Pat Van Den Hauwe

by Pat Van Den Hauwe

  We slept together for the first time in the spare room of her house one afternoon when Patsy and Nicola went out shopping. It was more of a ‘let’s get this out of the way’ kind of a situation for Mandy, so it was no great shakes. I did not know how bad her state of mind was at this time; she was scared and I was the mug who had fallen for her and was left to try and sort her nut out. I was the wrong man for the job.

  As horny as Mandy looked, it was just not on. It was like going into a top restaurant and looking at the fantastic dishes on the menu, then being told the fucking kitchen was closed. I wanted her every time I looked at her, but it was not going to happen. I began to think that the girl was quite simply afraid of sex due to her introduction to it at such a young age.

  My new life was a totally different ball game and I did not, like some, revel in the media attention we were getting. I was trying to concentrate on my football, trying to sort out what was fast becoming a bitter divorce, and also try and work out what was going on inside the mind of my new partner. To make matters worse, the press began to camp outside our home day and night and follow us every time we managed to leave it. Everywhere we went, we were besieged by the press. If we nipped out for a coffee, we were hounded; if I went for a newspaper or out to buy some cigarettes, I was followed; I absolutely hated the attention, but loved Mandy, so put up with it.

  Mandy was used to the attention and she handled it brilliantly when we were out but, once back home, she used to go back into a shell and I began to realise that she had serious issues. I used to speak to her mother at length about my concerns, but all she said was I should do my utmost to keep her daughter’s spirits up. She was genuinely concerned about her poor health and state of mind.

  Mandy used to love making me look beautiful and would spend hours applying make-up to me and plucking my eyebrows; it was something that kept her entertained. I went along with it to keep her happy, although I always ensured that I had removed all traces of mascara and lipstick before I set off for training.

  I became friends through the Smiths with a well-known hairdresser called Lino Carbosiero, and was introduced to a completely new set of so-called ‘jet-setter’ friends. Like Lino, some were good, although some were not so good and some were pure mugs. Peter Stringfellow was one in the latter category as, from the first minute I was introduced to him, I thought he was a complete knobhead. He was the biggest attention-seeker I have ever had the displeasure of meeting, and would drop people like lead weights as soon as he had used them for his own means, as I found out myself after Mandy and I had split up.

  His moment came when I went to his club with some of the Millwall lads and thought I would try a bit of queue jumping, given the fact I had always been treated as a VIP by Stringfellow. I walked past the waiting masses and informed the well-dressed doorman who I was. He pressed the buzzer and Stringfellow answered and, when the doorman told him who required special access, he said, ‘Tell him to fuck off!’ I had obviously passed my sell-by-date as I was no longer with Mandy or playing in the Premiership.

  I went to celebrity hairdressing sessions with people like Vinny Jones and even on make-up and modelling jobs just to please Mandy. I began to get on with the press a bit better and stated to get invited on TV shows, although I never received a button for it as all monies went into the Smith account. One show I remember was with Chris Evans and in the sketch we did we had to lie in bed and have a chat about a load of old bollocks. Unbeknown to the watching millions, I was pinching his knackers under the covers trying to fuck the whole thing up, but Evans was a top professional and got through it without batting an eyelid.

  After a year, we became engaged to be married and that was the usual pantomime scenario. Susan had, by this time, begun divorce proceedings against me and things were getting a bit messy. She had a top lawyer, while I had my trusty pal Nick and some Spurs lawyers batting for me. I thought deep down I was on a hiding to nothing, as the break-up was not in any way whatsoever Susan’s fault. I then had a tip-off that she had met a new bloke who was living in – on paper, at least – what was still my house.

  Susan denied this, so I hired a private detective and got photo proof that this bloke was co-habiting with her. Eventually, we came to an agreement after months of haggling that we would sell the property via an auction, as I simply refused to pay for a house that she was living in with another bloke.

  One day we were shopping in Harrods and Mandy noticed this stunning 3.75 princess-cut diamond ring which retailed at £55,000. She tried it on and it was the one she wanted, so we got a family friend to go to Belgium and buy the same stone and I had a jeweller make her the ring. It cost me £35,000 – a lot of money – but still £20,000 less than the now chairman of Fulham was trying to take me for. Although I had blown probably six months’ wages on it, the ring did the trick and, months after we had first slept together, I got to have a second go!

  The following morning, I opened the curtains and the vultures from the press were once again snapping away at me, so I opened the window and wished them a good morning as I was in a fine mood, having lessened my load, so to speak. One shouted up that he had been informed that I had bought a ring, and asked me what the occasion was, so I replied, ‘No comment!’

  Later that day, we were refuelling the car in a local petrol station having collected the ring and, as I looked at her in the car, Mandy mouthed, ‘I love you.’ It was the first time she had told me that and I was thrilled, although thinking about it now, was it me or the £35,000 ring she loved?

  Back at the house, the vultures were peppering me with questions about this ring so I said it was a friendship ring. Quick as you like, one shouted back, ‘£35,000 for a friendship ring … are you feeling all right, Pat?’ I turned to Mandy and asked her what she wanted me to say, so we agreed to come clean with them and I told them we were planning to get married. Within an hour, we were imprisoned in her home and it was impossible for me even to leave to go to training. The papers the following day were full of the story and I was upset that Susan had become involved, and was quoted as saying something along the lines of how it was amazing I had £35,000 to spend on a ring, yet was unable to pay for my own daughter to be clothed and fed.

  We planned the wedding for the following year – well, Mandy and her mother did. I just went along with everything they said. There was no point in trying to have any say in the matter, it was the Smiths’ day, not mine. Prior to the big day, Mandy treated me to a night at the Savoy. It was superb, the nicest evening we ever had together, until she told me that we were in the exact room that Wyman had taken her to. Talk about spoiling the moment!

  I was not allowed a stag night as such; we had a joint hen and stag party in a pub near White Hart Lane. It was arranged by Patsy and Harold and about 150 guests attended. Towards the end of the night, Nicola was pissed and she lifted her dress up to me and gave me a flash of her knickers. As she did, I saw that her mother had clocked her and the stare she gave us frightens me to this day. If looks could have killed, we would have both dropped dead on the spot. I managed to blend in with the crowd, but knew that Patsy had marked my card big time.

  Hello! had signed us up for a three-part deal, via Patsy, which covered the engagement, the wedding and the honeymoon. It was a sham, really, and I found it depressingly fake, but the money was crazy, even though as per usual none of it was destined for my coffers.

  The day itself was stunning and, on 19 June 1993, we married at Westminster Register Office. Mandy looked like Cinderella and, as we left the initial ceremony, there were over 100 photographers snapping away, which I found scary. I knew I had jumped into another world, one eventually I found I could not cope with. We were given a police escort to the reception and there were all sorts of security measures in place to stop anyone taking photos as Hello! had exclusive rights to everything we did that day.

  At the reception, I was thrilled to see my parents had turned up and brought Gemma with them, but soon I was despairing as Nicola ask
ed me whether I’d be mentioning her mother in my speech. What speech? Nicola was horrified and set about writing one to get me out of the shit, for if I failed to give Patsy credit for making the day so special, it would turn out to be the shortest wedding on record.

  I managed to get through it and everything went well. We had a dance and ate and drank well; it was a very pleasant afternoon indeed. Eventually, I asked Mrs Van Den Hauwe-Smith, as she had asked to be called, to join me in the bedroom for the customary night of wedding bliss, although I hadn’t banked on us being joined for the duration of the night by none other than her mother.

  It was at that precise moment when I truly realised that when I had uttered the words ‘I do’ a few hours earlier, that I had taken on the entire family, not just Mandy. By sleeping with us that night, Patsy let us know that she was not letting go, and it was a subdued night, to say the least. Had her mother been so protective during the early stages of her daughter’s relationship with Wyman, maybe her state of mind would not have been so fragile.

  The honeymoon was the same; we were put up in a stunning hotel but along came Patsy with her two little Yorkshire rat dogs Mini and Moochie. We never had a minute alone, and what disturbed me more than anything was that Mandy never once questioned her mother’s reason for being with us and seemed to believe what was happening was quite normal.

  Once we settled into married life, we looked high and low for a place to live, but Patsy always came and put Mandy off and it was only a matter of time before I began getting pissed off with the situation and hit the ale. Her uncle carried on as my drinking partner and was a mediator when we had relationship issues. He was a great bloke and would always try and patch up our frequent fall-outs.

  On one occasion, he tipped me off that the girls and their mother were going out and I gained access to the house and proceeded to cover it from top to bottom with Mandy’s favourite flowers, St Joseph lilies. There was not a square foot in that house which was not covered with the things and, as usual, I got the call that I could go home to kiss and make up. The following day, the story was in the paper and, as always, someone not too far from us had received yet another fat cheque.

  With Mandy not being able to eat like most people, we rarely went out for a meal or even for a drink, so spent most of the time cooped up in the house with her mother and sister. When we did venture out, it was a media-orientated circus that had invariably been pre-arranged by her mother and the press. It drove me fucking nuts. On the odd occasion we made it into town, there was never a dull moment and always for the wrong reasons. One such night we were in Terry Venables’ club Scribes and were enjoying a night with Vinny Jones, John Fashanu, Teddy and plenty of other players and so-called VIPs. We were also joined by plenty of hangers-on, whom we used to call ‘The Gatherers’. In London, and especially in these places, there were gatherers by the lorryload.

  I was introduced to bloke called Christopher Quentin, although I was later told that his name was really Christopher Bell, but as far as I was concerned he was Christopher Who? No fucker knew who he was until the name Brian Tyldesley was mentioned. I was told that he was once an actor in Coronation Street married to a lady called Gail. Now if that was the best he could come up with, I was not impressed, so he began harping on about how he was now a party organiser in London. I was still not impressed and found him to be a bit arrogant and in your face, and he also had what can only be described as a couple of slappers with him who were sitting opposite Mandy and Nicola.

  As the night went on, I left them and went to the toilet to come back and find Mandy crying her eyes out. I asked her what was up and she wouldn’t tell me, so eventually Nicola informed me that the two slappers with Brian Quentin or Chris Tyldesley whatever he was calling himself had kicked off on Mandy for no reason whatsoever.

  I went over and very politely said, ‘Excuse me, but why have you upset my wife?’ They looked at me like I had two heads and said that they had done fuck all, so I lost my rag and started giving them a mouthful as I knew they were responsible for ruining our night. Teddy jumped in to calm me down and was pulling me away, but I shouted to Mr big-time party organiser, ‘What the fuck have you brought these slappers here for?’

  Quentin jumped up and said something like ‘Who do you think you are talking to?’ so I told him I had no idea as he was a fucking hanger-on nobody. We went eyeball to eyeball before Teddy pulled me away, only after I had told Quentin that he was out of order littering the place with slappers, and eventually we left and went to the VIP lounge which was a place he was surprisingly not allowed in.

  I went and found Terry and apologised, as he would have found out sooner or later that there had been a bit of bother, but he told me not to worry and that Quentin and the company he kept were often involved in that kind of thing.

  Nearly everywhere we went, we had murder. We were in another club one night and both Nicola and Mandy had tiny dresses on which barely covered their arses, when some dickhead pulled up Nicola’s as she walked past. It was well out of order, but it’s something that happens all the time in nightspots when young lads have had too much to drink. I did not see what had happened until I saw Mandy fly into this large group of blokes shouting and swearing at them. I walked over and tried to calm things down, but Nicola joined in and, before I knew it, we were in danger of getting done in as the situation had turned really nasty. I managed to get hold of them and get them out of there before one of the dickheads did something stupid with the bottles they had all picked up. Even a trip to the shops would go pear-shaped, for if a member of the Smith trio were not treated like the queen, they would kick off and cause murder.

  By now, Nicola was doing a bit of modelling herself; she was a very nice girl and one day I think I came close to cracking it with her. Amazingly, Mandy and her mother went out and left us alone in the house and I came out of the bathroom wearing just a robe to find Nicola standing against the banister wearing just a skimpy t-shirt and a pair of jeans with the buttons open, flashing the top of her knickers. I was paranoid that it was a set-up, but could not stop looking at her and she then asked me to do her a favour – wax her legs! She peeled her jeans off and lay on the bed and I’m there as horny as an old goat trying to concentrate on the job in hand but knowing that given the slightest encouragement I’d be on another job in seconds. I pulled the wax strip too slowly and she screamed and I think it brought us back to our senses as she quickly got dressed and we never dared mention that incident to anyone again.

  I began to think our relationship was jinxed as there would be an incident of note every week without fail. One night, we were in bed and we were woken by a commotion of some sort outside the family home. I went out in my bathrobe to discover that a pissed-up driver had ploughed into a skip we had hired to fill with rubbish. I was supposed to have put cones and a light on it but had not bothered, and when I saw the state of the car my arse fell out. There was blood everywhere and I was soon joined by Mandy and the in-laws in their dressing gowns and slippers and they nearly passed out when they saw the carnage. Some locals managed to help the driver out and he legged it, leaving the passengers in the wreckage covered in blood. He did me a favour as the police never mentioned the lack of cones or lights, as they knew he had crashed because he was about five times over the limit.

  To keep Mandy happy, I wasted thousands of pounds on expensive items of jewellery for her, including a solid gold cross that was encrusted with diamonds that cost me £12,000. I also paid £5,000 for some bangles and bought her loads of other bits and pieces. One night, we returned from a rare outing and Patsy said she’d heard a noise upstairs a few minutes earlier. I went upstairs to find this huge black bloke hiding behind the curtains in our room holding a crowbar. I screamed downstairs for them to get out of the house and I flew down there to join them in the street. Within a minute, it seemed that every police officer in London had descended on the scene and the press were there at the same time.

  I smelt a rat as a few weeks e
arlier I had been asked if I could help them out with a huge tax bill, which I was unable to do. Every piece of jewellery that was insured was taken that night, on the one night of the month that I was out of the house – strange indeed!

  I agreed to stop drinking for Mandy and was even covered in nicotine patches as she tried to get me to stop smoking as well, but it was all a waste of time as, sooner rather than later, I knew she would tire of me and I was right. I was coming home after games and we just sat there watching TV without speaking a word to each other and, in the end, it just got boring so I’d go missing and hit the bars. I was chased by the police one night who suspected me of drink-driving and I parked up and ran into the house where Patsy hid me under stairs. I got away with it, but it was the only favour she ever did for me.

  I learned a valuable lesson one day about how the Smiths worked when I defended Mandy in the middle of a heated argument she was having with her mother. In seconds, Mandy turned on me, telling me never to interfere in family matters as it was none of my business. They then joined forces and attacked me like a pair of wild cats. That made me realise that the writing was on the wall; things were not working out as they should have done. We both knew we had made a huge mistake getting married and not setting up home by ourselves.

  I had been with Mandy for about three years and we had slept together just four times. At this time, my career was affected by our relationship and I was no longer a regular at Millwall, never mind Spurs. I came home one day from training and went into the conservatory to see Mandy sitting next to her mother crying her eyes out. Patsy stood up and said, ‘I think it is time you two had a break from each other!’

  I argued the toss with her but she was adamant that I should leave for three months and then see how things panned out. It was a ridiculous situation; the best chance we had of working things out would have been for Patsy to have packed her bags and to have pissed off. I knew there was no chance of that happening so, reluctantly, I packed mine. I told Mandy straight that if I was to go I would not be coming back, and she just looked at her mother and continued crying. Her mother was ruling her life; I could see it but, sadly, Mandy couldn’t.