Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read

by Paul Connolly

  At this point in my life, I was happier, more relaxed and calmer than ever before, and I had even begun to respect myself a little, and not just because of my ability to hurt people with my fists, but because I was now able to use my skills and knowledge to help clients make their lives better.

  But the old demons that had been haunting me all my life had not gone away completely; not at all. Now that I was making a good living doing what I loved, I no longer had to do very much door work, but I kept my hand in for when personal training work was slow and, even more, because I still enjoyed the opportunity to drop the people who deserved it and see them limp away, bruised and suitably chastened. A part of me needed to know that, when I felt the need to hurt someone, I would have both the opportunity and the means to give it to the sort of bloke who had it coming to him. Working on the doors gave me plenty of chances to vent the pent-up rage that I had never managed to purge, and I was reluctant to turn my back completely on those opportunities.

  Now that I was moving in wider circles and also feeling more confident about myself, I started to make more friends outside the world of door work and the gym, including my mate, Ian, who I met when he was putting the computer system into a gym where I was working as a manager. Ian, who had also grown up in Essex, lived just around the corner from my new house, and, although we were very different in many ways, we soon became good friends. Neither of us had a wife and family at the time so we started enjoying the bachelor life together.

  Having caught the travel bug through work, I now wanted to do more of it, and to do it on my own account. In 1996, Ian and I decided to go to Florida together for a break. Ian had a gold card with Virgin Airlines, so we had breakfast and a massage in the Upper Class Lounge. I was impressed by how all I had to do was look up the right way and a pretty girl came running with a delicious meal; this was a million miles from where I had grown up!

  ‘I could get used to this,’ I commented to Ian.

  After the meal, we boarded the plane and started to relax into the idea of a couple of well-earned weeks off in the sun.

  Just before we were due to take off, two South Londoners got on the plane. One was a huge, well-built man with long, blond hair and the other was a short, stocky guy with cropped hair. They both had idiotic expressions and seemed to be more than a few sandwiches short of a picnic. In short, they looked like trouble. They were. Ian knew me well, so he made sure that I sat on the inside seat, as far away from them as possible, using himself as a buffer.

  These two morons started to behave like the dickheads they were as soon as they got on board, to the consternation of all the families on the way to Disneyworld sitting in their vicinity, who now contemplated the horror of having to spend the next eight or so hours in their company. Anyone with eyes in their head could see that they were trouble. Already stinking drunk, the men opened up the overhead compartment, took out Ian’s computer bags and threw them into the aisle so that there would be room for their own stuff. Ian didn’t say anything. He got out of his seat and quietly rearranged his things. We all looked at the cabin staff with the expectation that they would arrange to have the troublemakers removed before the plane took off, but nothing happened. The senior staff were distracted because they had some trainee hostesses on the flight. Undisturbed, the two geezers got into their seats and remained relatively well behaved during take-off but as soon as the plane was in the air they set about getting even drunker than they already were, which is saying quite a lot. And the drunker they got, the more obnoxious they became. Sitting in the middle of the plane, across from them, I started to fidget. I had to sit on my hands to stop myself from taking action. I was in a closed environment and couldn’t stand being around these idiots without doing anything about them. If anyone was asking for a hiding, they were. I had come across their sort – vain, bulked-up bullies with a lot more attitude than brain cells – a thousand times before, but I had usually been in a situation to do something about it. Now I hated not being able to give them what they had coming to them.

  Ian looked at me. He knew how tense I was getting and what a temper I had.

  ‘Paul, mate,’ he said quietly. ‘Please don’t do anything you would regret. We’re off on our holidays. We’re supposed to be having a good time. Don’t let those idiots destroy it. They are not worth it. Just ignore them. Just relax!’

  ‘But those pricks threw your bags into the aisle! They took out your stuff and threw it about so that they could stow their own things away!’’

  ‘Yeah, and I’m not doing anything about it, am I? So why should you?’

  ‘Yeah, well…’

  ‘Paul. Please.’

  I now literally had to sit on my hands to stop myself from throttling them. But I kept getting angrier and angrier as these two lowlifes kept calling the hostesses to bring them more and more free wine. Presumably because they were inexperienced or just intimidated by them, the hostesses continued to oblige and the booze kept on flowing. Their voices got louder and they started passing remarks about and intimidating the families sitting around them.

  Then they noticed me.

  I was working out a lot at the time and weighed about thirteen or fourteen stone of pure muscle, which is a lot for a man of my build. I was still doing door work in those days and I needed to be big in order to move people out of clubs and on to the street when they caused trouble. They seemed to feel threatened by my appearance, or at least to feel some sort of a primitive need to establish themselves as the alpha males in this scenario.

  One of the drunken idiots caught my eye. I glared at him, and then looked away. I knew that Ian was right. We were in a metal tube at 35,000 feet and they were not worth getting angry about. I tried to ignore them. But the blond nudged his friend with a sneer all over his stupid mug.

  ‘Look at the dick with the T-shirt and the muscles,’ he said in a voice made deliberately loud enough for me to hear. ‘He thinks he’s so fucking great, don’t he? Let’s cut him. See if he thinks he’s so great then, eh?’

  His companion snorted in hilarity.

  One of the children sitting in the area started to cry. She had not signed up for this when she had persuaded Mum and Dad to take her to Disneyland.

  ‘Don’t. Do. Anything,’ Ian instructed me through gritted teeth. ‘Just ignore them. It’s not worth getting in any trouble over people like that.’

  We called a hostess and asked to be moved, but we were told that there were no seats for us to move to and that we would just have to stay put.

  The bozos continued calling for more wine, which the hostesses duly provided, and proceeded to go about getting drunker and drunker. About four hours into the flight, they decided that it would be clever to start throwing ice cubes at my head. Now they were fucking asking for it. I had been doing my best, but I had my limits and they had already been exceeded several times over.

  I turned to the two idiots and said in the most controlled voice I could muster, ‘Do I look like some kind of cunt?’

  ‘You fucking do,’ the long-haired one said. ‘Because that’s what you are and if you want to do something about it you can come over here and I’ll cut your fucking throat for you.’ He laughed and wiped the wine that was dribbling down his chin with the back of his hand.

  Well, that was it. I wasn’t going to take any more. I had done my best to stay calm, as Ian advised, but by now they had pushed all my buttons. I jumped right over Ian and headed towards them, and the long-haired guy tried to get up so as to be able to tackle me. In his drunkenness, he swayed slightly. A few of the women sitting in the area started to scream in genuine fear that something awful was going to go wrong.

  Before he could get to his feet, I hit him as hard as I could, packing my fourteen stone of muscle into the punch. His head whipped around, and the back of his ear ripped open against the velour of the aeroplane seat. Blood flowed everywhere and he screamed like a little girl in a combination of fear, rage and disbelief that I had dared to take him up on his t
hreats. Then his short-haired pal tried to get up, but he didn’t stand a chance. I was angry now and, when I get angry, I can really channel it. I get into the zone and nothing seems to matter except making sure that justice is done. Before the second man could as much as get out into the aisle, I hit him five times – bang, bang, bang, bang, bang – and knocked him back into his chair. He started screaming as high and loud as his friend. I had to laugh. One minute they had been, by their own reckoning, big-time South London gangsters, ready to cut my throat on a Virgin flight to Florida, and the next they were a couple of screaming little babies looking for their mum.

  The stewards hurried to the scene and combined forces to push me down the aisle. Impressive. They threatened to handcuff me with plastic ties and decided that the flight was going to be diverted to Canada, where I would be arrested for assault. ‘You’re in serious trouble here, mate. You’ll be looking at jail time.’

  I was still furious. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Arrest me. I don’t care. You’re the ones with the problem here. You’ll still be left with that pair of idiots, tormenting all the other passengers on this plane.’

  But Ian kept his cool. ‘This is an outrage!’ he said to the cabin crew. ‘This is disgusting. Your young crew allowed those idiots to get drunk, and they attacked us. You’ve obviously looked at your records, and seen that I’m a regular flyer. I understand you’re training staff on this route, but they are inexperienced and are letting customers get drunk. We asked to be moved, and you didn’t move us. And now you are blaming my friend for standing up for us.’

  The families sitting in the area came on board too, telling the stewards that they had got the wrong guy, because the South London geezers had been the aggressors in the situation, not me. They all insisted that, if I was arrested, they would write to the airline and complain because, as they saw it, I had been standing up for the families with children who were being bullied by the two unruly idiots while the airline staff just kept fuelling their behaviour with more and more free booze.

  ‘OK, fine,’ the cabin crew eventually said. ‘You can sit at the back of the plane and behave yourself.’

  Ian tried to get us moved to the front, but that didn’t work, so I did what I was told. The plane did not divert to Canada and we reached our destination more or less on schedule. At the back of the plane, away from the two morons I had taken out, I was able to relax a little and I started to calm down somewhat. From my vantage point, I could still see the pair of them. Having completely lost their drunken bravado, they were now crestfallen, staring at the floor while a doctor who happened to be on board sewed the first aggressor’s ear back together. When we arrived in Florida, I was firmly instructed not to leave the plane until they had got off first.

  Later, the two losers walked past us in the arrival lounge while we were speaking with the crew. They shuffled past me on their way out, reluctant even to make eye contact and clearly afraid that I was going to jump up and give them a second helping. The police were waiting just outside the airport and they were immediately arrested and deported back to Britain, because their plan was to drive away in their rental car, and they were clearly way too drunk to do anything of the sort.

  Ian and I went on to have our holiday, and on the way home we were upgraded to Upper Class by Virgin Airlines, because the airline staff knew that they had screwed up. Flying Upper Class was fantastic, and I felt that it would be a nice thing to get used to.

  ‘I should hit more people,’ I commented to Ian cheerfully. ‘Maybe I’ll get a free car the next time. Or a free condo for a couple of weeks. It could turn into a nice little earner.’ I laughed at my own joke.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Ian replied. ‘Don’t even make jokes about it. It could easily have gone horribly wrong. You won’t always be as lucky as this. Take my advice and keep your cool, because the next time you might really get into trouble and it could end up being a lot more difficult.’

  ‘Go on, mate,’ I said. ‘I was just joking. There isn’t going to be a next time.’

  But Ian had no idea how prophetic his words would turn out to be.

  10

  GRIEVOUS BODILY HARM

  You can run away from your past, as I did the moment I left St Leonard’s at the age of seventeen. But the past has a habit of jumping back out at you and tripping you up with memories when you least expect it, and when you are least able to deal with the consequences. Soon I was brought back to reality and to the memories that I had been trying so hard for so long to repress, with a resounding thud.

  Not long after Ian and I returned from our holiday in Florida, I was briefly involved with a girl who turned out to be living in a fancy apartment in Hornchurch – in a complex that used to be St Leonard’s, which had finally closed its doors as a children’s home in 1985. The fashion was now for unwanted kids to be raised in much smaller living units, and places like St Leonard’s were out of style.

  When the children’s home had finally ceased to function as such, the site had become an upmarket housing estate, and each of the cottages that had once housed up to thirty children at a time was subdivided into three luxury apartments. Because the home was set in attractive grounds and featured pretty Victorian architecture, it had become a rather desirable place to live and one of the more sought-after developments in the area. This woman brought me back to her place one night after we had been out on a date and, astonishingly, I found out that her bedroom was the exact same room that had once been my dormitory all those years before. Her bed was even in the precise spot where mine had once stood, although, of course, the room was completely unrecognisable as the rather grotty dormitory that I had known. From her living-room window, I could see over to the cottage where my best mate Liam had lived. I stood there for a moment and mimed a wave at the skinny child of my memories. I had not been in touch with Liam since I had left St Leonard’s, but I thought about how he would have laughed at this scenario; me invited back to a girl’s house only to find it was the home I had fled from all those years before.

  The cottages were all snuggled into the same beautiful grounds that had witnessed so many miserable childhoods, and the avenues that wound around them bore names that recalled the former rulers of the fiefdom – ‘Prescott Way’, and so forth. I couldn’t help but laugh. Imagine all these well-heeled residents living in an estate where a road might be named after a paedophile! If they only knew. What I did notice was that the cottage still felt just the same as it had when I was a kid, despite the expensive renovations. The old ghosts were still there.

  It might sound as though destiny had meant for us to be together, but that wasn’t the case, because this girl was a bit weird and I realised it almost as soon as I had met her. Perhaps the malevolent echoes of all those unhappy kids, all now long departed the home, with many having also departed this world, had gone to her head. She kept telling me that the fact that her apartment was the cottage where I had grown up showed we were meant to be united until death did us part. After just a few days, I realised that she was disturbed and that I would be much better off without her. When I tried to disentangle myself from what was promising to be a much less than satisfactory relationship, she took to parking her car outside my place and sitting there for hours in the dark, waiting and watching for me to come out. At one point, my mate Ian and I were hiding on the floor, running from one end of the house to the other to avoid her gaze as she looked from window to window. We were laughing, but it really wasn’t funny any more and I just wanted it to end. When she eventually left, I found a large pile of presents on the doorstep. Our relationship, such as it was, had lasted for one week, and she stalked me for three more until I began to feel genuinely nervous. Whenever I was getting any grief from a man, I knew what to do. But I couldn’t hit a girl, so I just didn’t know what approach to take. Eventually, I had to threaten her, telling her that I would report her to the police and make sure she lost her job, so that she would back off.

  Looking back, it seems almost as th
ough this silly little episode was a reminder to me of where I had come from, lest I should grow too comfortable and confident with my newfound success and growing social confidence. Because, just around the corner, my past and the violent nature that had developed in me as a result of it were always waiting to trip me up and send me right back to where I had come from.

  When I hit my early thirties, I came perilously close to losing everything I had worked so hard for, and to making an abrupt U-turn on the road I was travelling, heading all the way back to the wrong side of the tracks and the horrible destiny that Auntie Coral had so often predicted for me: ‘You’re rubbish. You’ll never amount to anything. Look at you, you fucking retard. You Irish lowlife scum. You’re just a bloody Connolly, aren’t you? Prison fodder from the day you were born, you little shit. Who ever loved you? Nobody, that’s who… and nobody ever fucking will.’

  My primary occupation at this time was working as a personal trainer. Although personal trainers are ten a penny nowadays, back in the late eighties/early nineties, they were a new phenomenon in the UK, and, as I said, I was, in fact, one of the first personal trainers in the UK. Although the media frenzy had died down somewhat and I was no longer appearing on television on a regular basis, things were continuing to go well for me professionally, and I was satisfied that my career was progressing quite nicely and that the service I offered was one that my clients both enjoyed and benefitted from. Also at the time, to make a little extra money, I was running the security for a little wine bar not very far from where I lived. The bar was very popular with a lot of serious people with equally serious commitments and responsibilities in a range of areas. In that closely knit community, everybody knew everybody, and security in the small two-storey wine bar was very tight, for obvious reasons. I only let in the customers who were the right people for that club and was strict in turning away anyone who was likely to cause trouble or attract the wrong sort of attention, or who didn’t really know what sort of place they were trying to get into. Most of the time, people did as they were told and business was quite uneventful and a nice little earner to have on the side.