by Ian Holloway
I thought about what Gerry had said, but was puzzled as to why he’d mentioned my dad. Dad knew a lot of people and some of them were close to Gerry and Rovers, so I supposed that his heart condition wasn’t a secret as such. He had angina and I supposed that it must have been fairly common knowledge he was on the waiting list for a triple heart by-pass operation, but as far as I knew, he was doing reasonably well. He had always been a fit bloke and was always running around doing this and that and keeping himself active. Plenty of people had heart attacks and made full recoveries, so why not him? As far as I was concerned he was going to be around for another 30 years or so, but all the same, it placed a seed of doubt in my mind that perhaps he wasn’t doing as well as I was being led to believe. I looked at Kim and we spoke about it and then she said, “Well why don’t we go home?” Why not indeed? It wasn’t happening for me in London and had never felt right since day one, admittedly, mostly because of what had been going on in Bristol. I liked Harry Bassett a lot and he was always fair and straight with me but I’d never settled at Plough Lane and hadn’t exactly been welcomed with open arms by Steve Perryman, who clearly didn’t rate me, so it was the easiest footballing decision I’d ever had to make. I called Gerry back and said ‘yes’ and informed Brentford I was leaving. It felt right, and for the first time since I’d left Bristol, going back to my home town, back to my boyhood club, back to my family and friends with the girl I loved on my arm and a baby on the way, was what I believe they call today a ‘no-brainer’. I still called Gordon Bennett to see what he thought and he said, “Oh, I wouldn’t go back. It’s not good to go back.” He’d told me not leave Wimbledon, but I had, and now he was saying don’t leave Brentford, and though I could see his logic, it felt right for Kim and me, and so we did. It was probably the first time in my life I hadn’t put my career first. This was a personal decision and for once, it was the right one.
Chapter 7: Back Home
We gathered our belongings and hired a truck for the move back home. A great mate of mine, Keith Millen, a centre-half at Brentford helped me pack up the truck and that one-bedroom flat suddenly became like the inside of the bloody Tardis. I couldn’t believe how much stuff we’d accumulated and it took an age to load it all up. We must have looked like the Beverly Hillbillies as we pulled away with only a rocking chair missing from the roof of the truck. We left at 5am the following morning and by the time we approached Membury Services on the M4 – about halfway back to Bristol – we couldn’t see more than a couple of feet ahead due to thick fog that had descended. I was panicking a bit because we were running on fumes but we couldn’t see anything and had to trundle along at a snail’s pace. Finally, we saw the signs for the services and managed to make it to the petrol pumps, only for a bloke to come out and tell us that we’d have to take a service road over the motorway to the other side because they’d run out of diesel. Fantastic. I wasn’t sure we’d make it, but we drove onto the service road up a hill and over a bridge and as we came down on the other side, the road seemed to veer sharply to the right. I came to halt in the grass verge and I heard a noise and looked out to see what it was, only to be greeted by a cow looking over a fence, inches away, just staring at us. “What are you bloody looking at?” I asked just as a car flew past us at speed and was gone in a flash. I asked Kim, “Did we really just see that?” Had it not been for old Ermintrude, I reckon he’d have rear-ended us – maybe worse. I found the petrol station, filled up and we crossed back over the motorway and slowly continued on our way. We moved in with Kim’s folks and stored the furniture in her dad’s garage while we looked to find a new home, and within a few weeks we’d found a lovely old house in need of renovation and I came up with a hair-brained scheme to do the work myself. I took my dad round and he absolutely slaughtered it. “What are you doing you idiot? What are you thinking about? This is a hell of a job and you’ve got no chance of getting this into shape…” He went on for a bit, but we bought it anyway. I think he could see it was going to be a bit of a money pit, but we could see what it could be like, and with a baby on the way, we were determined to get a big family home ready for the winter. With the help of my mate Paul Lewton, who was a workaholic builder, we reckoned we could just about do it. I’d been away once and come back to Bristol and I couldn’t ever see myself leaving again, so we put our heart and soul into the renovation work and on my afternoon off, Kim and I would nip off to Bath and browse antique markets and bric-a-brac shops looking for knick-knacks, fittings and furniture.
Dad would come around and give me a hand from time to time, but he wasn’t well and was getting chest pains – probably much more severe than he let on. Kim used to despair when Pen would turn up unannounced and take one look at me covered from head to toe in dust and say, “Coming out for a game of golf, Ollie?” He hadn’t changed a bit, though in truth, after my experiences at Wimbledon, it was good to see him again. Kim would invariably tell Pen I was busy – in so many words – and on one particular day I told him I had to get on with painting the skirting boards. The next day at training, I walked in and all the lads were on their hands and knees painting imaginary skirting boards around the dressing room. Pen was a bloody nightmare but because he was a fully qualified plumber and could have helped me out, I called him up and told him I needed a plumber urgently and he said, “No problem, mate, just look in the Yellow Pages under ‘P’,” he laughed at his own joke and then hung up. Like I said – a bloody nightmare. Who needs mates like that?
I was always in a rush to get things finished and on one occasion I almost paid the price for my haste. I was doing some tiling and had to take the light switch off, but didn’t turn the mains off first. As I was doing the last few tiles I touched a live wire and electrocuted myself. I couldn’t get away from the bugger and as the doorbell rang, I somehow managed to fall backwards on to the floor with my hair stuck out like an Afro. With a distinct smell of singed flesh in the air, dad walked in the room and shook his head. “I shall have to live till I’m one hundred and fifty to look after you, you silly sod.”
We had some laughs doing that house and we weren’t far off finishing when dad fell ill. We’d prepared the kitchen for plastering and later on he’d gone to watch a match with his mate, but on the way back he asked to be driven straight to hospital because the pains in his chest had worsened. He’d had another heart attack and this time it was major one.
The warning signs had been there, but he carried on anyway, never really telling anyone if he was in pain, and now he’d landed back in hospital, seven years after his first attack.
I went to see him every day, and four days after he’d been admitted – it was a Wednesday – I left hospital in high spirits because he’d perked up and was laughing and joking again. I’d taken Devon White with me and Devon was a tall, strapping striker from Rovers who was also doing the wiring on our house. Dad looked up at him and said, “Hello mate. Good God! I wouldn’t like to argue with you! You’re a big ‘un aren’t you my old mate?” He seemed almost back to his old self after a few days of not really seeming to have been there at all, no doubt partly due to the morphine he was receiving. I went back to the house feeling happier about everything, and started mixing the plaster for Paul. Not long after there was a frantic knock at the door – it was my sister Sue and my heart sank. “You’ve got to come quickly. Dad’s taken a turn for the worse.” I was devastated. I hadn’t seen him that long ago and he’d improved loads from the day before. We rushed to hospital and from start to finish, it was just a horrific experience. To us, he was getting better and there were no indications that anything untoward would happen, yet there we were, at his bedside, watching him slowly slipping away. All the immediate family were there but after a short time we were asked to go into another room – he had another attack and they managed to resuscitate him, but his breathing was awful, heavy and laboured, and it was torture to listen to. We were told he probably wouldn’t last the night and mum stayed by his side, but had t
o come out a couple of times while they revived him again. He’d lost his blood pressure and time passed into the early hours and we all knew we were just waiting for him to die which is the most terrible thing I’d ever experienced.
I had a game to play later that day and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I didn’t want to see dad suffering like that so I said I was going home because I had a match to play for Rovers, and we left about 7am, though it killed me to do it. I knew dad would be angry if I didn’t play because he’d spent his whole life making sure I turned up on time and was properly prepared to play. Within an hour, we had a call to say that he’d died – he was just 59, which is no age at all, is it?
A woman who had been in the next bed to dad called mum a few weeks later to say that after each time he’d been revived he asked the doctors what they were doing. “It’s my time to go…why are you doing that?” he’d almost whispered. That wasn’t my dad because he loved life and lived it to the full. He’d always told me to live each day as if it were my last, because one day it would be, and for him to want to leave and be at rest meant he couldn’t take the pain any longer. He also said he’d been to a lovely place and that he hadn’t wanted to come back, and I think we all took a little something from that. For me, hearing what dad had said meant I had to wipe my blackboard clean, because he’d always been the one who told me that when you died that was it, and this contradicted everything I’d been taught and believed in.
We’d at least had the opportunity to be with him and say things we needed to say but knowing the way he was, if he had pulled through that night, chances are he wouldn’t have been the same man, and that would have made him unhappy. If he could have, I reckon he’d have said, “I’ve had a hell of a go at it and enjoyed every single day, but when your time comes, that’s the way it’s meant to be.”
I was in pieces when I heard he’d died. I wanted him to be okay and get better and just be my dad again, but you don’t always get the things you want in life, do you? He couldn’t have done any more for me than he did and I think he did the job of two dads – the one he didn’t have himself and the one he wanted to be for us. Everything I ever really wanted, I got, and for that I’ll always be eternally grateful to both my parents. Everyone knew Bill Holloway, and my brother-in-law, Phil, always said he thought dad was the richest man in the world because wherever he went he gave warmth to others and they gave it right back to him. He’s still with me, though it’s getting harder to hear his voice in my mind. From that moment on, I vowed to get my career back on track and use the loss, pain and grief I felt by channelling it into my football. It was the only way I could deal with things and it was the start of a new chapter in my career. Whether he was around to see it or not, I was going to make him proud of me.
My decision to play just hours after he’d died, I believe, was one of the best I made during my playing career. It was obviously one of the hardest, too, but I called Gerry Francis to tell him what had happened and that I wanted to play that night. We had an FA Cup replay against VS Rugby at Twerton Park and Gerry asked if I was sure I’d be alright and I told him I’d be okay.
“That’s fine by me, then,” he said. I’d intended on keeping the news of dad’s passing to just very close family and Gerry so that I could get on with the game without anyone mentioning it to me. The last thing I wanted to do was to break down in front of 8,000 fans, and I thought that was the case, but when I ran out to warm up before the match, there were a few people who did seem to know. I had to run straight back in. It turned out somebody from the hospital informed the Evening Post and they’d run a brief story about it – I was fuming, but I still had a game to focus on.
None of the lads seemed to know and if they did, they kept it to themselves, but anybody watching me that night probably guessed something wasn’t quite right. All the anger and grief I was immersed in came out in one of my best performances ever for the club. The ball was all I cared about and I could hear dad saying, “Always believe it’s yours. Make it yours.” Every time the ball dropped near me I was in for it first and won it, and it was as if all the self-doubt, fear of failure and hesitancy I’d been carrying with me throughout my career just lifted from my shoulders. If he was ever with me during a game, it was that night, because I could feel him there in my boots. I played like a man possessed and was all over the place during a match we won 4-0, and after the game I finally broke down, overcome with the events of the past 24 hours.
In truth, things hadn’t gone at all well at Rovers since I’d returned and for the first time I’d started to hear a few moans and groans around the ground. I remember a ball came to me and it went straight under my foot and out of play. There were one or two boos, which I’d never had before, but Pen ran 30 yards to me and said, “Come on Ol, get on with it, get on with it!” A few minutes later we had a corner and little Phil Purnell, another lad I’d known all my life, ran up and said, “Come on Ol! Come on son!” and I realised I needed people to get through this. I knew that if I could get through that and play after what had happened, I could do anything and my fear of failure had gone in an instant.
I later went to the chapel of rest but I didn’t kiss dad goodbye or touch his hand because as a kid I’d been to see my grandfather at rest and given him a kiss on the cheek, but he was stone cold and I hadn’t expected it. I didn’t want that to be my last memory of dad so I just popped my head in and as I looked at his body I felt – not heard – him say, “That’s not me anymore.” I felt that wherever dad was now, it wasn’t there in the chapel of rest. He looked like he was made of plastic and it was bloody awful. In my mind I could see him fresh and young, running around, joking and full of life. I almost wish I hadn’t gone and seen him lying there because he didn’t need me to do that, and I would rather not have that memory of him. Everything felt different in my life. I felt very lonely. If I had a problem with my house I couldn’t just pick up the phone and talk to dad about it anymore and the feeling of loss was all encompassing. Probably the hardest thing for me was knowing he’d never hold my child, who was due just three months later. He’d had such a special relationship with his first grandson, Sue’s little boy, Luke, and he would have been the same with my little one. He’d go round to Sue’s house every Friday, pick Luke up from school then stay for his dinner and play rough and tumble with him. It was wonderful to watch. Luke still misses his Granddad today, some 20 years on.
Mum took on a full-time job the week after dad’s death and showed her inner strength by getting on with her life when she could have just as easily hid herself from the outside world while she grieved.
The funeral was one of the weirdest experiences I think I’ve ever had because I felt as though I was watching everything from afar, as though I wasn’t actually taking part. There were hundreds of people at the service which was at a crematorium in Bath for some reason, and the wake was held at a club dad used to go to with all his mates. People were saying things to me about him, but I can’t remember anything because the whole day seemed to be played out in slow motion. I saw some people look at me and then look away and I just thought they were cowards because I had a lot more respect for the people who tried to say a few words, even if they couldn’t quite get them out. We all managed to keep it together on the day, even though we were all in something of a stupor, but I felt angry and cheated because he was just 59 for God’s sake. My only advice to anyone reading this is to tell the people you love exactly what you think of them while they’re here. Tell them you love them and how much they mean to you and, like dad always told me, never go to bed on an argument, because if you lose somebody without doing any of that, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
Another one of his sayings was “One out, one in,” meaning that for every death in a family there would be one birth, and the old rascal was right, because our first child was born just a couple of months later on March 6, 1988. Kim went into labour and the moment I knew the baby was comin
g I rushed her to hospital because I had an irrational fear of the baby coming quickly and me ending up like Frank Spencer trying to deliver it myself. We got there, but the baby wasn’t born until 9pm at night, by which time I was in the bad books after moaning about how long it was taking. My off-the-cuff comment, “I wouldn’t be here for just anybody, you know!” during a heated discussion, ended with Kim verbally launching into me. I think I probably just about deserved it. I nipped out to get something to eat in my sister’s car, ‘Bluebell’ – a beautiful blue VW Beetle – and I found a chippy nearby, but there was a fair old queue and the woman behind the counter said there was a five minute wait for chips. I had an odd feeling I needed to get back sharpish so I just asked for a pasty and set off back to see Kim. All the while, Kim was ready to give birth and was holding on as best she could. The midwife asked if I’d be upset at missing the birth because the baby was ready to come out at any second and Kim said, “Bloody right he would!” Just then, she heard me whistling in the corridor, not a moment too soon. Kim was sure we’d have a girl and was shocked when our first born turned out to be a boy. I was in floods of tears and the midwife wrapped him in a blanket and handed my little son to me and at that moment, everything felt right in the world and I understood what life was all about. I knew why dad had been like he had with me and if I could have hugged him at that moment as I was hugging my baby, it would have made my world complete. We’d been planning to call him Jacob, but Kim was more than happy when I asked if we could call him William after his Granddad. It was an amazing, life-changing event, but that, of course, is when the really hard part began.
Paul Lewton, who’d worked ever so hard on helping us get our house finished, had just finished his nursery by the time we returned home, and I’ll be forever grateful for the way he got on with things on his own. I quickly learned, however, that babies don’t sleep to order. William sounded like a little warthog, snorting and grunting, and I asked Kim if he was going to be like that all the time. I was paranoid about getting my sleep, especially around matchdays and after three weeks he had to go in his own room. He was given his first red card – he invariably had an early bath each day anyway – and after another month or so, he slept all the way through the night – thank God!