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council estate, which she shared with her husband Derek – or ‘Dekker’ as he was known at the pit. Dekker had encouraged me to go out and play with a neighbour’s kid who took me to meet his mates. Ironically, given the profession I’d later follow, my new ‘mate’ got me to stand in the middle of a circle of about ten other youngsters and fight whoever came into it. I’m not talking play fighting either, this was proper ‘smash your fucking teeth in’ fighting.
    After I’d beaten up the first two volunteers, the others wereless keen to try their hands. The biggest lad, whose name I will never forget, pushed another small kid into the circle who I also finished off with my increasingly sore fists. By now I was exhausted. I didn’t want any more. I hadn’t wanted the previous three either, but it had kind of been put upon me.
    Seizing on my weakness, the biggest lad, who was probably fourteen or fifteen, ran into the circle and floored me with a flying kick. On the floor, I was defenceless against the horde that all of a sudden wanted to fight. I lay there curled up into a tight ball, getting kicked from every conceivable direction, trying as best as I could to protect my head. A couple got through and soon the metallic taste of blood covered my tongue. The kicking then stopped, leaving me still curled in a ball. I wanted to cry, to burst into tears, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
    The brain is a strange organ when dealing with trauma. Despite what had just happened, all I could feel was the stinging from a fingernail on my left hand that had been kicked loose. I rose slowly to my feet, ignoring the stares and taunts, and hobbled to my mam’s house. My mam was out, only Dekker was there. When I told him what had happened, he just shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a rough estate.’
    I pissed blood for the next week, and have had traces of blood in my urine ever since. Believe me, it’s a pain when trying to pass an employment medical.
    As I entered my teenage years, my mother’s influence on my life became more tangible. I’d been streamed into the top class at secondary school and was captain in many of the sports teams. I was playing football at an extremely high level, and had a reputation as someone who could handle himselfin a scrap. Yet for all these youthful achievements, my gran was struggling to look after me due to my increasingly errant behavior. My temper was becoming too much for her to cope with; I’d smashed up my bedroom on many occasions through anger at nothing in particular.
    Eventually, and without notice, gran was taken from me to a one-bedroomed bungalow on a warden-assisted estate for old folks. I was carted off to live with my mam and stepdad, who had moved themselves from the rough estate into a posh bungalow in an outlying village. Nobody in the family consulted me or considered how I felt – it just happened. An angry thirteen-year-old forced to live with a disinterested mother and a drunken, violent stepdad; it seemed as if I’d secured a part in a soap opera.
    As with most soap operas, death eventually featured. Not long after our separation, I was taken to visit gran on a hospice ward. Cancer had ravaged her body until she lay withered to skin and bone in a ward hammock. I didn’t know it would be the last time I would ever see her, but I now understand that the look she gave me said that she did.
    With my gran gone, I needed family. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it at home, so mateship became more important. I found that my eight-mile round trip walking to school afforded me plenty of time to get to know other kids. Many of them weren’t as academically minded, but a commonality existed, being from coal-mining families, and that connection only grew stronger in March 1984 when the miners’ strike began.
    We had moved yet again, our regular transience only surpassed by my stepfather’s insistence on buying a shit carevery six months. We returned to Knottingley,