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    I stole money one day off my aunty Nell's neighbor. I took the pound note to the sweet shop, and my aunty Nell was behind me without me knowing. She didn't say anything at the time but phoned up the school.

    The headmistress summoned me to her office and said, "What were you doing with all that money?"

    "I found this old mirror," I said. "I got some varnish, done it up, sold it, and got two quid for it."

    I got away with it. I thought I was so clever; everybody else was a mug for letting me steal from them.

    Because my mum and dad were working hard, I had a lot of freedom.

    I repaid them by being a complete shit.

    My mum had broken her leg and was sitting in the front room one night watching Peyton Place. She said, "Don't eat the last orange, Andy, I'm going to have it for my dinner later on."

    I knew she couldn't get up and hit me, so I picked it up and started peeling it, throwing the peel out of the window. My mum went ApeShit, but I ate the orange in front of her, then ran out of the house when my father appeared. I slipped on the orange peel and broke my wrist.

    After school, and sometimes instead of school, we used to go thieving in places like Dulwich Village and Penge, areas that we reckoned deserved to be robbed.

    We'd saunter past people sitting on park benches, grab their handbags, and do a runner. Or they'd be leaving their cars unattended for a minute or two while they bought their children an ice cream; we'd lean through the window and help ourselves to their belongings. If a p car was hired or had a foreign plate, we'd always know there was stuff in the boot. And as we learned, they were easy enough to break into.

    In school lunch breaks we often used to take our school blazers off and hide them in holdalls so no one could identify us when we stole. We thought we were dead clever. The fact that ours was the only comprehensive school in the whole area didn't really occur to us.

    Then we'd go around looking for things to steal. We got into a car one day, took a load of letters, and discovered that they contained checks.

    We were convinced that we'd cracked it. None of us had the intelligence to realize that we couldn't do anything with them.

    We broke into a camping shop one night in Forest Hill. There were three of us, and we got in through the flat roof. Again, we didn't really know what we wanted.

    It was one of the places where you could go and buy swimming ribbons to put on your trunks. So the priority was to get a few of those and all become gold-medal swimmers. After that we didn't know what to do, so one of us took a shit in the frying pan in the little camping mock-up that they had as a window display.

    At the age of fourteen I was starting to get all hormonal and trying to impress the girls that I was clean and hygienic. You could buy five pairs of socks for a quid in Peckham market, but they were all outrageous colors like yellow and mauve. I made sure that everybody saw I was wearing a different color every day. I also started to have a shower every night down at Goose Green swimming baths. It cost five pence for the shower and a towel, two pence for soap, and two pence for a little sachet of shampoo.

    I wore clean socks, I was kissably clean, but I was overweight.

    The girls didn't seem to go a bundle on fat gits in orange socks.

    Then the Bruce Lee craze swept the country. People would roll out of the pubs and into the late-night movie, then come out thinking they were the Karate Kid. Outside the picture houses, curry houses, and Chinese takeaways of Peckham of a Friday night, there was nothing but characters head-butting lampposts and each other to Bruce Lee sound effects.

    I took up karate in a big way and got into training three times a week.

    It was great. I was mixing with adults as well as people of my own age, and I started to lose weight. I was also doing a bit of running.

    The schooling and all things academic were still bad. I got in with a fellow called Peter, who wore his cuffs and big, round butterfly collars outside his blazer. I thought he was smooth as fuck in his big, baggy trousers. He asked if I wanted to do a couple of weeks' work for his dad, and I jumped at the offer.

    His old man owned a haulage firm. Peter and I loaded electrical goods into wagons, then helped deliver them.

    We made a fortune, mainly because we nicked radios, speakers, and anything else we could get our hands on when the driver wasn't looking.

    I earned more than my old man that month. Even in adult life people would have perceived that as a good job. My attitude was, "Get out of school because it's shit, get a job, earn some money," and that was it.

    I didn't realize how much I was limiting my horizons, but there was no guidance from the teachers. They were having to spend too much time just trying to control the kids, let alone educate us. They had no opportunity to show us that there was anything beyond the little world we lived in. I didn't realize there was a choice, and I didn't bother to look.

    In the sort of place that we lived, a really good job would be getting on the print or the docks. Next level down would be an underground driver on London Transport. Other than that, you went self-employed.

    I landed up working more or less full-time for the haulage contractor, delivering Britvic mixers and lemonade during the summer.

    I managed to get extra pallets of drinks put on the wagons, sold them to the pubs, and pocketed the proceeds.

    In the wintertime I delivered coal. I thought I was Jack the lad because I could lift the coal into the chutes. I couldn't move for old ladies wanting to make me cups of tea. I thought I knew everything I needed to know. I pitied the poor dickheads at school, working for nothing. I was making big dough; I had all the kit that I'd wanted two years ago.

    I lost my virginity on a Sunday afternoon when I was fifteen. My mate's sister was about seventeen. She was also willing and available, but very fat. I didn't know who was doing whom a favor. It was all very rumbly, all very quick, and then she made me promise that I wasn't going to tell anybody. I said that I wouldn't, but as soon as I could, like the shit that I was, I did.

    The contract work finished, and I started working at McDonald's in Catford, which had just opened. Life there was very fast and furious.

    I was sweeping and mopping the floors every fifteen minutes. I could have a coffee break, but I had to buy all my own food. There was no way I could fiddle anything because it was all too well organized.

    I hated it. The money was crap, too, but marginally better than the dole-and besides, the McDonald's was nearer to home than the dole office.

    I started to get into disappearing for a while. A bloke and I did his aunty's gas meter and traveled to France on day passes, telling the ferries our parents were at the other end to collect us. On the way back we even stole a life Jacket and tried to sell it to a shop in Dover.

    I had no consideration whatsoever for my parents.

    Sometimes I'd come back at four in the morning and my mum would be flapping. Sometimes we'd have the police coming around, but there was nothing they could do apart from give me a big fearsome bollocking. I thought I was the bee's knees because there was a police car outside the house.

    I started going off the rails good style, sinking as low as tipping over Portaloos so I could snatch the occupants' handbags. One day three of us were coming out of a basement flat we'd just burgled in Dulwich when we were challenged by the police. We got cornered near the railway station by a handler and his dog.

    As soon as the police gripped me, I was scared. I bluffed in the van because the other two weren't showing any fear. But as soon as we got separated at the station, I wanted to show the police that I was flapping. I wanted them to take pity on me; I wanted them to see that I wasn't that bad, just easily led.

    The station was a turn-of-the-century place with high ceilings, thickly painted walls, and polished floors. As I sat waiting in the interview room, I could hear the squeak of boots in the corridor outside.

    I wanted so badly for somebody to come in; I wanted the police to know that I wasn't bad; I'd fucked up, but it was the other two's fault.

    My heart was pumping. I wanted my mum. It was the same horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that I'd had running home from Maxwell's Laundry.

    I had visions of ending up in Borstal or prison or being the new young meat in an overcrowded remand wing. I'd always looked up to the local characters who'd been in prison, and I thought they were really hard.

    Now I knew that they must have hated it, too. All their stuff about "being inside" must have been hollow bravado; it wasn't glamorous, and it wasn't exciting. It was horrible.

    When my parents came up to the police station and I saw the shame and disappointment in my mums eyes, I thought: Is this it? Is this what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life? Having a cell door slammed behind me, was bad enough; it was claustrophobic and lonely in there, and I was very scared. But I'd never seen Mum like that before, and I felt terrible.

    I decided I was going to change. Alone in the interview room I said to myself: "Right, what am I going to do? I'm going to start getting myself sorted out."

    There had been one brief spell at school when I'd really got into English. I did a project on Captain Scott and got an A. I thought it was really great, but then I just dropped it. I got into history for a short while and enjoyed making a model of an Anglo-Saxon village.

    Maybe I could make a go of it. I didn't want to land up as just another local nutter who thought he was dead cool because he had a Mark III Cortina and a gold chain around his neck.

    So what was I going to do? There was no way I could get a decent job in South London. Academically I wasn't qualified, and certainly I didn't have the aptitude to work in a factory.

    In the back of my mind there had always been ideas about the army.

    When my uncle Bert had lived upstairs, I'd heard him talking to my mum once about the army.

    He'd joined just before the Second World War because they were going to feed him three meals a day. And I knew they educated you because my mum had said so about my brother. Aunties and uncles would say, "John's away now." My parents would reply, "Oh, yes, make a man of him."

    I'd seen all the adverts for the army-blokes on windsurfers who always seemed to have loads of money, going places and doing stuff.

    And at least it would educate me. Why not do three years, I thought, and see what it's like? My brother had enjoyed it, so why not me? If nothing else, it would get me out of London.

    As soon as the interview started, I said, "Please, I don't want to be in the shit because I want to join the army. It wasn't my idea going in the flat. I was just dragging along. They told me to keep dog. Then they came running out, and I ran with them," And I kept on bubbling.

    I got put into a remand hostel for three days while I waited to go in front of the magistrates. I hated every minute of being locked up, and I swore to myself that if I got away with it, I'd never let it happen again. I knew deep down that I really would have to do something pretty decisive or I'd end up spending my entire life in Peckham, fucking about and getting fucked up.

    On judgment day the other two got probation; I got let off with a caution. I was free to carry on where I'd left off, or I could show everybody, including myself, that this time I meant business.

    I jumped on a bus that would take me past the army recruiting office. want to fly helicopters," I said to the recruiting sergeant. "I want to go in the Army Air Corps."

    I took a simple test in English and math, which I failed.

    "Come and try again in a month's time," the sergeant said. "The test will be exactly the same."

    I went down to the public library and studied a book on basic arithmetic. If I could master multiplication, I told myself, I'd never again have to hear the sound of a cell door slamming.

    Four weeks later I went back in, sat the same test, and passed-by two points. The sergeant gave me a pile of forms to take home.

    "What are you going in?" my dad said.

    "Army Air Corps."

    "That's all right then. We don't want any of that infantry shit.

    You don't learn anything in that."

    I was given a travel warrant and went off to Sutton Coldfield for the three-day selection process. We were given medicals and simple tests of the "If this cog turns this way, which way does that cog turn?" variety and did a bit of sport. We watched films and were given talks about teeth arms and support arms and where the army was in the world. I was loving it. The Army Air Corps seemed to operate everywhere; Cyprus and Hong Kong looked good for starters.

    As I was going through the tests, though, the terrible truth dawned on me that there was no way I was going to become a pilot. A lot of the other candidates were in the brain surgeon bracket, loaded down with 0 levels and going for junior apprenticeships to become artificers and surveyors. You'd have to be in their same league to go for pilot training, and I didn't have a qualification to my name. All the time I had wasted humping coal and lemonade flashed in front of me as if I were a drowning man. For the first time since I'd been old enough to do something about it, I was surrounded by blokes who had something that I wanted, but this time it was something that couldn't be nicked.

    At the final interview an officer said to me, "You can go into the Army Air Corps and train as a refueler.

    However, I don't think you would be best suited to that.

    You're an active sort of bloke, aren't you, McNab?"