The Life of Lee

by Lee Evans

  But here’s the cruncher: you definitely need a mattress to break your landing or it doesn’t work. The hard ground doesn’t cushion your fall nearly as effectively. This is what I tried to explain to those two lads at school in Billericay, but Helmet Head immediately began boasting that he could do the Frisbee Flop too.

  I didn’t care – it wasn’t a challenge or anything. I even tried to stop him. I stepped forward and said, ‘’Ere, biss don’t want to try that’un, my cocker,’ in my Bristolian accent, but he pushed me back. His weasel friend stopped giggling for a moment and came right up close, touching his forehead against mine in a sort of slow-motion head butt. Then, while still staring at me all hard like, he pulled away and began giggling again.

  I tried talking Helmet Boy out of it, but it was too late. He adopted a very serious demeanour as he took a short run-up. With the concentration etched on his face, he shouted out a guide to what he was doing.

  ‘What … I … do … is … jump … then … curl … over … and …’ SNAP!

  You could hear the snap all the way across the county, because everybody on the playing field just stopped what they were doing and stared at us. I was standing next to Weasel, who’d stopped giggling and was looking ashen and stony-faced at Chubs writhing on the floor in front of us. After not pulling his flop off properly, he’d landed with his full weight on his arm, snapping it in two like a dry twig. ‘Biss, eer, your arm’s pointen in enover doirection, my cock.’ As if he didn’t know!

  It was weird because he wasn’t crying, well, not yet anyway. He just lay there, his face contorted, his mouth wide open, doing a kind of primal scream, like the telly with the volume turned down – presumably because he was in so much pain. I asked him, ‘Should I gow and get a teacherrrr or summut?’ But he didn’t answer, he just finally flipped, inhaled and started screaming. I panicked and ran.

  Weasel Boy and I watched as Helmet Head was taken away on a stretcher into an ambulance. I never saw him again, because soon afterwards I moved on to senior school. I wonder what happened to him. He probably became an Olympic high jumper.

  Still, I’d made an impression. And, after that, nobody at the school ever messed with me again. They thought that ‘Farmer Giles’ possessed strange West Country powers to inflict damage on Essex lads without even trying!

  But it didn’t help me fit in. I’m afraid I still felt like the Odd Boy Out.

  15. Raging Bull

  The very physical sport of boxing was always described by Dad – from the well-upholstered comfort of his armchair – as ‘a proper, working-class sport’. He believed that passionately – remember his initial desire to name me ‘Cassius Clay Evans’? To punch home his point, he could sometimes get quite angry and animated in his defence of the sport. He would rise up and dance around the lounge, mock-boxing as if in the final round of a world title fight, hands up by his chin, head bobbing around like a demented chicken on ‘wacky baccy’. He would throw the odd jab towards Wayne and me, who stood rooted to the spot in stunned fascination at his pugilistic demonstrations.

  ‘Careful, Dave, you’re going to knock something over,’ Mum would carp, not even lifting her eyes from another one of her production-line jumpers, smiling to herself as she stared down at her rat-a-tat-tatting needles. It wasn’t very often that we were all together as a family, and Mum always glowed when we were. She liked the noise and the banter that went on whenever Dad was home after months away.

  What there was to knock over, God only knows. Dad could have set about our home like a man possessed with a large sledge-hammer and only succeeded in doing about two quid’s worth of damage. We hardly had anything, so what he might bump into was anybody’s guess.

  ‘Boxing is a sport …’ Dad would begin, stopping for a lug of his fag before moving around the room and beginning to gear up to his usual Churchillian ‘I know what I’m talking about’ speech. All blokes do it, in the safety of their own home, in front of the wife and kids. There they are Einstein, the great intellect that demands to be listened to. And, it goes without saying, if only the world leaders would consult them, they might learn a thing or two. If we could have afforded a phone back then, the world leaders would have been constantly trying to get through, but they would’ve had to join the queue to speak to the top adviser. Of course, as soon as all these blokes get out of the house and into the real world, competing with everyone else, they find they actually have a brain the size of an amoeba and would dump in their Y-fronts if confronted by so much as a local MP.

  ‘A sport,’ Dad would rattle on, his lecture now in full flow, ‘that can, through sheer hard work, raise a man up from the absolute depths to the very pinnacle of our society. It is a sport that does not discriminate. It is attended by lords, dukes and even royalty, as well as the ordinary working man in the street.’

  Dad boxed during his service in the army, and he thought it would be a good idea to drill it into Wayne and me. So every Christmas or birthday, there would be the obligatory pair of boxing gloves, inflatable punchbag, or – the one I liked because it didn’t hurt so much – a boxer on a stick. Under the boxer’s robe were two levers you pushed to make the plastic boxer throw a punch.

  Me and Wayne wearing our obligatory boxing gloves that we got every Christmas.

  I hated boxing when I was a kid because it felt as if I always came off worst in the pecking order. As soon as the gloves were unwrapped at Christmas, I knew at some point that day I would have to reluctantly slip them on. The constant goading from Dad and Wayne would chip away at my pride and, not wanting to look weak in any way in front of Dad, I had to put up or shut up. It was a constant competition in our house, as Wayne and I tried to gain some form of approval from Dad.

  I don’t know if Dad encouraged it between us – in particular, the contest to see who was the toughest fighter. My efforts on the boxing front were always futile. Dad would look on as Wayne bashed the crap out of me. My brother had this incredible move that would catch me unawares every time. Mid-fight, as I staggered around the middle of our lounge, visibly exhausted, Wayne seized his chance. He would suddenly dart forward and with his leading foot step on my front foot, so I was trapped, pinned to the floor like a rat in a trap, unable to back off or go anywhere. Then he would bend forward and follow through with a massive head-numbing, over-arm punch that came out of the sky like a meteorite, thumping down on to the top of my head and leaving me seeing more stars than Patrick Moore on a clear night.

  It was that same devastating punch Wayne would later use to massive effect to win fights at amateur boxing club level. After moving to Billericay, we both joined Berry Boys, a local amateur boxing club. By then things were definitely a little different for me. I’d learned to be a bit tougher; I was no longer willing to take a sucker punch from my big brother. Instead, I’d mastered the artful technique of dodging. I was brilliant at it. I could bob, weave and dance around the ring in my over-sized shorts in a way Fred Astaire would have been proud of, my skinny white legs bopping across the canvas.

  Maybe I was now more determined because I was slightly older, or perhaps it was because I thrived under the rules and regulations of club boxing, under proper supervision, or maybe I just lapped up the camaraderie and fun of being with all the other boys at the club.

  The sparring still hurt, but I had learned to defend myself a little better. I began to enjoy it – and my love of boxing was to continue into later life.

  Celebrating with Heather after winning my first fight in the East End of London at one of the many boxing shows.

  I especially loved the discipline of the intense training sessions. I also relished the fact that all the fighters at the club had something to train for, namely, the boxing shows. These were organized by the Amateur Boxing Association and pitted fighters from different clubs across the county against each other. It was usually an evening event and always well attended, mostly by the families of the young boxers, who came to shout their s
upport.

  There was always a tense, edgy atmosphere to these occasions. This was made all the more important for the young boys fighting by the presence of some of the regular faces and characters well-known to the boxing fraternity, who had either been in the fight game for years themselves, or were retired trainers, all unable to keep away from the buzz of the ring. They were looked up to by all the young boxers.

  Every competition was different. Sometimes it was a relaxed, casual affair, a few bouts held, say, at a local working man’s club in the East End of London, where a ring was simply erected in the middle of the room. By the time the first bout punched off, the air in the club would be hot and heavy, laden with thick cigarette smoke that made breathing difficult. How the boxers managed the highly physical bouts with such short supplies of oxygen was beyond me.

  Berry Boys boxing programme – Fight No. 15 – they spelt my name wrong!

  The rowdy tables were full of mostly lively, rotund, sweating riff-raff, some getting so excited they would be leaping out of their seats. Somehow, in their heads, they themselves were in the ring, as they demonstrated by incessantly bobbing around, wiping and flicking their nose with the end of their thumb and air-boxing. All the while, they were shouting their genius instructions to the poor young lads who were actually doing it for real, battering hell out of each other in the floodlit ring.

  Then there were the shows I preferred, held at a posh hotel somewhere Up West, where the crowd all dressed up smartly in dinner suits and dicky bows. It was still the same riff-raff, but it somehow felt more professional and glamorous. Instead of the air being thick with cigarette smoke, this time it was cigar smoke.

  The reason I liked the posher dos was that the illegal gambling created a real buzz in the crowd. Before each fight, the men in dicky bows were placing bets on who might win. If you put on a good show and created some real excitement in the room, some of the tables would shout their approval and throw money into the ring for the young fighters. It presented an unexpected problem; frustratingly, you couldn’t pick the money up from the canvas wearing boxing gloves. Even though you might try, there was only limited time to do so, as you were hustled out of the ring by the officials to make way for the next bout. My trainer, Jack, would scoop up the money from the canvas, and was always strangely flush when it came to buying rounds afterwards.

  Because Dad was so often away working, he could only manage to come to a couple of fights. But he still saw boxing as – cue his lecture again – ‘a good, honourable art-form, with proper high-minded principles and sportsmanship.’

  Now, Mum had never been to a boxing match before, but one day asked a friend secretly to smuggle her in so she could stand at the back and see what all the fuss was about. This turned out to be a very big mistake …

  Naively, Mum hadn’t realized quite how violent a boxing match is, in particular amateur boxing, a completely different sport altogether to the professional boxing one might see on the TV. Amateur boxing consists of three three-minute rounds. As it’s such a short period, the time is limited in which to score points, and so the two opponents are encouraged to go nuts with each other. To the discerning observer, it looks like two Rottweilers set on each other in a back alley.

  Unfortunately, Mum only ever attended that one fight. She never saw Wayne or me ever fight again. Luckily, I wasn’t on the bill that particular night – just as well, as I think things would have been worse if I had been. Wayne did fight that evening, though, and that was all Mum could take.

  What took place that evening had never been seen at an amateur boxing match before and was never mentioned in our house again. The psychological and physical damage to some of those in attendance that night was immense – Wayne’s opponent, his training staff and, most of all, the referee. As soon as Mum witnessed Wayne being punched in the face, it made her blood boil. Before you could say ‘Raging Bull’, she had climbed from the back of the room up over tables, chairs and people’s heads, jumped straight through the ropes into the ring and leaped on to the referee’s back.

  It caught him completely by surprise. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting a fuming, middle-aged women suddenly to pounce on him and cling on like a limpet while hitting him across the back of the head with a handbag and demanding, ‘Stop that boy right this second from hitting my son in the face!’

  Mum then tried to deliver an uppercut to the jaw of Wayne’s opponent as she accused him of cheating. A tense, unnerving atmosphere hung in the air even after a team of bouncers extracted the fingers of her right hand from around the corner ropes and the fingers of her left hand from around the poor referee’s throat.

  Her attendance caused much distress for all concerned. As Mum was evicted from the premises, it was explained to Wayne and me in no uncertain terms by the powers that be that our mother would not be welcome at any other boxing event. Ever.

  But it showed one thing: Mum cared deeply about us – to the point of trying to land a right hook on anyone she thought was threatening us!

  That regrettable – but quite unforgettable – incident didn’t put me off sport, though. In fact, quite the contrary. So desperate was I to be ‘in’ and impress the girls at school, I was mad keen to try any form of sport. I enrolled with every single after-school sports club. I didn’t care – I signed up for basketball, football, rugby. Being Welsh, Dad always encouraged rugby, but I found out very quickly there was a slight drawback with that particular sport: it frigging hurts. Also, my teeth were telling me in unequivocal terms that they wanted to stay in my mouth. I remember thinking, ‘All my ancestors are Welsh and Irish and all their favourite sports seem to involve getting your head bashed in.’ So I passed on that one.

  Instead, I tried out volleyball, badminton – big jokes for me, then a thirteen-year-old wazzock, with the use of the word ‘shuttlecock’ – and javelin. That was a very difficult sport to master. Sprinting like a nomadic tribesman down the runway and holding the javelin aloft, I approached the line that signified I had to give it a good chuck.

  Whipping my arm back in readiness, I accidentally jammed the javelin into the ground behind me. As I tried to pull the trigger, so to speak, all I managed to do was throw myself backward in a heap on the ground. It would probably have been a very alluring sight for any girl who happened to be standing around gazing at the runway, but – surprise, surprise – there were none. The javelin was the same as any other item of sports equipment: as soon as I got hold of it, it became completely useless.

  Now beginning to despair, I travelled further down the official list of sports with which, based on rigorous scientific evidence, girls might be enamoured. So I had a go at the pole vault. I realized it was not exactly a glamour sport, but I was desperate. David Beckham might be able to curve a ball into the back of a net from roughly five miles away, but can Mr ‘Sexy Tattoo Stubbly Man’ catapult himself up into the air clutching the end of a giant pole and pointlessly throw himself over a bar? I didn’t think so. I can. Well, I can’t, but I tried.

  At the county sports day, I was the only one entering the pole vault that year – well, any year actually. But I was ready to take the inter-school athletics championship by storm and probably pull a few lassies in the process. Why? I had the advantage that no other kid in their right mind would go in for such a dumb-ass-monkey-on-a-stick sport. So being the only competitor, I was a dead cert for a win and the all-important gold medal that I thought I could wear round my neck and prance about with. If anyone should mention it, I would look down as if wondering what they were talking about, and then be completely surprised by the medal hanging there. I was convinced that glittering bauble would become my shiny lure for catching the birds.

  At first, everything went exactly to plan. The sports day was very busy. It was bustling with parents who had come to watch their kids in various sports. Disappointingly, my plan soon took a bit of a knock as I noticed the girls-to-boys ratio was a bit lower than I’d hoped. But my reckonin
g was that once I’d grabbed hold of that pole and belted down that runway like a boy, scientists might surmise, propelled by a huge hormone imbalance, my pole in the air at a forty-five-degree angle, no girl would be able to resist me.

  I got a lot of attention from the passing crowd, some girls among them. But I felt that they were showing interest only out of a morbid curiosity. They were just rubber-necking, eager to witness an appalling accident at the most dangerous stunt they would see for some time. I heard gasps during my purposeful, some might say crazed, run-up and my death-defying leap skyward. I picked up comments such as, ‘Who’s that nutter?’, ‘That’s the Evans boy – he’s berserk,’ and ‘What the f–?’ It probably made a thrilling change from some of the more ordinary sports on show, and I certainly didn’t disappoint the crowd.

  I must have got caught up in all the excitement myself – I was lost in what athletes call ‘The Zone’. However, as I raced towards the scarily high bar that I was supposed to soar over effortlessly, I began to think, ‘I don’t remember running this fast in training. Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever doing any training.’ It suddenly occurred to me that I had never done the pole vault before in my life. But by now it was too late …

  I didn’t have any time to see the reaction of the gathered crowd, but there was no doubting my ability to thrill and give the stunned assembly exactly what they wanted: a catastrophe.

  As I approached the towering bar in front of me, with perfect timing I slowly lowered my pole. At exactly the right moment, I managed with stunningly good aim to jam the end of it into the little cup at the end of the runway and braced myself for take-off.

  It must have been the way I was holding the pole because instead of launching me skywards as desired, the end of the pole caught me suddenly with a mind-numbing thud right in the bean bag. The impact gave me an instant udder full of cauliflower sperms and, instead of going up, I went down, down like a large bag of jelly. I writhed around on the ground for several minutes in complete agony. The assembled crowd were also in pain – from their sustained, rib-endangering laughter at my utter ineptitude.