Essex Boy: My Story (7 page)

And my schoolwork was so bad that I still couldn’t do my times tables, basic maths, basic spelling or tell the time .
.
.
Plus I was mixing things up a lot when reading or looking at
numbers – yet another clear sign that I was dyslexic, but no one seemed to see this.

Deep down I felt like, ‘I can’t do the work, so I don’t want to.’
But I was not about to admit I was struggling – instead I would play up and make out like I just
didn’t want to do it.
My entire focus at school was on being the ring leader, the cool kid who would do anything naughty if it got me noticed.

One day I was round at my mate Pete’s house after school, just messing about and trying to think of things to do.
He disappeared for a minute, then came running back and pushed me out the
door.
‘Get round the corner!’
he whispered, and we sped off before he dived into a bush, pulling me with him.

‘I stole a fag off me dad!’
he announced, holding out a slightly squashed and misshapen cigarette that he had been gripping in his hand.
In the other hand he held a lighter.
It had
never really occurred to me to smoke before, but there was no way I wasn’t going to give this one a go.
So we got right into this huge bush on our hands and knees – we didn’t care
that we were getting dirty – and crawled through into the middle.
We didn’t want to be seen, although I think we were more afraid of Pete’s dad finding out we’d taken his
cigarette than we were of being caught smoking!

Pete put the cigarette in his mouth, trying to look all cool, like he had smoked all his life, then he looked at the lighter, confused, before finally taking the cigarette back out.

‘What do you do?’

‘I dunno,’ I had to admit.
‘Just smoke it.’

‘I don’t know how to!’
he said, handing me the lighter and putting the cigarette back in his mouth.

I flicked it, and the flame sparked at the end of his cigarette, but it wasn’t catching, even though he was blowing and puffing on it.

‘No, you need to suck!’
I knew that much .
.
.
Well, he did, and straight away he was collapsed on the floor coughing, but trying to pretend like he was fine.
Then it was my turn,
and I tried not to cough either, even though, mate, it was disgusting.
And we worked our way through the whole cigarette, until by the end I thought, ‘Oh man, I’m proper dizzy!’
but we both agreed that what we had done was a cool thing.

After that, we decided we were smokers, and there was nowhere cooler for us to smoke than in school .
.
.
If anyone needed proof that we were rebels, this was it!
So Pete and I, along with two
other mates called Ashton and Barry, started scabbing fags whenever we could – from parents, friends, even half a fag off the floor that someone else hadn’t smoked, minging though I
know that is.

We’d go behind this green container in the grounds of the school to smoke.
I’ve no idea what the container was or did, but it was there.
In fact there were green containers all over
the place in Essex, come to think of it, in all the parks and that.
I guess they were owned by the council.
I seemed to spend half my life behind green containers – there definitely
aren’t enough of them around these days!

So we’d go there for a cigarette in our breaks, and fuck knows, we probably weren’t even lighting them properly, or inhaling right, or anything, but we felt like we were, and we
convinced ourselves we were.

While we were smoking, there is one thing we used to do that really should have encouraged us to put our heads down and study, so we could go and earn good money when we were older.
We used to
stand and daydream about a house that backed on to our school grounds.
We would look over the fence at this huge white mansion in complete amazement.
It was the biggest house in Grays, and we
always wondered who lived there.
To us it looked like the White House where the President lives in America!
We would stand there going, ‘Oh my God, imagine living in there.
How many millions
of pounds do you think the guy living there has?’

‘I reckon it must have cost him a billion pounds to buy that.
He must be famous, or like a trillionaire.
I’ll be so rich one day I’ll be able to buy one that is even bigger and
I’m gonna live in it with my mum!’

‘Seriously, though, who does live there?’

But we never spotted the owner, so we never knew.

And then afterwards, when we came out from behind the container, all these girls would say, ‘Oh my God, were you just smoking in school?
Did you smoke the whole thing?’

‘Yeah, we were, and yeah, course I did, man.’

And they’d be like, ‘Wow, you are so cool!’

My God, we strutted round there like we were amazing, when the reality was, we were little shits trying to act hard!
But that was it, I have smoked ever since.
Since that first fag at ten, I
haven’t stopped.

Sometimes I’d behave myself, and be lovely and polite, and well mannered, making plans and dreams for the future – almost like a sweet little boy!
Other times I would be showing off
and being the naughty kid.
Then at the worst moments something would make me flip, and that was it, I would lash out at anyone around me; I didn’t care who they were.
No teacher could control
me when that happened and the other kids would get scared.

I swear I was like the Incredible Hulk – a bit geeky, a bit quirky, a bit shy and nice, and then bang!
Something would set me off and I’d have a tantrum, and you’d have to feel
sorry for anyone who got in my way.
It was like I didn’t know how to deal with anything that upset me.
I’d get this huge frustration building up inside me, that would turn into an anger
that I had no power to control.
Then once I had got rid of it, I would feel horrible and ashamed at the way I had just got on.
I never used to cry by that age – it was not a good thing to be
seen crying where I grew up – and besides, my dad had told me I had to be a man, and men don’t cry.
So if I felt like I was going to cry, I’d smash something up instead.

Near the end of year six, when I was eleven, I was in the playground and this girl with plaits turned around and flicked me in the face with them.
I was so mad, I went and got
some scissors and cut one of them off.
She was going nuts, and this boy started defending her, then suddenly six boys were trying to beat me up.
I lost it, and really went for them.
I beat them as
hard as an eleven-year-old boy can.
A teacher saw the fight and tried to break it up, but she couldn’t, nothing could stop me.
Afterwards, when things had calmed down and I was sat slumped in
her office worrying about what I had done, she called my mum in for a chat.

She told her, ‘I watched Kirk have that fight, and it’s not normal for a kid of his age to fight other boys with the complete and utter rage that he had towards them.
His temper is
really bad, so we would like to see him get some help.
It’s possible that he has ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – so it might be an idea to go to your local GP
and get him to do a test.’

Mum didn’t really know what ADHD was, and of course nor did I, so that’s what we did, without questioning it.
And then the doctor referred me to a kind of social worker who
specialized in helping naughty kids and finding out why they behaved the way they did.
He asked me what made me upset, and what made me flip, and all sorts of other questions that I didn’t
know how to answer.
I would try my best to explain the way I felt, saying, ‘I don’t know!
I just get the hump if people try and make me feel small, or stupid – I can’t just
take it on the chin or laugh it off like other people can.
I hate being taken for a mug.’

No one took my dad for a mug, so I didn’t want them to take me for one either.

They decided that I did have ADHD.
Basically, this is a psychiatric disorder that means you are much more hyperactive and impulsive than other kids, and can’t focus on things as easily.
I’m no scientist, but as far as I can tell they still don’t fully understand its causes – although there are certain things that are associated with it.
Apparently a lack of
oxygen at birth has been linked to developing ADHD as a child, and you’ll remember that when I was born the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck.
Suffering something traumatic in your
life can help bring it on too, and I guess Mum and Dad splitting up could have been a cause.
I was at a really vulnerable age when it happened, and because I didn’t know how to deal with that
experience, it was coming out in me in a different way to someone who might sit and cry.
For me it was showing as this uncontrollable anger.

My diagnosis and treatment were all sorted out over the school summer holiday.
I was put on this drug called Ritalin, which is supposed to work by calming you down.
At one point my doctor told
me I was on the highest dose of it in Thurrock, or something daft like that.
Most kids had to take two tablets a day; I had to take five.
They were these small white round pills with numbers and
codes stamped on them, and I had to have the first two at 8 a.m., then another two at midday, then the last one at 6 p.m.

I also had to go and see this psychotherapist once a week.
He was a middle-aged man with a very calm voice.
In the first session I didn’t want to be there.
I hated the stupid questions he
was asking, and I lost my temper, saying, ‘Mate, I’m not talking to you.
What are you going to do about that?
I don’t want to be here, so fuck off!’

But he just sat back and talked to me, and after a while I realized he was trying to help me.
Even if I didn’t want to be there, he had good intentions, so I knew I shouldn’t be so
harsh on him.
And although he didn’t change anything for me, I got on better with him after that, and didn’t mind going to the sessions.
In fact I kept going for the next eighteen
months or so, although after a while the frequency of my visits went down from once a week to once a month, to just every now and then, until it was decided I didn’t need to go any more.

Mum and Dad had very different reactions to my treatment.
I think Mum was slightly relieved that there might be a medical reason for why I behaved the way I did at times, so it was a bit of a
weight off her shoulders.
But Dad wasn’t happy about it at all.
He didn’t like to think that I had ADHD.
He would say, ‘It’s just a phase.
You don’t need all this
medicine and meetings, you’ll get over it in your own time as you grow up.’

The bad side of it all was that I started to feel like taking Ritalin was making me a hard man.
I would think, ‘This is pretty cool.
Yeah, I’m so naughty that no one can control me.
I’m so mad I need tablets to control me.’

And the other kids were like, ‘Cor, are you on Ritalin?
You must be nuts!’
and they would be a bit respectful to me because of it, so in a way it made me play up to my
reputation.

On top of all this, Mum, Daniel and I had another problem on our plate: we were about to be made homeless again.

After we had been in the house for about 18 months, Mum spoke to the council about her rent, and they said, ‘What do you mean,
you
have been paying the landlord, Julie?’

And she proudly told them, ‘Yeah, I pay him bang on time each week, and have never missed a payment, but things are tight, so I was wondering if you could help out more?’

And they told her, ‘But Julie, you are not supposed to be paying the landlord anything, that is what we are doing!
If you’re paying him too, he’s getting double the
money!’

Wow.
That sent Mum into a proper rage.
She went straight round to the landlord to try and get her money back, but she didn’t have a chance.
The guy told her to get lost, and said he wanted
us out of the house.
I guess he saw it as the easiest way to avoid paying us back, now that there was no way Mum was going to play by his game.
We had to move out fast, so Mum spoke to the council,
but again they had no houses going spare that they could move us into.

Growing Up in a Hostel

So that was it.
I was eleven years old and Daniel was fourteen and it looked like we were about to become homeless for the second time in our lives.
Not exactly something to
boast about.

Mum put her pride aside and spoke to her parents, and we went back to Nan and Granddad’s for a while.
The three of us in one bedroom.
We were so grateful, but we felt like a real burden at
the same time.
They had their own lives to be getting on with, but now they had to look after us too.
And it was embarrassing for Mum – she was thirty-three and back living with her parents.
That’s not exactly what you plan for your life.

But this time she didn’t wait around for someone to come and help us.
She was getting wise to this whole housing thing.
So she went straight to the council and sat there day after day in
their housing department, until finally they told her they had somewhere for us.
It wasn’t exactly luxury – a room in a hostel – but it was better than nothing.
As far as council
housing goes, everyone knows a hostel really is the lowest of the low.
It’s the bottom rung of the ladder, just above homelessness.

Not that I really understood all of this at the time, though – to me it was just another new home, and I didn’t really mind.
I remember when Mum sat me down on the bed in
Granddad’s house one day, and explained, ‘We’re moving to a new home in a hostel.
It’s a big building with lots of people living in it in different rooms, but at least we
will have our own space.’
I imagined that it was like going to a holiday camp!

So the day we moved I was pretty excited.
A lady called Shelley from the council came and drove us to the hostel in her car.
We didn’t have much.
Any furniture we had owned, Mum had given
away, mainly to family, so we put what we had in a few boxes.
It was mainly clothes, and bedding, that kind of thing, and we were able to fit that in the car.

The only thing I was sad about was leaving Bella.
We couldn’t take her to the hostel with us, so she stayed living with Nan and Granddad.
They loved her, though, so we knew she would be
happy, and we’d get to see her all the time.

Then Shelley took us to the hostel, on Charles Street in the heart of Grays.
We pulled up outside and I saw these two three-storey blocks next to each other, with yellowing walls and bars over
the windows.
It looked like a prison.
But that didn’t make me any less excited – this was our new home!

Shelley took us through the reception of one of the blocks.
We went past a couple of women working behind a desk, and passed what I later found out was the communal living room.
Everyone stared
as we went by, so I put my head down and stuck close to Mum.
We went up to the first floor, where there were ten to fifteen rooms all belonging to different people, and Shelley let us through a
door at the end of the corridor.

‘Here are your keys,’ she said, setting them firmly in Mum’s hand.
‘I recommend you lock the room any time you are out, even when you go to the bathroom for five minutes,
as you never know.
There is no security, but any problems, go to reception.
Any guests have to sign in there, and this buzzer on the wall means you can let people in when they call you from the
entrance to the hostel.
The bathroom is down the corridor and you saw the living room.
Enjoy!’

And with that she was off, leaving us to explore.
The room was smaller than your average living room, and bare, with walls that were supposed to be white but were closer to brown.
On the floor
was the shittiest, thinnest blue carpet ever, that was frayed at the edges and covered in stains.
There was a double bed on one side for my mum to sleep in, and a bunk bed on the other for me and
my brother.
There was a wardrobe for the three of us to share, but we didn’t have a lot of clothes, so we easily fitted all our stuff in there.
And, well, that was about it.

Mum was clearly upset and her eyes kept welling up, which confused me.
It must have been so hard for her.
No one imagines when they have kids that they will be bringing them up in a hostel, and
I know that she was forever beating herself up over it.
But on that first day she tried to make the most of the situation, pointing out the view from the window, which overlooked a park.
I was
fine, though – it was our own space, after all.
And I was just obsessed with the bunk beds, arguing with Daniel over who was going to get the top one!

Daniel and I went to explore the rest of the building and found the communal lounge, which boasted a television and one sofa with mismatched cushions.
And I don’t mean the little fluffy
scatter ones you put on the sofa, I mean the actual cushions you sit on.
It was like the whole thing had been put together from sofas other people had thrown away – which was quite possible.
Later, on boring days when I was stuck inside, I would rearrange the cushions to make different patterns, not that it ever made it look better.
That sofa was a lost cause.

We also found the bathroom, which contained one bath, one toilet and a couple of sinks, not even a shower.
We didn’t realize it at first, but we had to share this small bathroom with the
whole block – roughly eighty people.
You had to queue up to do your teeth in the morning, and everything was dirty and stank.
At the time I didn’t question it, but now I don’t
know how we did it.
Eighty people sharing a bathroom that was clearly meant for two!

But it still felt like a holiday to me.
I thought I was in a chalet at Butlin’s or something.
I spent the rest of the day running around the place – there were so many corridors to
explore and places to hide in, that in a way it was a kid’s dream.
When we went to bed that night I couldn’t stop giggling and being stupid, until Mum snapped, ‘For
goodness’ sake, shut up!
Any more and I swear you will be sleeping out in the corridor!’

We quickly found that eating in the hostel was practically impossible.
There was never a chance to get into the kitchen and make what you wanted, because someone would always be there first.
And
even if you did manage to get a spare few minutes, the place was so disgusting it put you right off eating.
When I say horrible, I mean really horrible.
There was mould all around the kitchen where
it had never been washed – it was like you’d get ill just looking at the place.
The most Mum ever did in there was bung a pizza on tinfoil and stick it in the oven, all the time
avoiding the dried crust of burnt baked beans around the top.
Then you had to sit and watch the pizza, to make sure no one nicked it when you weren’t looking.

A lot of the time we would skip breakfast, and we ended up living off takeaways later in the day.
Not flash Chinese ones, but £1 burgers from the kebab shop around the corner, that kind of
thing.
Mum would give us the money and send us off to get our tea.

What stopped us existing totally on that kind of food was a friend of my mum’s called Maxine.
She lived across from the hostel in a proper house.
She was there with her two kids, one of
whom was my age and I had a laugh with, and I guess you could say they lived a much more normal life than us.
But somehow she and my mum were friends, and she was happy for us to go and eat at her
house whenever we wanted to.
In the end, we would go there most nights.
It wasn’t anything posh, mostly just chips and beans and things like that, but it was a proper dinner, a nice dinner,
and off a clean plate.
She also let us use her bath, rather than the stinking dirty one in the hostel.
And afterwards we could relax and watch television there too, without worrying someone might
hit us in the back of the head for a laugh, or change the channel to what they wanted.
My favourite shows by then were
Bernard’s Watch
and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
.
Pretty standard viewing for most kids that age.

Maxine really was a lifesaver.
It was her and her house that made our time living in the hostel bearable.
Not that getting over to her house was the most pleasant walk, despite being only about
one minute away!
You had to cross this area of grass called Spider Park, and like most parks, it had its resident drunk.
This one was called Johnny, and he was a sound old geezer, but he was just
too far gone down the booze line to ever fit back into normal society.
We kind of knew he was heading towards his death, which was sad, but I’d always say hello as I walked past.

I remember one time I saw his hand out and what looked like his drink spilling, so I went over to tell him to take care.

‘Johnny, mate!’
I said.
‘Your can is tipping all over the .
.
.
oh.’

It wasn’t his drink at all.
It was just Johnny taking a piss then and there on the bench, not caring in the slightest that I was seeing.
But I guess you can’t fuss about the niceties
of life when you are homeless.

Either way, Johnny was a good reminder that no matter how hard things might have seemed in the hostel, at least we had a roof over our heads; and, more importantly, we had each other.
We knew
there were always people that bit worse off than us.

Then in September 1999 I was off to secondary school – big school, as we called it.
I was going to St Clere’s in Stanford-le-Hope, which is where my brother already
went.
To get there we had a ten-minute walk to the station, then three stops on the train, then a walk at the other end.
It wasn’t the easiest, and we always had to make a choice.
Dad gave us
£10 each a week, and it was £2 a day for the train ticket.
So it was a decision.
Have lunch and bunk the train.
Or pay for the train and not eat.
That £2 would get me a lot of
food – crisps, chocolate, sweets and a can of fizzy drink, and that was my idea of a good lunch.

The school uniform was another expense for Mum, and once I ripped a pair of trousers scrapping with another kid, too badly for them to be fixed.
But Mum couldn’t afford to get me new ones
until she had been paid.
So my brother and I had to take it in turns to wear his trousers and go to school while the other one stayed home.
It sounds crazy, but until payday, that was the reality
of our lives.

School was getting a little bit better for me now, in terms of my behaviour.
It seemed that the Ritalin was actually having an effect on me.
The teachers knew I was on it, and I had to have a
letter with me at school to say I needed to take the tablets at lunch.
It did make a difference.
It helped me to concentrate, and I would sit there quietly in class and listen, even if I
couldn’t do the work.
So while I wasn’t actually learning a lot more myself, I guess I stopped disturbing everyone else and making the teacher’s job harder.
I was glad, because I
wanted to have a better reputation in my new school.
I couldn’t be naughty yet because I didn’t know the teachers or the other pupils.

There was one big problem with the Ritalin, however.
While it calmed me down – I’d never lash out during the few hours after I’d taken it – it made me bottle my feelings
up even more.
So then, as the drug started wearing off, my emotions would come out ten times stronger.
My poor mum always took the force of it.
I’d be fine at school, then it would be wearing
off as I got back to the hostel, and then it would all kick off and I’d be going mad until I took my pill at 6 p.m.

We would have huge rows, Mum and me.
She has a bit of a quick temper on her too, and we’d lose it, and would go at each other in blood-curdling arguments.
Even though I love her to pieces,
and did at the time, and she loved me, we were so alike that we were always clashing and then arguing.

The biggest issue was money.
It was only once I was at secondary school that I realized why my mum was so upset every day.
I began to get embarrassed about where I was living
and the fact that we couldn’t buy anything.

I understood that where I lived was different when we talked about our homes at school.
Daniel had probably felt it before then, but the contrast when I went back to my friends’ houses was
what made me understand.
Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t in huge mansions, and no one in the area could ever really afford a holiday or whatever – it wasn’t that sort of
place.
But they lived in houses, and could have dinner at night in their own kitchens – that made it special.
Mum really wanted to do that for us, but she just wasn’t able to.
They also
had quiet rooms, and tables and desks to do their homework on – not that it would have made a difference for me, as I never did a bit of homework in my life.
But if I had wanted to, it would
have been pretty difficult in the hostel.