by Lee Evans
It helped enormously, of course, if you could actually fight. Despite all my years in the boxing ring, when it came to a real fight, I still didn’t really know one end of a fist from the other, and I was at an immediate disadvantage in a ruck. At the first sign of trouble, my motto would be: stand and get beaten up.
Me revving up for the big one!
There was always one small consolation. It appeared it was true what they say, that you don’t actually feel the pain while it’s happening to you, while you’re in the thick of it. It’s only afterwards that it hurts. It’s the adrenaline, I suspect; you feel the kicks going in, but somehow you’re numb to them.
Whenever there was trouble, I would more likely than not be curled up on the floor in my little ball of protection while my mates fought gallantly around me using their fists. When it all went off, as they say, I would try to fight, of course. But inevitably it was only a matter of time before I was peering out through a mass of shuffling feet that clattered around the ground where I lay, as the kicks rained down from whatever gang we had picked a fight with that week.
Let me tell you a bit more about the ethos of our gang. At that age, you believe you’re indestructible. You truly think there is all the time in the world. In those days, for us bunch of mates, something risky would always present itself as a test, to see how far you could push the boundaries in a world of authority, rules and regulations. All boys do it to some extent, it’s a rite of passage, and hopefully always great fun.
We were no exception. For some insane reason, we always either had an ear to the ground or were on the lookout for the most pin-headed, pea-brained, high-risk scheme that would nudge us a couple of notches up the pecking order. Depending on the amount of risk you took, you could be hailed by all your mates as ‘A friggin’ nut-case’ – that was as good as a knighthood – or, better still, ‘You’re mental, you are!’ – that’s a military cross right there.
For example, I partook in any number of ridiculous, chicken-headed, dim-witted, clodpoll activities, that only a vegetable called stupid would think of doing, just so I could wring perhaps a laugh out of my mates. It would either be hitting myself full on in the face with a frying pan or any other object that might get a good twang, or a demonstration of how I could light my own farts without snapping my spine in the process.
Oh yeah, you name it, we tried it: sticking ferrets down our pants, eating live insects, learning to puke on cue (which always created an interesting chain reaction), keeping a stern face while one of your mates kicked you full in the testicles.
I was very proud to be proclaimed ‘a gourmet solid top bloke’ for daring, on one of our many night-time exploits, to crawl into a tomb for the night at a remote churchyard just outside Billericay. The graveyard was voted by everybody as the scariest and most haunted place in the area. I spent the entire night there while everybody else sat in awe on the other side of the stone wall in the pitch black, admiring the way I shat my pants. Yep, there wasn’t anything we wouldn’t do.
For some odd reason, our gang of boys had the notion that climbing out of a perfectly comfortable bed, sneaking from our houses in the middle of a freezing cold night on any given weekend and meeting up to traipse down to the local industrial estate and find a rough place to sleep was good fun. Probably just because it was there and unexplored, we found it particularly hilarious to climb over a wall and down into the back of various factories at all hours of the night. There we would stumble around like fools in all sorts of chemicals, plastics and God-only-knows-what-that-was pools of hazardous crap in the pitch black as we rummaged amongst the loading pallets, containers and skips.
Giggling with excitement at the chance of being caught, we would clamber over boxes and through piles of various off-cuts, searching for a place to sleep for the night. We would much rather freeze our tabs off than sleep in something that was specifically built for sleep, called a bed. We would be woken by the factory as it heaved slowly to life with men wearing overalls in the early hours of the morning.
On the industrial estate, we thought it was a real bonus one night to stumble across what we all thought was a cotton factory. It was difficult to tell in such darkness, but the consensus among all of us as we descended the wall into the factory yard on the other side was that it was a real stroke of luck. We were delighted by the prospect of a decent night’s sleep tucked like tiny mice in various little cracks and spaces found between the massive industrial rolls of cotton that were piled up as tall as a house waiting for dispatch.
So you can imagine our surprise when we were abruptly woken in a fit of absolute torture half an hour later. ‘Run! Run! Get out of here quick!’ Up went the cries, as the massive rolls of stacked cotton began popping out boys like popcorn from all sections of its mountainous honeycomb structure. We landed on the floor in a heap, jumping to our feet and running towards the wall and our escape.
We quickly realized there was definitely something wrong. Each of us suddenly broke into a sort of crazed-t’ai-chi-karate-kid-on-a-bucket-full-of-E-numbers jig. All our bodies were racked with some kind of furious plague of torment and itching. It seemed no amount of scratching or rubbing would ease the fire that buzzed right through to the bone. It felt as if someone had crawled inside my body wearing a suit of feathers and begun dancing the Macarena, such was the mass of tickling that afflicted the insides of the skin.
After frantically stumbling back over the wall and into the yellow street lights on the other side, we were even more alarmed. It was swiftly becoming clear that our faces were visibly changing to the colour of beetroot. Our features were sinking behind rapidly growing lumps the size of sprouts. We were like a bunch of extras who had burst out of the make-up truck on an episode of Dr Who.
We were so tormented from head to toe, all we could think of was to run off slapping and scratching as if in some sort of imaginary wasp attack. We headed off in a random direction, thought to be somewhere, anywhere, less itchy, if such a place existed. This affliction would plague us all for a full week and a half. Even then, it took another week for our faces to go back to normal instead of looking like a yam pushed into a baboon’s arse.
How were we to know, without night-vision goggles, that we had in fact crawled into a giant, extra-itchy, skin-shredding pile of industrial-sized rolls of fibreglass? Before running away, I took a quick glance up at the huge illuminated hoarding on the side of the factory. It bore the name of a fibreglass company and a picture of a woman in a swimsuit waving at me as a boat swished past behind her at speed. But if she’d been where we’d just been, she would not be wearing that swimming costume because, like us, her entire body would be covered in angry welts.
Once the swelling had gone down, everything was forgotten and, of course, we resumed our night-time factory excursions – right up until the time we climbed into the back of a nail-varnish factory. Sitting amongst the barrels of varnish, we found that the waft of the fumes was highly intoxicating, drawing us in, making us see far more pleasant images than mere lumps, I can tell you.
My friend Don, for example, before falling over in a fit of giggling, mumbled that I looked like a giant rabbit with big goofy teeth and pointy ears. Out of my tiny mind, I slowly lurched around in the dark, much to the amusement of all the others. I’m told people laugh at anything when they’re well and truly varnished. I felt as though I was walking on air, but they informed me three days later when we all finally snapped out of it that I was traipsing around imitating a spaceman, arms akimbo, taking giant steps for mankind and making lots of bleeping noises. As far as I was concerned, I was on the moon. But I think we all went on a little journey that night, a much longer trip than we’d anticipated.
We were all still there, as if sat round Pete Docherty’s house on a Sunday morning, when the factory clunked to life the next day. Someone with half a wit about him did shout ‘Run!’ But it sort of sounded like, ‘Rrruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnn!’
Of course, it was those incidents that brought us together. Just as an army unit must be first broken before they can be put back together, bonding them even closer, the same could be said of our group. We just looked out for each other.
Take the notorious Battle of Basildon. It had started out as a simple night out for a group of kids attending a well-known nightclub in Basildon. But that night would eventually lay the foundations of my personality – in solid, reinforced concrete. It was an occasion that I was made not only to pay for, but never allowed to forget. I truly believe it has been a major psychological driving force throughout my life and my career (if you call what I do any sort of career).
Even today, and probably for evermore, the events of that evening are burnt into my memory – because, when it came to it, I ran. I ran away, leaving my friends to endure a pasting so bad that one of them suffered a brain injury and was hospitalized for months afterwards. Others were beaten so bad they looked like one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings during his Blue Period, or Mike Tyson’s sparring partner after telling him in a clinch that he had done his wife big time.
Running for it cut against everything that had been engrained in me by Granddad Evans, my dad and the kids I hung around with. It was instilled in me from an early age: you never run, you stand and fight, face up to whatever it is.
But I ran.
Not only was I racked with guilt, but I was made to suffer for it. I swore to myself after that incident that I would never run from anything ever again, and I haven’t – since then I’ve never ducked from any risk, any challenge, any fight, anybody or anything. There are always major lessons in life, and that was one of mine.
Anyway, back to the beginning of the story. It was ridiculous really to want to go to that disco, but when you’re a teenager, you yearn to be an adult. One of us got the news that a popular Basildon nightclub for adults was now holding a teenage night. Lots of clubs were having them. Thinking we might pull a few birds, the whole group of us dressed in our best stuff, which was then high-waistband trousers and DMs. We were bathed in so much Brut, the fumes could have peeled paint at fifty paces.
In addition, we poured gallons of talc into our underpants, hoping that if a bird put her hand anywhere near it, she would have the sweet smell of Johnson’s. However, it only resulted in a huge white patch that showed through your trousers in the ball area. If you patted it, it would send a plume of refined talc into the air, creating a dust cloud so massive it could have blocked out the sun’s rays and triggered a new ice age.
We caught the bus and went on to the top deck. After all, we were teenagers and that’s what they do. There was the usual loud bantering between excited lads, and you could already feel the tension on the bus as we were venturing into hostile territory: Basildon.
Long before Wayne and I had arrived as kids in Essex, there had always been a rivalry between Basildon and Billericay. I found it odd at first that any time Basildon was even mentioned, kids you were having a perfectly normal conversation with about, say, marbles, would suddenly lose theirs. Boys as young as twelve would start snarling, ‘I fucking hate Basildon.’ As they vented their spleen on the neighbouring town, their fists would be clenched at their sides, all the while staring spaced-out and wide-eyed into nothingness, like those weird ankle-munchers from Village of the Damned. Then they’d just as quickly calm down and snap out of it, acting as if nothing had happened. ‘Sorry? What did you just say?’
No one knows what really started it, but apparently there has always been a history of fights and trouble between the two towns, both of which are made up from the London overspill. If you were in their high street and the kids in Basildon found out you were from the next town along, you were mincemeat. And if you happened to stumble into a pub in the middle of Billericay and one of the locals got even a sniff you were from Basildon, it would be only a matter of seconds before you were dismembered and your body parts sold off for spares at one of the many local car-boot fairs.
Whenever the two towns came together, there was always trouble, so we lads were in no doubt that if anyone found out we were from Billericay, there was going to be mayhem. It was the equivalent of being dropped behind enemy lines. It would be even more galling for the boys of Basildon that our mission was to disrupt the supply of girls – in other words, to see if we could pull any. Basildon being a much bigger town than Billericay, they would have a lot more birds than we had. The trouble was, they had a lot harder boys there, too.
The bus journey only took half an hour, and although I had butterflies, I dared not let them show. As usual when nervous, I was playing the idiot and doing something stupid like making faces into that square hole with the mirrors in that the driver uses to keep an eye on the top deck.
We had a great night at the club. It felt so good to act all grown-up – although we knew we weren’t. We acted like men, hanging out, drinking the only thing they served, cherryade and Coke. We held our drinks as if they were gin and tonics in a plastic beaker and leaned against the bar, posing for the teenage girls who milled around the dance floor. Now and again we thought one of them might be looking up at one of us boys from under her heavily hair-sprayed fringe that was flapping up and down to the rhythm like a piece of corrugated panelling on a windy day. ‘She just looked at me … I think.’
What is it with girls and their fringes? They spray enough lacquer on their fringe to fill a skip, so that it becomes a reinforced, hardened wing, a fashionable shield that hangs rigid down and across the spotty forehead, a rock-solid mix of frozen-in-time strands of stunned hair and chemical spray. It always looks like they’ve spent the morning in the prosthetics department of Star Trek, turning into a Klingon.
Girls couldn’t care less about any other part of their body or even the world. But the fringe – prepare to meet thy doom if you so much as go within a light year of it. And God help them if it rains. Even in a light shower, you always see girls make a sort of awning by cupping their hands and holding them just above the fringe over their forehead, protecting the all-important front bit of their heads, just before making the frantic, death-defying run from one shop to the other.
At closing time, we filed out from the club in amongst the crowd of teenagers, out into the street. We never pulled any girls – surprise, surprise – but we were still grinning from ear to ear, so happy that we’d had our first night out at a real club. It was just us, friends, all by ourselves; this, we felt, was going to be our gang for the rest of our lives. The mood was high as we skipped along the pavement, making our way to the stop just around the corner from the club to catch the bus back to Billericay.
But then everything started to go wrong.
After reaching the bus stop just off the main drag of Basildon High Street, we looked around and noticed that the street was strangely quiet. Somehow you could feel the menace in the air. Standing at the bus stop, we must have looked like a bunch of chickens waiting for slaughter.
It’s a strange feeling when all your survival instincts kick in; it shoots right up your spine to the back of your head, your legs go all wobbly and your face turns white as the blood drains away and mans the muscles like soldiers to the turrets at the ready.
I think it was Don who whipped his hands out of his pockets and looked up. He was a small, skinny kid and always reminded me of Jack Wild, who played the Artful Dodger in Oliver! He was the one who saw it first. ‘Watch out, you lot. Look!’ He nodded up the road and took up a kind of fight or flight position, leaning on the furthest point of the bus stop away from what was coming towards us. His head was darting in all directions, searching perhaps for somewhere we could run. The laughing and joking stopped, and we all looked at him. We could hear it in his voice, but we could also see it in his face – it was definitely something bad.
I spun around and couldn’t believe my eyes. A massive bolt of fear ripped through my body. I was frozen to the spot as we all watched a parade of what must have been the whole of
Basildon’s teenage population gradually begin to fill the entire street. I thought for a moment that maybe we’d just missed a carnival. But no one was smiling.
They were big, small, wide, long, all shapes and sizes, their numbers at least four or five thick. Streaming around the building, the Bad Lads’ Army of Basildon just kept on coming. They were led, I noticed, by this one huge lump of a kid who marched out front like someone had just taken his toys away. His face was red with fury, but I couldn’t work out why he looked so angry. He walked with such determination. Eyebrows narrowed to a point, it looked like he had just used a pencil sharpener in the middle of his forehead. This lad’s face had the appearance of a well-used claw hammer; in fact, I thought that young fella hardly had a head at all, just a huge fat neck with a couple of eyes pitched on the front of it.
The marauding Basildon street fighters filed around the corner towards us. The cool summer night air that had felt so fresh after leaving the club earlier had now became thick and hard to breath. I realized that there was no carnival, that this lot were here to make us the entertainment tonight. My heart jammed itself into my throat. Maybe it was doing what I was doing: looking for a way out.
If that wasn’t enough to get the bowels rumbling, from around the opposite corner of the building appeared another lot, easily thirty strong, maybe forty. The two crowds of kids marched onwards, merging into one big bustling group like some Chinese Olympic display team.
Now as one mass, they drummed a beat towards us at the bus stop. Then, as they got to a couple of feet away, they suddenly stopped. We stood there rooted to the ground, stunned at the long line of kids packing the whole width of the street. They were now so close to us, we could hear them breathing. All this lot just for us? It was as if the town had a special bell or a big horn someplace, like you see in the films, perched high on a tower made of bamboo that someone had run off and sounded, making a call to arms and bringing out anyone who was able to fight. It was as if every kid born in the last seventeen years had turned up for a reunion punching party, ‘For the good old days.’ I wasn’t sure, but I think I spotted a young Uncle Tom Cobley and all.