Gazza: My Story (3 page)

I don’t think it was simply clumsiness – well, not always. It was more to do with the daredevil in me. I was always doing daft things. I was playing on some pipes one day – big concrete ones on a building site, which had been piled up against a wall – and I was sliding down the biggest one, legs open. I hadn’t realised there was a big nail sticking out. That time I had to have fifty-six stitches. Butterfly stitches, they were called.

Then, in Saltwell Park, when I was seven, I fell off a tree and broke my arm. I was trying to swing from tree to tree but missed the one I was aiming for. My arm was in plaster for six weeks, but that didn’t stop me going swimming in the lake in the park. I swam with my arm in the air, or tried to, but the plaster would get all soggy and I’d have to have it redone.

My first school was Brighton Junior Mixed. I got into quite a few fights there because the other kids called me names. I can’t remember them all, but one of them was ‘Tramp’. Because of my clothes, perhaps, or the family I came from, I don’t know. So I had to defend
my honour, didn’t I? Not in school, or in the playground: I waited till the name-callers came out of school, and then I got them.

At home, I often fought with Anna as well as Carl. I knocked out one of her teeth once. The fighting Gascoignes. We’d fight over anything, even crisps. My mam would empty several packets out into a bowl, and then we’d all fight each other for our favourite flavour. But when we weren’t scrapping, we were singing and dancing and loving each other. I’d say I had a very happy childhood, at least up to the age of twelve or so. If my mam and dad had an argument, I would rush across and hug both of them. I’d cry if they started rowing, or if my dad left us. I loved them both so much.

When my dad was out of work, he’d go out at night and dig in the field for coal. This didn’t involve any actual digging. There was a coal depot near us at Dunston, and when the coal wagons were being shunted, a lot of coal would fall off into the field, so people would go out and pick it up in the dark. Me dad would put his salvaged coal on the fire and we’d toast bread and have beans on toast. It was my favourite meal. Some of my earliest memories are of going with my mam to bingo. One night – I must have been very young then because I was sitting on her
knee – she won a tin of beans. That was brilliant. Even today I prefer beans on toast to caviar or a fillet steak.

My mam and dad fell out several times and he moved out, sometimes to a room over a pub, on his own. When I was about ten he moved to Germany, to look for work on the building sites, like the blokes in
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
. He was away about a year and we kids fought even more in his absence. I don’t think he always sent money home. My mother had three jobs at one time: she went out cleaning in the mornings, did two hours in a factory in the afternoon before coming home to give us our tea, then more cleaning in the evening. She also worked for a while in a chip shop.

We didn’t starve but we didn’t have much. All four of us kids would get into the bath together, then we’d put our clothes in the bath and wash them. We only had one decent set of clothes each, so me mam would have to take them to the all-night launderette to dry them, then stay up half the night ironing them for us to wear in the morning.

When I was seven, I had a weird experience. I’d been playing football in the park all afternoon and all evening. I had my new football and I kept on playing,
even though it had got dark and all the other kids had gone home.

As I was walking home on my own, I looked up at the stars and thought, how long do stars go on for? Then I wondered, how long is life? How long will I live? How long will I be dead? Will it be OK when I’m dead or will I feel different? Suddenly I was scared, and I ran all the way home, screaming and crying.

I got into bed with me mam and dad, squeezed in beside them, cuddled close. I didn’t tell them why I’d been screaming. I just sort of hid it in my head. In fact it didn’t come out again till recently, in a conversation with a counsellor at a clinic. It was a massive relief to talk about that. Looking back, it was the first time in my life I was aware of death. I’d never actually seen anyone die. I’ve always been afraid of dying, for many reasons, since then, but until that counselling session, I’d never realised when it all began.

“
Paul did make us laugh. I used to look forward to him coming home from school and telling us the latest joke he’d heard, or something funny that had happened.
”

Carol Gascoigne, Paul’s mother

According to me mam, I was playing football when I was nine months old. I walked at nine months, and talked at nine months, so I might have managed to push a ball around as well. From about four or five I was playing all the time, in the street and in the park, just like most of the other boys in our neighbourhood.

My dad had played when he was younger, just for a local team, a railway team, and on Sunday afternoons he used to have a knockaround in the park, after he’d been to the pub, just with his mates, other grown-ups, most of them probably half-drunk. I used to play with them, even though I was only little. He would encourage
me to do tricks and I could tell he was proud of my skill.

I suppose I knew from about the age of seven, when I was given that first football, that I had a talent for the game. I was aware that I could play it better than other boys. My dad would give me tests, getting me to dribble down the pavement with my ball to the shops and back, timing me, and then making me do it again, only quicker. When I did a paper round, I used to kick a ball with me all the way, in and out of the houses.

I first got into the school football team when I was eight, even though I was younger and smaller than everyone else. At ten I won my first little trophy, and from then on, I wanted to be a professional player, though if you’d asked me at the time what I wanted to be when I grew up I would probably have said a millionaire. I remember announcing just that on the bus one day when the other lads were talking about their own ambitions.

I was awarded my cup in a penalty competition for all Gateshead primary schools, scoring 12 out of 12. I took my trophy home and kept it under the bed in case any burglars found it. I then got a place on a weekend coaching course at a country camp, where I met Keith
Spraggon. He lived not far away from me but went to a different school. He was very good at football, and we became close friends.

What I wanted was to get into the local Redheugh Boys’ Club. They had a brilliant football team, and their big rivals were Wallsend Boys, who have produced many well-known Newcastle players over the years. I was too young to join the club, but I’d climb over the wall and watch them training. I pestered everyone to take me along until finally I persuaded my dad to get me in. He had to swear that I was a couple of years older than I was. At first I just acted as ballboy or helped put up the nets, but eventually I got into the team, and so did Keith Spraggon.

My first hero was Johan Cruyff. I watched him on telly over and over again, and copied his turn. I also loved Pele, like every other football fan. I was a Newcastle supporter, of course, from an early age. When we lived at Edison Gardens, we could hear the roar from the Gallowgate End at St James’ Park. The player I liked best in the team was Malcolm Macdonald. He was my first local hero, I suppose.

At eleven, I left Brighton Junior Mixed for Breckenbeds Junior High. I was good at all sports, usually
the best in the school. I won cups for basketball, tennis and badminton and of course played football for the school. I liked maths and was quite good at it, and I learned to play chess. I pestered my mother to buy me a set, and when she did I taught her how to play as well. I’d also play cards with her for money. I usually won, but she’d keep going till either she won her money back or I fell asleep.

Whenever I had any money, I’d spend it on sweets. Keith and I and some other boys used to go into one particular shop where we’d take the mickey out of the woman who ran it, winding her up and causing trouble. We’d try to nick the sweets and she’d chase us out. One day, when I was ten, I took Keith’s little brother Steven with us, telling his mam I’d look after him. I was mucking around in the shop when Steven ran out into Derwentwater Road in front of a parked ice-cream van. He didn’t see there was an oncoming car and it went right into him.

I ran out and and stood over his crumpled little body, screaming, ‘Please move, please move!’ His lips did seem to be moving slightly, but soon he was completely still. I was on my own with him for what seemed like ages, while someone went for his mother. I just had to sit there, watching him die, waiting for his
mam and the ambulance to arrive. I can still see his mother, Maureen, running down the road. She’d rushed out of her house with no shoes or stockings on, screaming and screaming.

It was the first dead body I’d ever seen – and I felt Steven’s death was my fault. I had said I would look after him and I didn’t. I couldn’t understand why he had died when he was so young and hadn’t harmed anybody. It didn’t make sense. Why had God let him die? For weeks and weeks I’d wake in the night, reliving the scene. I suppose I should have had grief counselling, if they had such a thing in those days. I’ve talked to psychiatrists about it since, and I still go over the accident in my mind. Just speaking of it can make me cry.

Something else awful happened about that time. My dad had returned from Germany, but he wasn’t well. From the age of sixteen, he’d suffered with a lot of headaches, terrible migraines which could last for fourteen days. Then he started having seizures, which the doctors decided in the end was some form of epilepsy. He was on medication, but he still got these sort of fits, during which he would be out of it for about twenty minutes, unable to talk. He wouldn’t know who he was or the names of his own children.

This happened to him once when I was alone at home with him in the room. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, and I thought he was dying. I tried to pull his tongue out of his throat because he was swallowing it. I was afraid he’d choke and die in front of me and it would be my fault for not rescuing him. Anyway, my mam appeared and said I should keep my finger in his mouth while she rang for the ambulance. He was biting my finger so hard it was killing me, so I put a spoon in his mouth instead. I kept it there till the ambulance came. He recovered that time, but not long afterwards, when he was alone in the house and just getting out of his bath, he had a brain haemorrhage and collapsed. He was rushed to hospital, where he had countless operations. They thought he was a goner, that that was it: he’d either die or, if he lived, never fully recover.

I think he was in hospital for about eight months. Before he was finally allowed to come home, they gave him lots of tests to see if his brain was working properly. They showed him photographs of people on bikes, cars in the street, and he had to tell them what he could see. When they showed him some pictures of animals, and asked him what they were, he said: ‘That’s an elephant fucking another elephant.’ They knew then he
was back to normal. ‘OK, then, Mr Gascoigne, you can go home now.’

But he couldn’t go back to work. From the time I was twelve, he was never able to work again. So my mam had to do even more jobs to try to make ends meet. My dad would make us our tea while she went out to work. I don’t know how she managed to bring up the four of us on so little money.

It was around this time that I started displaying peculiar twitches and began making lots of noises. Just silly sounds, sort of swallowing all the time, gulping, or just shouting. I got thrown out of school for a week for making so much noise that no one else could concentrate. I liked school and hated not being able to go. I was never late and always went, even when I was ill. I even got a star once for good attendance.

Along with the twitches I developed various obsessions. I became obsessed by the number five, and had to touch certain objects five times, put the light on and off five times, or open and close a door five times. I had to have everything lined up at a certain angle, whether it was plates on a table or my clothes. I insisted on keeping the light on at night and still do. Even today I can’t sleep unless there is a light on. My mother now
says she thinks this was her fault. She was like that herself as a girl, and she inherited the habit from her own mam who, as a child, used to see the ghosts of nuns sitting in her bedroom unless the light was kept on. So my mam did the same with us, leaving a nightlight on so that we wouldn’t be scared and she could keep an eye on the four of us and see that we were all right. Anna, Carl and Lindsay stopped all that once they had left home, but I never did.

My mam got worried by these twitches, the hyperactivity and my inability to concentrate at school, and decided to take me to the doctor. He sent me to see a psychiatrist at the Queen Elizabeth. Dad took me for my appointment, as my mam was working. This psychiatrist made me play with a load of sand and bricks, which I thought was really stupid, so I refused to go again. My dad thought it was fucking silly as well. My mam wanted me to go back, but I dug my heels in. So all the twitches and stuff just carried on.