What was invariably happening was that those tiny children had just realised that they were all alone in the world. That nobody wanted them. That nobody had ever wanted them. That nobody cared. That, ultimately, nobody really gave a shit whether they lived or died because they were essentially disposable. Disposable little scraps of humanity about whom nobody had ever cared. I remembered going through that myself. I think we all did. It is the loneliest feeling in the world. It is a feeling of utter, absolute desolation. It was almost worse watching someone else experiencing that realisation than it had been experiencing it for myself.
We older kids would talk to the little ones and try to help them work through what they were experiencing. We would say, ‘Well, yes, you are all alone in the world, but there’s nothing you can do about that. We’re all alone too, and look at us, mate; we’re all right.’ What else could we say?
But they would not stop crying and asking, ‘Why haven’t I got a mummy? Why haven’t I got a daddy?’
‘It’s all right,’ we would say again. ‘It’s all going to be OK. It’s not your fault.’ We couldn’t answer their questions, because we didn’t have any answers and because many of us had not stopped asking the same questions about ourselves, even if we no longer allowed ourselves to break down.
The fact was that it did not make a blind bit of difference whose fault it was. For most of those kids, the damage had already been done.
And the only people they could conceivably turn to either beat them up or sexually abused them or both.
I told myself that I could not wait to leave.
ROUGH BOY
By the time I hit my teens, I was two people. On the one hand, boxing taught me to respect myself. I knew that I was very good at what I did, and I knew that the main reason for this was the fact that I worked tirelessly to reach my goal, putting in long hours in the gym and listening carefully to and acting on everything my trainers told me. But there was another side to my personality that was very unpleasant indeed. I was a thug, and knowing how to box meant that, when I was violent, I really knew what I was doing. I knew how to hurt people so badly that they would be walking around with the scars for the rest of their lives after an encounter with me.
While I would have knocked the lights out of anyone who had dared to suggest to me that I didn’t like myself, around this time I more or less consciously decided to lose contact with Mary and her family. Despite the fact that she had always been so kind to me – or maybe even because she had always been so kind to me – it no longer seemed appropriate for me to be having cosy little holidays with Mary and her family in the New Forest. They represented all that was middle class and clean and decent, and I already knew that I was going down a route that Mary would have seen as the wrong path. I hardly even felt as though I belonged to the same species as her. The boxing club had become my point of contact with the real world, and I lost interest in staying in touch for a while. Looking back now, however, I can see that Mary was a real touchstone for me all through the years of my early childhood and I was never as grateful then as I should have been. Now, I realise that I can’t thank Mary enough for everything she did for me.
Over the years, I would use my carefully honed boxing skills in a very wide range of circumstances and environments, from the boxing arena to the street. As an adolescent, I started to win amateur titles, even though I was so small I rarely weighed enough to box with opponents my own age. The fact that I was little and skinny could be to my advantage, because my opponents tended to underestimate me, at least for the first few moments of any encounter. I looked as though a strong gust of wind might blow me away, but I was able to punch well above my weight. I gained a degree of confidence from doing well in the boxing ring and learned to judge my own value according to how well I was doing at boxing. This was a saving grace. Some of the other children at the home were beginning to get into serious trouble for mugging old ladies and beating people up in the street. I was beating people up in the boxing ring, and getting praise and medals in exchange.
The order and discipline that boxing brought to my life also saved me from what would go on to blight the lives of most of the children at St Leonard’s in one way or another. I have never been one for alcohol and drugs, although I spent years and years of my working life in and around bars and clubs and various seedy establishments filled with equally seedy characters. I had innumerable opportunities to get into the drug scene, but fortunately I never had any interest. Boxing taught me how to control the violence that was just beneath my surface all the time, and I knew enough to see that taking drugs or getting drunk would threaten the control that had become so important to me.
However, although something good was happening in my life, I was also developing a very nasty streak. For years, I had been a bullied little runt, afraid of my own shadow and convinced that all of the horrible things that Starling and Coral said about me every day were absolutely true. Now that I had developed seriously good boxing skills, I was very ready to do some bullying of my own and more than prepared to bring my boxing skills out of the ring and on to the street. Nobody was going to look at me sideways more than once. I began to feel a little better about myself – but only a little. I was still going home to care workers who told me every day in a myriad of ways that I was stupid and unwanted and unloved.
Because Starling was in charge of the finances, the carers creamed as much money off as they could, and saved a bundle by feeding the majority of the kids rubbish – mostly just bread and margarine with a couple of fish fingers or a spoonful of beans. There never seemed to be enough bread and margarine, and there would literally be fistfights for it. We were growing kids who were hungry all the time, and at mealtimes it was a question of the survival of the fittest. We would just grab all the food we could and stuff it into our mouths as fast as possible. As soon as I was old enough, I got a paper round so that I could fill up on sweets and crisps. Another lifeline was the bottles of milk that milkmen left on people’s doorsteps. We stole the milk and any other dairy products that had been delivered to the householders and scoffed them on the way to school to fill up, because our breakfast of bread and margarine was never enough. I had to fit my paper round in without getting in the way of the work the carers organised for us. They were on to a bit of a scam, getting us to deliver advertising brochures for the local shopkeepers, and keeping our pay to augment their salaries and whatever they could keep from the food budget.
One of the ways Starling kept control in the home was by having a regime whereby the older kids were told that they were responsible for keeping the little ones in order, thus deflecting any responsibility for how this discipline was enacted. When I was little, one of the other kids often gave me a bit of a walloping at Uncle Bill’s request. There was a reward system in place. If the older children kept the younger ones under control, they would receive certain favours, such as permission to stay up late and watch television, or an exemption from Uncle Bill’s ritual humiliations. Uncle Bill would smile approvingly when one of the little ones got whacked around the head by a bigger kid. Not all the older children wanted to hurt the little ones, although they then got in trouble for not doing what they were told. Although I was a bit of a thug and never hesitated to take on someone my own size or bigger who was having a go at me, as I got older I drew the line at beating up little children and I hated Uncle Bill so much I didn’t care about the fact that I was not getting on his good side as a result. I had little enough self-respect as it was, without resorting to hurting the little ones.
In 1975, I was still just thirteen, but I knew what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be like. I idolised Muhammad Ali, who was the reigning hero of the day and a role model I really looked up to. His biography is still the only book that I have ever read from cover to cover and my house is full of as many photographs of him as I can get away with. I even have one from his very early days, signed ‘Cassius Clay’. It must be worth about a thousand pounds by now. But I would nev
er sell it; it is one of my most prized possessions.
Muhammad Ali was everything I dreamed of being and the fact that he was black didn’t make any difference. In fact, I had grown up with so many black kids that I was not really sure what the difference between us was supposed to be. We were all rejects together. Anyway, there was Muhammad Ali – handsome, strong, gentlemanly and dangerous. He was on television all the time in those days. I never missed a fight and when I saw him being interviewed I hung on every word he uttered, glued to the small black and white screen in the television room. Afterwards, I would lie in bed and revisit the interview, remembering every word and every nuance.
In 1975, Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier. Ali got beaten up for fifteen rounds, hit with big swinging hooks over and over again, and in the last round he got knocked down. But he was not going to stay down. Despite the indescribable pain that he must have been suffering, he got up and finished the fight. I have never seen anyone so brave.
But Muhammad Ali was not just brave in the boxing ring; he didn’t let anyone in the outside world give him shit either. During the Vietnam War, he had been banned from boxing because he refused to go to Vietnam, on the grounds that he had no problem with the Vietnamese, so why should he want to kill them? This was at a time when prominent black people were getting murdered in the United States. Malcolm X was assassinated. Martin Luther King was assassinated. But Muhammad Ali, he was a survivor and he was brave, even when everyone called him a coward for standing up for what he believed in. He just stood proud and tall and told the rednecks of America, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger, and I’m not going to go and kill a yellow man because a white man tells me to.’
Because I wanted so badly to be like Muhammad Ali, I identified with him and decided that I would do my very best to grow up to be like him in every way that I could. He became a real father figure to me, although of course our relationship was completely one-sided. We were both from the underclass – it didn’t make any difference that he was black and American and I was neither, because we were both from groups that ‘polite society’ would have preferred not to exist. He was brave, and I wanted to be as brave as him. He fought on when his jaw was broken and I decided that I would be prepared to do the same thing. He spoke out about what he believed in even when his opinions were unpopular. He was never knocked out or stopped. He never let pain stop him from doing anything. There were times when Muhammad Ali lost fights, but he was always as brave in defeat as he was gracious in victory. Whenever I was in a fight that did not seem to be going well, I would think of Muhammad Ali and I would tell him, and myself, that I would never give up. When I was hurt in the ring, I got back on my feet. When someone was rude to me or belittled me, I tried to think, What would Muhammad do? – although I rarely reacted as graciously as he would have.
Back then, Muhammad Ali was everything I wanted to be. He still is.
After years of hating school, I was finally expelled, to much relief on both sides. The teachers had been violent to me and the other kids for years, and I finally started hitting back, having decided that enough was enough and that I just didn’t want to take any more of their shit. It could have been any of the teachers, but on this particular occasion it was someone who had hit me one time too often. He came at me with the cane, and I laid into him and knocked him out. I had got to the point where I knew that I could throw punches accurately and effectively and this guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time; he also deserved what he had coming to him, which meant that I had no qualms whatsoever about giving him a serious thump. So there he was, stretched out on the floor in front of me, blood trickling from his nose and on to his clean, white cotton shirt, and his mouth and eye swelling where I had hit him. I permitted myself a little smile. It was good to see one of the teachers finally getting what he deserved.
‘You’ll pay for this, Connolly,’ he said weakly, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbing gingerly at his wounds as he struggled to his feet.
‘Fuck you,’ I said.
Unsurprisingly, I was called up before the Principal.
‘You’re out,’ he told me. ‘You can’t hit a teacher! You’re lucky that he’s not pressing charges. You’re lucky that you are not going to serve time for this.’
‘Fine by me,’ I said. And it was. At the back of my mind, the whole thing had been an exercise in the hope that I would get thrown out because I just couldn’t take it any more.
That is how I left school at fourteen, illiterate, skinny, undersized, bruised and angry. I could not even recite the months of the year. I did not know anything. Nothing at all. Of course, it didn’t matter, I felt, because I was going to be a professional boxer, and I would be able to hire other people to do whatever reading and writing needed to be done. For the time being, however, I needed something to do and I needed a way to make some money.
As they had done so many times before, my friends at the boxing club came through for me. They knew a guy called Frank who had a fruit and vegetable stand at Romford Market, and they sorted me out with a job working for him. The job was a relief after the torture of school; I liked it and, although I hadn’t been able to do maths at school, I could work out change in my head and performed my duties reasonably well.
Although I was earning money now, I was still officially a minor, and would continue living in St Leonard’s for another four years. Every evening, when it was time to go back to the home, my heart would sink.
I knew how to take care of myself, I reasoned, but I couldn’t take care of everyone. While all the children at St Leonard’s were inclined to be self-destructive, some of the kids were seriously harming themselves. Glue sniffing was rife to the extent that little effort was ever made to hide it, and equally little effort expended on stamping it out. Possibly the care workers figured out that it was probably easier for them to manage the kids when they were confused and off their heads. I remember one of the boys being rushed off in an ambulance because he had gone too far with his glue sniffing and was having trouble breathing. It must have been a terrifying experience for that particular kid, but there was no visible decline in sniffing among the solvent abusers after that. By the time the youngsters at St Leonard’s reached fifteen or sixteen, loads of them were smoking marijuana every day, but I don’t think there were any hard drugs. There were not all the drugs around then that there are now, for one thing. A little later on, a lot of the glue sniffers would graduate to heroin, which ultimately killed a large number of them. They sniffed glue to try to forget about how unhappy they were, and I am sure that this was also the reason why they took heroin when they were older. For me, violence served the same purpose. I found that I got a real adrenaline high from my bouts in the boxing ring and an even better one from my less regulated encounters on the street.
The combination of fear, deprivation, drugs and general mayhem among the inmates at St Leonard’s created a situation in which outbursts of violence among the children and teenagers were a daily occurrence, and the girls were almost as bad as the boys. I had already been carrying a knife with me for several years, and in this respect I was far from unusual. Most of the kids had weapons about their persons at any given time. They had weapons stuffed down the waistband of their trousers or in their socks. They had weapons hidden in the dormitory and all over the garden. They had weapons in their school bags. Often, when I was playing outside, I would find a knife or a bat or a sharpened screwdriver under a bush or secreted behind a drainpipe. We all wanted to be prepared for any occasion, and knowing that there was always a weapon to hand made us feel a bit more in control of our situation.
I will always be grateful for the fact that boxing gave me a way to escape from grim reality and hope for the future. Most of all, it gave me a glimpse of normal family life and, as I passed through my early teenage years, I increasingly realised that the status quo at St Leonard’s was not normal and that it was not right. The ordinary teenagers I knew from the boxing club didn’t go home to beatin
gs and abuse, but to parents who only punished them when they had actually misbehaved, and who worried about them and cared about them and gave them food that was not just abundant but tasted good too. They even tried to encourage them, and said things like, ‘Well done, son.’
Before, my anger had been general and without focus, but now I was angry because of the childhood I had never had and because of the childhoods that were being stolen from my foster siblings at St Leonard’s still.
Most of all, I became angry with the adults at St Leonard’s, but I also became angry with the Catholic Church. Until I was fourteen, I had attended Catholic school where I had received nothing but hardship. You would go into one class and get caned for giving a smart answer or for looking out of the window, and then you would go into another and the religion teacher would tell you that violence was wrong and to love your neighbour as yourself. And then we were expected to go to confession every week and own up to our sins, in return for which we were given the usual ritual penance to pay. I didn’t know the word ‘hypocrisy’ but I definitely knew what hypocrisy looked like, and I saw it every day in the faces of the good Catholics who were supposed to be teaching us.
Fucking dirty, sanctimonious, hypocritical pricks.
Well, they would all be history when I had made it as a boxing pro. Oh yes, they would be sorry then!
My idea of becoming a professional boxer was a whole lot more than a pipe dream, because I was actually very good at it, and had been boxing competitively since I was thirteen. I was the rising star of the small club I had joined a few years before. I was not the only one. There were some seriously good boxers at the club, some of whom had won major amateur championships. One of the guys at the club, Tommy Butler, was an England boxing coach.
Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read Page 5