Twisting My Melon Read Online Free PDF Page B

would take the blame, so they thought he was the good one. At that stage he was the one that was going to go to college and make something of himself. I was seen as a bit of a lost cause. I’m sure I was a nightmare for my mam and dad. From when I was thirteen, my mam used to panic whenever I walked through the door because she didn’t know what trouble I was bringing with me. I could see the dread on her face every time the phone went, as she would always be expecting the worst. Looking back, I can see that when I did get a hiding off my dad he was doing it to try and protect my mam as much as teach me a lesson.
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    I used to go to the pictures a lot when I should have been in school. I liked Clint Eastwood films like Dirty Harry or Magnum Force , or Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon . There were some great films made in the early 70s. There was one particular cinema, the Princess in Monton in Eccles, which is part of Salford. That place was a belter. They’d let us in to see anything , even though we were only ten years old. And we didn’t even sneak in to the Princess – we would pay.
    I had plenty of money then. I think part of my recklessness with money in later life came from having pockets full of dough as a kid, because it meant I didn’t really learn the value of money. I could always get money if I needed it. It was a bit of a shock later when I ended up having to get a job at the age of fifteen and I was on £17 a week. When I was thirteen I would spend that in a day, easy; I’d spend that in an hour . I’d go in a shop and buy a bike, ride it around all day and then just leave it somewhere if I couldn’t get away with taking it home. I was probably making £100 a week at that stage. I was a thirteen-year-old kid and I would be jumping in a black cab with my girlfriend and going into town to the Golden Egg, a café on Deansgate that would serve us alcohol. We’d be sitting there having a mixed grill and a lager when we were supposed to be at school.
    On the rare occasions I did go into school, I started rhyming in the playground. My little crew, who went around together setting fire to stuff and robbing, would also all stand around and make rhymes up. We would just come up with silly little riddles and poems about ‘Miss Annie had a smelly fanny’ and stuff like that. Really childish nonsense, just to amuse ourselves.
    If the teacher back then had said to our class that one of us would become famous one day, none of the other kids would have ever thought it would be me. I wouldn’t have thought it would be me. I suppose the first person from our school to become famous was the kid who strangled this woman with her own tights, round the back of some pub, just after he’d left school. If we’d known that one of us would become famous, we probably would have presumed it would be for something like that – for killing someone or getting caught doing an armed robbery or something. We certainly wouldn’t have thought it would be for music or anything in the entertainment world.
    There was actually one other kid from our high school who did become famous. On my first day at Ambrose we got chased by the older lads, who wanted to flush our heads down the bogs. One of them managed to get hold of me, and his name was Nigel Pivaro. He later became Terry Duckworth, Jack and Vera’s tearaway son in Coronation Street . He was a couple of years older than me, but we ended up becoming pals and we even knocked about with him later when we were in the Mondays.
    I started wagging school when I was about eleven. Initially I tried to cover myself, but by the time I got to thirteen I just didn’t bother hiding it. I didn’t give a fuck. I can remember quite clearly in the third year of high school thinking to myself, ‘I haven’t learned a fucking thing since I’ve been here.’ My mam and dad went to parents’ evenings at school anyway, so always found out what was going on, and things would often get back to my mam