the time to go by so I could get home and sit alone in the safety of my bedroom and dream some more. I would stay in my room practising over and over an Essex accent, having listened intently to other kids’ conversations at school, so they wouldn’t keep laughing every time I opened my frigging mouth.

The fact that the Wurzels entered the charts halfway through my first year at school in Billericay didn’t help my cause one bit. That was it for me – I was from then on known as ‘a carrot cruncher’ and ‘a Wurzel’. I had, according to my tormentors, a brand new combine harvester. I wouldn’t have minded, but the bloody Wurzels were from Somerset, which is, granted, over that way, but actually nowhere near Bristol.

First-year senior at Billericay School, aged thirteen.

Then again, I always laboured under the disadvantage of thinking that I was slow in the head; that I was one banana short of a bunch; that one of my van doors was always open. But perhaps a more accurate description would be to say that rather than being behind everyone else, I was merely one step to the side of them.

I was away with the fairies at that time primarily because I found school so incredibly boring. Plus, I had been to so many different schools, been taught so many varying curricula and made so many short-lived friendships before having to leave again, that I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t do any maths whatsoever, I didn’t know any times tables – I didn’t even know how many days there were in a month. To be honest, I could barely spell my own name. ‘Is it, er, L-E-A?’