by Dynamo
I had a lot of resentment towards him, particularly when I was a teenager. I know he was in jail and that he couldn’t be around at certain times, but he could have sent me a birthday card or a Christmas present. No matter how small. On the few occasions he was out of jail for a month or two, I didn’t see him because he’d be up to his old tricks. He very occasionally pops up now and then, but whenever he does try to come to find me, he asks for Dynamo, not Steven. I think that says a lot.
People say that I look a lot like my dad. I’m mixed race; my mum is white and my dad is Asian. That’s as much as I know, because I’ve never met my dad’s family and they haven’t tried to get in touch since I was very young. They wanted to take me away for a few days not long after my dad first went to prison, but my mum said no because she was worried that they’d never bring me back.
Growing up in Bradford in the eighties and nineties was an interesting time. I was quite an anomaly in many ways. Most estates in Bradford are very racially divided; you have Asian people in one place and white people in another. Being mixed race and living on a largely white estate had its challenges.
Bradford was a tough place to grow up
AFTER MY DAD went into prison, we moved around different estates in Bradford, including Wyke, Wycoller and Markfield Avenue. Mostly, though, I spent my childhood and teenage years on an estate called Delph Hill. I grew up with my mum, her mum and stepdad (Nana Lynne and Granddad) and my mum’s grandparents, my great-grandparents (Nan and Gramps). Apart from my aunty and some cousins, that was the only family I had.
Delph Hill is surrounded by countryside, so in theory, it could be a beautiful place. Back when I grew up, you didn’t have to look too hard though to see the burnt-out cars, broken glass and dilapidated houses. It was your typical low-rise estate; lots of terraced houses crammed together on a hill. It was much neglected.
The estate is quite far from the city centre, so it’s hard to go anywhere. It’s a long bus ride to get to the train station and the buses come when they feel like it. Once you’re in Delph Hill, you rarely ever leave. Growing up there left me feeling very isolated. I had the sense that real life was being lived far away from the patchy grass and streaky concrete that was my everyday view. It’s been done up a lot since I was a kid. Nowadays, mostly older people live there, so it’s much safer. They’ve cleaned it up considerably.
Back then, though, Delph Hill was a tough place to grow up. There were a lot of kids running around, selling drugs, taking drugs, robbing and fighting. With packs of young gangs roaming around, it wasn’t safe to walk about – especially when you’re a small kid with a young mum and no dad. It was safer to stay indoors because I was such an easy target. I was born small and I stayed small. Because of my size, I was picked on, both on the estate and at school. I’m hardly the biggest guy now, so you can imagine what I was like as a kid.
Even though I was tiny for my age, I had no idea that something was medically wrong with me. I played football like the other kids, I went skateboarding, and I ran around the playground – though that was mostly trying to escape from the bigger kids!
I was skinny and, no matter how much I ate, I found it hard to put on weight. Sometimes I would find blood in the toilet, but I thought all that was normal. My mum became concerned when I was thirteen. Until then, she assumed that I’d have a growth spurt when I hit puberty, but as my friends shot up around me, I stayed the same size.
My mum took me to the doctors and they started running a lot of tests – there were tubes up and down my body, cameras in and out of every place imaginable, and all types of horrible things. I had to have loads of barium meals, which are these rancid powdery drinks that help doctors see what’s wrong inside of you. You can’t eat anything the night before, so you can imagine how nice it is that the first thing you have to drink the next day is this disgusting, salty, acidic powder mixed with water. You have to do it, though – the barium is radiopaque, which means that whatever is wrong inside shows up clearly on an X-ray. After weeks of tests, the doctors eventually told me I had Crohn’s Disease.
I’d never heard of Crohn’s and I had no idea that it would mean a lifetime of discomfort, pain and, when it got really bad, lengthy hospital visits. Crohn’s is a form of inflammatory bowel disease. It’s classed as a chronic illness because it’s very difficult to manage. The thing about Crohn’s is that it’s incurable. Each person has different symptoms, which makes it hard to treat, and therefore, I presume, cure. The exact cause is also unknown. It could be genetic, it could be the immune system or it could be affected by environment. It’s more commonly found in Europe than, say, Africa.
Because it affects the stomach and digestive system, many sufferers of Crohn’s tend to be very small, which explained my size. You can’t eat certain foods and the food you can eat, you have trouble digesting.
As it is an inflammation in the digestive system, it means pretty much every time you eat, there are complications. Eating can sometimes be an uncomfortable experience. Imagine you’ve got a big, deep cut on your arm or your leg. Whenever you eat, it’s like rubbing dirt into the wound.
Having Crohn’s – so I’ve been told – can be similar to what women experience once a month; cramps, discomfort, blood loss and mood swings. Except it’s what I have every day. I’m in pain all the time. I try to keep on top of it by not eating things that make it worse. There’s a lot of stuff I can’t eat, like sesame seeds, the skin of vegetables, peanuts, sweetcorn and beans. I can eat carrots though; they’re good! Popcorn, on the other hand, is not my friend. That put me in hospital for two weeks a couple of years ago. Sometimes I don’t know if certain things are going to make me ill. So I could plan to do lots of things the next day, but I actually can’t because I’ll end up ill in bed.
I’m in a relationship now, but it used to be awkward taking girls out. I’d usually take them for some food and I’d be eating and suddenly realise I needed the toilet. The worst time to go the toilet is when you’re on a date with someone you don’t know very well. Leaving her waiting for half an hour isn’t the greatest look.
My condition also means I’ve also got weak bones. I’m anaemic which makes my teeth and bones brittle and my body aches a lot. It makes my eyes water sometimes. My back kills all the time. I’m often very tired and I find it hard to sleep. I can’t lie on my stomach because I have an operations scar there and I find it hard to sleep on my back, so I have to really tire myself out before I can fall asleep. I wake up every morning in pain and I have to sit in a hot bath to try to loosen up my body. As a kid I found living with Crohn’s difficult. Not just because of the physical symptoms, but because it was another thing that made me an outsider. I was different. It made me small and I couldn’t run as fast as the other kids – easy prey for the bullies. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve learnt how to manage it better, and more importantly I don’t dwell on it. I’ll never let it stop me doing anything I want to do.
Medication used to help, but the ones that worked best also had the worst side effects. And the side effects weren’t worth it. I felt so drugged up when I was on them that I didn’t feel like me. For that reason, I don’t really drink alcohol and I’ve never done drugs. I don’t like not feeling myself.
Of course, I wasn’t the only kid on our estate with problems. I wasn’t the only one trying to control something uncontrollable. Life throws a lot of weird stuff at you – some good, some bad, but as I’ve grown older I’ve realised you just have to find a way to carry on and do what you want to do. No matter what it takes. And, after being diagnosed with Crohn’s, it wasn’t long until I found my own secret to getting through those dark times.
I WENT TO Wyke Middle School and Wyke Manor Upper School, which I suppose were your average comprehensive schools in the nineties. Culturally, there was a rich mix of Indian, white, Jewish, South-East Asian and black students. The school, like all comprehensives, was mixed ability, so you had all types of kids there. It wasn’t particularly huge – maybe 500 pup
ils – but it was pretty rough. Some kids would show up to lessons, some wouldn’t. There would be a lot of smoking, and some kids used to bring in booze, others something stronger. Bullying was rife. It was the sort of place where you had to look after yourself. You would never have gone to the teacher to tell them someone was picking on you.
Initially I learnt, as a defence mechanism, that if I was willing to laugh at my own expense, then other people would laugh too. It was degrading, but I was just trying to fit in, trying to make friends by being what I thought was ‘cool’. It was only years later that I realised people were humouring me and taking the mickey out of me most of the time. They weren’t laughing with me, they were laughing at me. Guys like Paul and Ben would pretend to be my friends, but then they’d demand my dinner money. No dinner money, into the dustbin I went. So, to try to get out of trouble, I talked too much and I talked a lot of rubbish. Little Steven thought he was very cool but, looking back now, I probably wasn’t as cool as I liked to think.
The teachers didn’t help much either; they didn’t seem to understand. ‘Shut up and sit down, Steven,’ they’d say. ‘Keep on like that and you’re straight for detention.’ Some teachers don’t know how to communicate with kids and then you totally lose their attention. In my opinion kids would take someone who they relate to, like a music artist much more seriously in the classroom than your average, out-of-touch teacher.
I wasn’t brain of Britain, but I was perhaps quicker to grasp what was being taught than the other kids. It looked like I was acting out, but really my mind wasn’t being challenged enough. I knew I could do the work quickly so I’d doss about, distracting the other kids and driving the teachers mad in the process.
I tried being the class joker, I tried being top of the class, I tried being friends with the bullies, but nothing I did helped me to fit in. I was an awkward little boy; trapped between the gaps of all these different worlds.
‘STEVE, ARE YOU coming to the dam with us?’ shouted Paul. I was sat outside my mum’s house, trying to mend my broken skateboard. ‘Yeah, yeah, wait for me,’ I said excitedly, chucking aside my skateboard and running after them.
Next to Delph Hill was another estate called Woodside, the two separated by a dam. Once a year, kids from the two estates would meet to have a fight. It was like something out of The Warriors or West Side Story – albeit the Bradford version. All the local estate kids would pile in and try to beat each other up. You know that scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary when Colin Firth and Hugh Grant have that pathetic slapping fight? Well, it was sort of like that. Usually, one side would get cold feet and run away and the other estate would be crowned the ‘winner’.
Ordinarily, though, the dam was where the older kids from Delph Hill went to smoke, muck about and try to get off with girls. Being asked to go down there with them was a big deal. Like anyone, I was desperate to fit in and be one of the cool kids. At that point, I was, or so I thought, friends with Paul and Ben.
We got to the dam and within two minutes of us being there, Paul and his brother had picked me up. I knew what was coming; it had happened before.
The dam water was cold, murky and filthy dirty. As I flailed around, panic rising as I struggled for air, two hands gripped my shoulders and pulled me out. Coughing and choking, Ben threw me down on the muddy bank. All I could hear were the other kids laughing like it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. I pretended not to care and tried to smile, relieved that they wouldn’t see the tears on my already wet face. ‘It’s only a joke, Steve, don’t be a baby,’ they’d say. It wasn’t very funny to me. I couldn’t swim. Every time they did it, I was convinced I would die.
The bullying started a lot earlier than I even realised at the time. It would be more psychological than physical; my ‘friends’ would say or do something to make me look stupid – they’d take the mick out of me and I’d laugh along. Because it was done under the guise of a joke – mates mucking about, everyone having a laugh – I couldn’t see what was happening. But Paul and Ben were never thrown in the water. No one ever took their lunch money off them.
Even when the bullying became more physical, I just thought it was normal. If it wasn’t me being chucked in the dam, then it was someone else. I wouldn’t stop and help the other kid being bullied; I’d just be relieved it wasn’t me on that occasion. I thought it was normal because it happened to loads of kids all the time. But Paul and Ben weren’t my friends. They hadn’t asked me to go down there to hang out. They got me down there to chuck me in, make fun of me, to use me as a scapegoat.
It’s only when writing this book, that I realised my desire to walk on water came from that time. I always thought the River Thames was an idea that had randomly popped into my head, but I know now that as a little kid, soaking wet, freezing cold and scared stupid, I would have given anything to walk on water. To be able to just glide across the surface and get away from them all. The seed was sown.
BECAUSE OF THE fear of being bullied, I started to avoid going out at all and spent more and more time alone in my room. The likes of Paul and Ben couldn’t get me there. Up in my room, I’d watch as many films as I could. I became enveloped in a fantasy world of action heroes and futuristic metropolises. I really wanted to be MacGyver, the private detective, from the American TV show of the same name. It was huge in the eighties. To me, MacGyver was the ultimate action star. No matter what situation he was in, he always found a way out. He created something from nothing. Just like a magician, in a way. He would take down a plane with just a hastily assembled slingshot, using a belt and an inflatable dinghy. That ideology stuck with me as I got older. Now, you can take me to a slum in Rio and I’ll pick up an old bit of wire and think of something to do. Take me to Miami and I’ll make a girl’s tan line move from her wrist to her shoulder. Show me snow and I’ll turn it into diamonds. MacGyver instilled in me a sense of improvisation; you don’t need expensive props to make brilliant magic. Back then, though, what MacGyver did for me was make me realise that you didn’t just have to accept things the way there are. You can makes things happen out of thin air.
MacGyver wasn’t my only screen hero. I was very naïve as a kid and, as ridiculous as it sounds, I believed that Superman was real. I thought Gotham City really existed. I’d have trouble sleeping, partly because of the Crohn’s, so I’d be up half the night watching Superman, Batman, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and The Goonies, over and over again. It was an escape into a mysterious world where normal people could have magical powers. I’d imagine what it would be like to be them; to be able to travel through time like Marty McFly and fly through the air faster than the speed of light like Superman. In my mind, these people were real, so what they could do was a reality too. Even now I believe I can make those things happen. Who knows one day maybe I will move the moon like Superman did. In all of my work, you’ll see the positive impression those films left on me – it was watching Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and Spider-Man’s skyscraper scaling that inspired me to perform levitations and walk down the Los Angeles Times Building. But there are no tricks with my magic!
As a kid, though, I had no idea what bearing these superheroes would have on my life. All I knew was that they could make me happy and transport me out of my own little world of worry, but now their value to me is incomparable. Those films taught me to never doubt your abilities. If you want to make something happen badly enough, then you’ll make it happen. I still watch films to inspire me now. It’s an art that knows no boundaries, just like magic.
I WAS NINE when magic really became an intrinsic part of my life. Like lots of little kids, I had a passing interest when I was very young. I was given one of those generic magic sets for Christmas and I’d mess about with the wands and cards, but it wasn’t something I paid much attention to.
But then one day Gramps gave me my first real glimpse of magic in real life. He’d fought in the Second World War and had learnt a few things then that he used to entertain his army mates with. And, after
the war, he was a pool hustler and could often be found in the local pub, taking people for their cash with one of his tricks. I’ll never forget when he first performed one of his classic moves on me. He took two different-sized shoelaces, then did some crazy move with his hands, and all of a sudden…the laces were exactly the same length. As he waved them in front of my face, my mind whirred. It was the most amazing thing I’d seen – real magic in my own front room.
‘Show me how to do that, Gramps,’ I begged, excitedly. He looked at me for a minute and then gave me a smile. ‘I’m not going to tell you how to do it, but I’ll show you something else.’ I didn’t need to be told twice when he sent me off to the kitchen for two boxes of matches.
What was Gramps going to show me next? When I returned, Gramps painted the tips of the matches and the boxes – one set green and the other set red. Then, he put the green matches in the red box and vice versa and asked me to hold them. ‘Shake them up,’ he said and I did, as hard as my little hands would allow me. The matches rattled away inside, while my heart pounded with anticipation.
‘Now open them,’ Gramps beamed, his eyes wide. Tentatively, I push the little boxes open and when I did I nearly dropped them. My breath caught as I looked down at them. Somehow the green matches were in the green box and red matches in the red box. I was absolutely stunned. Miraculously, the matches had invisibly travelled through the air, without me seeing, and had switched boxes. I was blown away. Just like all good magicians, Gramps never gave me an explanation. It was simply magic. Of course, I can make that happen myself now. But that day it was like I’d fallen under a spell. Over the next couple of years, my interest in magic grew, and then when I turned twelve it really took hold of me.