Memoirs of a Karate Fighter

by Ralph Robb

  The change of location had a dramatic effect on our relationship. Hilda was now a more positive person, a fully qualified nurse, whose newfound optimism had led her to embark on a midwifery course. Both of us had matured in a way that helped us to understand each other’s viewpoints a little more. Nadine was now a rambunctious toddler who was attending a local pre-school nursery and in her interactions with other children she had blossomed. As a family, we had grown together.

  There were major changes in my work too. Arches closed in 1983 after it had degenerated into the last refuge for all the thugs in town who had been barred from every other establishment. But it was not to be the end of my working on nightclub doors. Fuelled by the desire for furniture for our new home and a newer car, I clambered aboard the capitalist treadmill like a well-trained hamster and began to work at several clubs. It was during those times that I realized how touchingly naive, and somewhat amateurish, we had been while working at Arches. The world of the professional doorman was a great deal murkier, and as I gradually found out, it was a place inhabited by drug-dealers, steroid-abusers and police informers.

  It was the one aspect of my life that troubled my conscience more than any other. In some cases working as a doorman was as nasty and as dangerous a job as they came. The nightclub foyer is often inhabited by emotionally stunted men, who while not very brave, are capable of extreme violence. During my time on the doors I had seen some unpleasant things – like a man having his face destroyed by a piece of timber until it looked like a mound of raw and bloody steak while four men took turns to jump on him as he lay unconscious, in what the newspapers described as a ‘turf war’ between two rival gangs of bouncers. Initially, I’d had few qualms, but as the violence continued I began to feel that most of it was to do with feeding egos and garnering reputations. My perception about violence and the feelings it once stirred within me had finally begun to change. Where there was once exhilaration was now a slight nauseous pang. Yet although some of it turned my stomach, it was not enough to make me discontinue my work as a doorman. Maybe it should have done. What kept me working in such places was chiefly the money, but it helped that I also felt one step removed from what was going on around me. I was not like these men, I told myself. But one evening, as I was getting ready to do another stint on a nightclub door, I looked down to see my daughter playing with one of her dolls. The sight was so captivating that I sat down. As I watched her play, I wrestled with my conscience and once Nadine was tucked up in bed, I did not bother going out to work. From that moment I had finished with working on nightclub doors.

  As for my work at the factory, I repaid the personnel manager’s faith in me and passed my Higher National Certificate examination with flying colours. Mr Pearson then had me moved from the maintenance department to the management offices. My promotion did nothing to disguise the racist structure of the management within the plant; as I was the only black person in the offices, my presence only served to highlight it. I wish I could say that I entered my new position feeling like a trailblazer, or that I was making some sort of statement about equality. In reality, I was an extremely tentative young man whose biggest priority with regard to work was how much it would pay into my mortgage. Upon his retirement, and before he left the factory for one last time, I assured Mr Pearson that I had no intention of quitting. I remained grateful to this quietly-spoken man who had profoundly altered the course of my life.

  A second departure from the factory prompted me to reappraise some aspects of human behaviour. Mick Davies told me he was leaving. “No offence,” he said, “it’s nothing personal, but I really can’t work under you.” I thought I understood how he felt. I was once his junior and now, nominally at least, I was his senior. To most of my former colleagues in the maintenance department, I was a treacherous ‘scab’ whose promotion had the ring of thirty pieces of biblical silver about it. I shook Mick’s hand and I was sincere when I wished him well. We had shared good times and although we had grown a little distant from one another, what we had experienced was only the normal ebb and flow that is the nature of human relationships.

  Similar ebbing and flowing had gone on within the YMCA karate club. There had been growing tensions within the dojo and matters came to a head after Jerome Atkinson won his world title at the end of 1984 in Maastricht. I had taken a special pleasure in his victory when I found out that the man he had beaten in the final was the same one I had lost to in the European under-21 championships. But I also recognized that years of gruelling training had taken their toll on Jerome’s body, particularly his knees, and it was only with the aid of two cortisone injections that he had been able to compete that day. When he returned to England, he told Eddie Cox that the world championship final had been his last bout and he was not going to put his health at further risk by competing again. The YMCA had been invited to compete in a tournament the following week but it was not until we were at the venue that our sensei told us that Jerome would not be fighting with us. The air, particularly that which came from my cousin Ewart, became thick with recrimination and acrimony. Eddie Cox’s unexpected news had left the team completely demoralized. For the first time in years, we were eliminated in the early rounds and Ewart never fought in a karate tournament again.

  From that day, the Wolverhampton YMCA karate club existed in name only. We went through the motions for another two years but we were never again to recapture our glory days. The spirit and camaraderie within the club had gradually vanished. People, times and karate itself had all changed and although some of the faces remained, many more had left and the end of the fad known as the ‘kung fu boom’ meant that fewer young men were inclined to enter and put themselves through the rigours of karate training. Those of us who had trained together as youths were now young men who wore black belts around our waists. Leslie, as usual, seemed to emerge from the chaos within the YMCA unscathed to win three British championships and a European title at lightweight. He was, to any neutral observer, favourite to win a world title in 1986 but an appearance in court led to British karate’s governing body imposing a ban which disqualified him from competing at international level. The man who went onto win the world title at Leslie’s weight was a competitor who he had beaten many times, and it only served to confirm my belief that the wild side of Leslie’s nature robbed him of more things than it helped him to achieve. And although I continued to do well in competitions, I did not do as well as Leslie; mostly because of a double dislocation of my shoulder which required an operation and a snapped Achilles’ tendon. The injuries were very painful signals that my body was neither willing nor able to continue to suffer the severe punishment I had put it through for over a decade. The club had been like a family to me and it was too much to expect that the relationships within the confines of the dojo could continue in the same vein. As my father had said to me as I had left the home in which I had been brought up: two bulls cannot reign within the same pen. Perhaps, then, it was unreasonable to expect that a dozen bulls could remain, never mind reign within the same enclosure.

  I continued to see Clinton from time to time, and more often than not, the meetings left me with a heavy heart. He cut a tragic figure, even during the periods when he was free from the worst symptoms of his psychosis. There had been episodes of paranoia, but thankfully Clinton was always intercepted in time by friends or relatives to prevent anyone getting hurt, and he had ended up being ‘sectioned’ under the Mental Health Act. With Hilda often by my side, I went to see him in the hospital. Every time I laid eyes on the bloated person who had been consumed by the chemicals that were supposed to alleviate, if not cure, his illness, I could not help but think back to the times when Clinton had the chiselled physique of a finely honed athlete and when there was an energy and sharpness about him. In the years since his illness was first diagnosed, his life had been punctuated with tragedy and incidents that took him back to the psychiatric ward on several occasions and I often wondered if there would be any end to his torment.
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  I remember, as it approached the end of May 1986, thinking that the following month would mark my twenty-fifth year. A quarter of a century: it seemed a long time to be alive back then. June would be a special month for me and it would also be one in which the members of the Wolverhampton YMCA karate club would come together for one last time.

  *

  The church was filled with the sombre faces of friends and relatives I was only conscious of for brief periods. The Wolverhampton YMCA karate club and Clinton’s friends were present and united in grief, but I sat well away from all of them. Like Clinton had once done, I had closed myself off from the outside world as I asked myself where had I been when Clinton had needed me most.

  The day before he died, Clinton had called at my house but I had been out, nowhere important. When Hilda had told me of his visit and that he had called around to wish me happy birthday, I said that I would see him during the following weekend. Another time I might have telephoned or tried to find him, but I had been left drained after every occasion I had seen him since his mother’s death during the previous year. Clinton had been hospitalized after her death, but with Hilda’s help, I had dredged up the will to visit him whenever he had been admitted. We walked the hospital grounds with him and Hilda would sometimes look across as we slowly shuffled along and smile as if to tell me that I was doing fine. It was nearly all too much for me: why had life treated him so cruelly that he had been reduced to this?

  With a voice full of well-rehearsed sincerity, the vicar brought my mind back to the funeral service when he asked the congregation to reflect on the ways Clinton had touched our lives. A great wail went up from the back of the church and rippled its way to the front before it reverberated within my chest. My heart felt as though it was swelling and the sensation brought my head toward my knees as I thought my chest was about to tear open and expose the raw pain I had experienced in losing someone I had loved.

  There was movement all around me as people got up to file past the open coffin to take one last look. I glimpsed a woman who had a camera in her hand and for a crazy moment I wanted to push her away and shout out that this was not a circus. What were the motives of those who photographed or gazed in at the corpse; a morbid curiosity about what a skilled mortician can do for a body broken by a fall from a thirteenth-storey window, perhaps? As I stood up my head began to spin and I brushed past the woman as I made my way out via a side door.

  I sat on one of the low walls in front of the church and while looking across to the tower block from which Clinton had fallen, I tried to imagine his last moments. A hand found my shoulder and I turned to see it was my mother. She asked if I was going to take a last look at Clinton and I told her that I did not want my last memory of him to be one of him lying in a coffin. My mom nodded as if she understood. “Come on then,” she said, “they’re finished in there now. We still have to put him to rest.”

  *

  More than a month had gone by since the funeral. Hilda had taken Nadine shopping with her and left me to get on with the plumbing job in the bathroom that I had intended to do for almost two years. I appreciated that she left me alone with my thoughts as often as she could.

  My mind continually wandered and made my progress with the plumbing so slow that I decided it was time for a tea-break. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I switched on the radio. An old song from the seventies was playing; Carl Douglas’ hit ‘Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting’. All at once there were images flickering through my mind: of nights out with Clinton, Errol and Leslie at the Colosseum watching kung fu movies; of the time we had been chased by that gang of men and how Clinton had run back to help me; and of that very first training session at the YMCA after he had persuaded me to go with him.

  “Clinton, you were as fast as lightening,” I laughed to myself, in time with the song. At least, I thought I was laughing. It was then I noticed the water on my arm. Confused, I looked up to the ceiling while thinking my plumbing had sprung a leak. I looked to my arm again and saw more water, this time dripping from my nose. Mr Kovac, my old Hungarian neighbour, had been right; not even karate could allow me to win all my battles: I could not fight back the tears anymore. I sat at the kitchen table and I wept for what seemed hours as I finally came to terms with never seeing my cousin Clinton again.

  About the Author

  Ralph Robb was born in Wolverhampton, England, of Jamaican parents. He was once an international karate competitor and European medallist and he retains a strong interest in the sport. Ralph now lives in Ontario, Canada with his wife and four children.

  Other books by the same author:

  Writing as Sylvester Young:

  What Goes Around

  Sleeping Dogs Lie

  More Than A Game

  Writing as J.S.Noon:

  Love Lies and Bleeding

  Copyright

  First published as an e-book in 2013

  by HopeRoad Publishing

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  All rights reserved

  © Ralph Robb 2006

  The right of Ralph Robb to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978-1-908446-15-2