Hateland

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  In April 1968 - one month after my eighth birthday - Powell (then Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South-West and a member of the Shadow Cabinet) said Britain had to act to halt immigration (especially black and Asian immigration from Commonwealth countries). He feared that, unless the government took urgent counter-measures, by the year 2000, 'whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population'. He said this was 'like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre'. He proposed that the next Conservative government should refuse to let in more immigrants - and send back as many as possible of those already here. The absence of such measures could provoke serious civil strife. He said, 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood".'

  The speech went down well at my Wolverhampton primary school, which didn't contain many 'Commonwealth' pupils. I remember the older children chanting in the playground, 'Enoch, Enoch, Enoch Powell, Enoch Powell, Enoch Powell.' I doubt whether the chanters could have explained much about the speech's content, but they'd certainly picked up something from their parents.

  Four national opinion polls recorded an average of 75 per cent support for Powell's views. If the parents outside my school's gates were anything to judge by, I suspect support for him may have been even higher among the whites of Wolverhampton, many of whom embraced the MP as a folk hero.

  I'd often hear parents talking about 'jungle bunnies', 'dirty Indians', 'nigger bus drivers' and 'the fucking Irish'. The older children at my school started calling everyone who displeased them 'Paki', 'wog' or 'coon', regardless of their colour. These were the 'in' insults. I don't really know what I made of it all. I was myself the son of Irish immigrants, and I had a vague sense of not being English, but I absorbed a lot of the anti-black prejudice of my peers. Perhaps I hoped that, if I joined them in hating blacks, they'd overlook my 'fucking Irish' background. I don't know. I only know that this prejudice couldn't have come from anywhere else, because my parents never said a word against black people. When my mother and father first came to England in the '50s, I think they encountered similar hostility ('dirty Irish' and the like).

  To be honest, the questions of immigration and national identity weren't uppermost in my mind at that age. I was more preoccupied with the hostile environment in my own home. My mother came from Sligo in the Irish Republic, one of thirteen children raised in a four-bedroom council house. I was her third child. There were two boys before me, Jerry and Paul. A fourth, Michael, came later. I was christened Patrick Bernard, taking the first name from my father and the second from a favourite uncle. As soon as I could exercise any choice in the matter, I stopped using my father's name.

  My father came from County Waterford in the Irish Republic, but never told me anything about his background. In fact, he never told me anything about anything. Normal conversation didn't take place in our home. Over the years, I've pieced together fragments of his story. They've helped me understand better why he became such a vicious bastard. Born illegitimate in the 'county home' (otherwise known as 'the workhouse') and abandoned by his young mother, the experiences of his childhood must have killed any decency within him. They certainly convinced him he could survive only by suppressing his softer emotions. That was what life had taught him and it was the only lesson he wanted to pass on to his children. He hated to see us crying or showing 'weakness'. Even as infants, he expected us to behave like grown men, or, rather, like the man he'd grown into - cold, hard and ruthless.

  I'd been born in Dunstable, but when I was four my father, who worked at the Vauxhall car plant, decided we should move to Wolverhampton. He began to drink a lot and also became extremely violent towards all of us, my mother especially. He'd come home barely able to stand, spitting obscenities at my mother before beating her and slouching off to bed. Memories of my mother screaming as she was beaten still haunt me. She'd be screaming for him to stop and we the children would be screaming with fear. Other nights, even without much drink taken, he'd just turn off the television and sit there slandering her family, humiliating her, degrading her, even questioning the point of her existence. His most decent act would be to send us to bed. Then I'd lie awake in the darkness listening to her sobbing downstairs, pleading with him in my head to stop. As I got older, I'd sometimes overcome my fear and shout out, 'Leave her alone, you bastard.' And he'd come running up the stairs to beat me.

  My father had another notion to move, this time to Codsall, a village close to Wolverhampton. He'd found us a three-bedroom terraced house which backed on to the main railway line. At night, I felt the house was going to fall in on us as coal trains thundered past at the end of the garden.

  As I grew older, I didn't try to hide my hatred for my father. I forced myself to endure his violence stoically. I didn't want him to know he was hurting me. His dislike for me seemed to grow in response to my defiance. His physical violence only ended up hardening me, but his verbal violence had a more disturbing effect. He'd grip me by the throat or hair, shouting obscenities in my face while prodding or punching me in the head or body. His favourite insult was a reference to the circumstances of my birth (when my mother had almost delivered me in the street). 'You were born in the gutter,' he'd say, 'and you'll die in the gutter.' He'd tell my brother Paul that our mother had tried to kill him by pushing him in front of a bus when he was in his pushchair. He'd scream, 'She didn't want you, son. She didn't fucking want you.'

  But this was nothing compared to what he saved for our mother. He treated her like a dog. In fact, if she'd been a dog, he'd probably have been arrested for cruelty, but because she was his wife the police and others felt they could do nothing. It was, they said, a domestic.

  One Mother's Day, I brought her home a card I'd made at school. She put it on the sill above the kitchen sink. I was still sitting at the table eating my dinner when my father came home smelling of drink. He saw the card and picked it up. 'Is this what your little pet got you, is it? Mother's little fucking pet.' My mother asked him to stop, but that only made him worse. He turned to her and said, 'Shall I give you something for Mother's Day, shall I?' He picked up a plate off the draining board and went to smash it over her head. She raised her arm to protect herself and the plate broke across it, cutting it wide open. She spent the rest of the day in casualty getting it stitched.

  Another evening, he came home and complained his dinner wasn't freshly cooked, just heated up. Presumably, he expected my mother to guess what time he'd stagger back from the pub. He threw the dinner and the plate against the wall, grabbed my mother by the hair and started punching her. She was bleeding from the nose and mouth, but he kept punching her until she collapsed on the floor. He stood over her as she lay there, his hands and shirt smeared with her blood. My mother raised her head slightly, coughed up some blood and asked me to get her some water. My father said he'd get it. He walked out of the room and I helped my mother sit up. He came back holding a mug of water, 'Here, Anna. You wanted fucking water - take it.' And with that he dashed the mug into her face.

  I used to go to school in the mornings like a bomb waiting to explode. I loathed the other children's happiness: Daddy did this for me, Daddy did that for me. I needed to shut them up. I used to fight them with a ferocity fuelled by a hatred of their normality and happiness. Even at that young age, I was developing a fearsome reputation for violence. I must have spent more time in front of the headmaster than in lessons. I wasn't invited to another child's house until I was ten, when I went to the birthday party of my next-door neighbour, Nicky. There were about 12 children there, as well as adults, and everyone was laughing and joking. Their joy made me feel angry and down.

  One of Nicky's presents was a model of an American Flying

  Fortress bomber. When all the other children went out to play football, I stayed behind and smashed the plane to pieces, dropping the remains behind the television. I wasn
't invited back.

  In 1971, just before I went to secondary school, my father decided to show me how to do up a tie. He made me stand still with my hands by my side. This meant I could only see his hands and not what he was doing with the tie. Then he undid the tie and told me to do it. I got it wrong. He grabbed the tie, which was round my neck, and began pulling me about with it, slapping me round the head and saying I was fucking stupid. Finally, I could take no more. I shouted at him, 'I wish you were fucking dead,' then I punched him on the side of the head before running out of the room and up the stairs.

  He ran out and caught me halfway up. He laid into me with a vicious fury. I ended up at the foot of the stairs curled into a ball to protect myself from his kicks, which were aimed at the small of my back. I thought he was going to kill me. My mother screamed at him to stop. Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain and my legs went numb. I began shouting, 'I can't feel my legs! I can't feel my legs!' Only then did he stop. He tried to get me to my feet, but I kept collapsing. My mother ran out to call an ambulance.

  As I lay on the floor waiting for the ambulance, my father knelt down beside me. He pulled my head up by the hair and said, 'Say you were playing and you fell down the stairs on your own or I'll fuckin' kill ye.' And that's what I told anyone who asked. Fortunately, nothing was broken, but the discs in my spine were damaged in a way that even today causes me pain.

  I started going to Codsall Comprehensive, a school of around 1,200 pupils. I'd have fights with other boys almost every day of the week. If I came home with a black eye or another mark on me my father would beat me and offer me the only bit of fatherly advice he ever gave any of us: 'Don't let people get away with hitting you. If they're bigger than you, hit them with something.'

  We all started following his advice. My brother Paul got into a fight in a pub car park with a gang from another part of town. He ran at them with two screwdrivers, one in each hand. He stabbed three people before being beaten to a mess. He served two years in Borstal. The eldest, Jerry, took on a group of men in a pub.

  He'd armed himself with a pair of large mechanic's spanners and started clubbing all round him. The police arrived and he clubbed one of them too before being overpowered. He'd given one of the men a fractured skull; a policeman had a shattered knee. Jerry was sent to prison. All of us, under my father's tutoring, had developed a capacity for extreme and awful violence. It set us apart - and set us against the world, especially the world of authority.

  I never felt English growing up, although I suppose I never felt properly Irish either. With everything else that was going on, I didn't spend much time agonising about that aspect of my identity. I knew my roots were in Ireland and I felt comfortable around Irish people. In a sense, I lived in an Irish-Catholic world, although there was no flag-waving paddiness. I was a so-called 'plastic paddy' (the less-than-welcoming Irish term for people born in England of Irish parents).

  At school at first, I encountered some anti-Irish abuse - 'thick paddy', 'Irish drunks' and that sort of stuff. It didn't last long. A good punch in the head tended to discourage repeat offences. I used to hate the superior attitude of some English people and their nauseatingly deluded belief that the whole of the world somehow looked to England. They'd try to make me feel inferior, which infuriated me, because I knew I wasn't inferior to them. I also hated posh English professionals who'd talk down to my mother as if she were stupid.

  'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland began to float on the margins of my awareness. I remember 'Bloody Sunday', the day in January 1972 when paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed Catholic men and boys on a civil rights march in Derry. My one clear memory comes from watching television and seeing a priest crouching over one of the victims, waving a blood-stained handkerchief. I can recall this event being met with jubilation by some people in Wolverhampton.

  Around this time, while on holiday in Ireland with my family, an Irish teenager broke my nose with a punch at a youth-club disco, calling me an 'English bastard'. I didn't take his attack personally I seem to remember thinking it was natural for an Irishman to want to punch an Englishman. Despite my 'empathy' for my attacker's motivation, I returned to the disco with a mob of my Irish cousins and we gave him and his mates a good beating outside.

  The first time 'the Troubles' really registered, though, was when the soldier son of a family in our street was shot and wounded by the IRA in Derry. The news caused great shock and excitement in the village, and I remember a ripple of anti-Irish feeling. Around this time, I had a slanging match with some of the wounded soldier's family. I started shouting, 'Up the IRA!', presumably to wind them up, because I can't remember being especially supportive of the Provos or even very aware of what they stood for.

  However, I met the wounded soldier in a pub a few years ago and he remembered me as far more pro-IRA than I remember myself. He told me I'd also thrown stones at him as he recovered and shouted, 'You British Army bastard!'

  I suppose my gut instincts were certainly pro-republican, and I did have a sense of northern Irish Catholics being underdogs, though I can't say I had any real political consciousness. I tended to sympathise with anyone who fought authority, so people who threw petrol bombs at the police and army seemed like my sort of people. I was constantly in conflict with teachers. Whenever anything punishable happened, I was rounded up as the usual suspect. I did get up to a lot of mischief, but I also found myself blamed for things I hadn't done.

  After the window of the school coach was smashed, I was unjustly fined for the offence. I had to pay the fine over three months in weekly instalments. The money came from my part-time job killing turkeys at a local farm. I despised the teachers and I despised their justice, just as I despised the woman who'd slide back the hatch at the school office and take my hard-earned money. For the first six weeks, she said the same thing: 'Oh, you ought to be putting this in the bank, O'Mahoney. Maybe next time you'll think before you act. Do you want a receipt?' I hated the bitch.

  One night, I crept into the school grounds and hurled a crate of empty milk bottles through the headmaster's window. Then I sprayed blue paint over the school coach. I wasn't caught. For the next eight weeks as I handed over my money I used to smirk at the woman and ask, 'Have they caught anyone yet?'

  I soon started coming to the attention of the police. They began arresting me for, and charging me with, various petty offences. A conviction for using 'obscene language in a public place' got the ball rolling. I was charged by a desk sergeant who, calling me 'a little fucker', accused me of causing 'fucking trouble'. I was subsequently fined five pounds by a magistrate who lectured me about bad language.

  My second criminal conviction was for an even more laughable offence. At the farm where I worked part-time, breaking turkeys' necks in a cone-shaped metal bucket with squeeze bars, I found a broken wristwatch on the floor in the yard. It only had one hand. I was subsequently arrested by a policeman who assaulted me and charged me with 'theft by finding'. A magistrate later fined me thirty-five pounds and gave me a lecture on morality.

  In my adolescent mind, all I could see was that the forces of law and order could hound a boy for petty irrelevancies, but couldn't intervene to prevent a man battering his wife and children half to death. Rage and resentment stewed inside me. School was a farce, the law was a farce, 'normal' life was a farce. But I wasn't going to take their shit for long. I planned to hit back.

  I carried out my first street robbery when I was around 13. It became a regular pastime of mine. Our targets were usually teenagers our age or thereabouts, but we weren't averse to robbing adults. Life became a non-stop cycle of violence. One Saturday afternoon in 1973, I was on my own in Wolverhampton town centre when I saw a group of around 20 skinheads on a sinister stroll. They wore high-leg, cherry-red Dr Marten boots, white Skinner jeans and Ben Sherman checked shirts. Tattoos decorated their arms, heads and, in some cases, faces. Chanting 'There ain't no black in the Union Jack. Wogs out! Wogs out!', they jostled blacks and Asians on the street. The
occasional young man who offered resistance would be punched and kicked to the ground, then steamed by the entire mob.

  I was shocked. I'd never before witnessed such mayhem. I followed the skins, mesmerised by the effect they were having. Shops closed rapidly, taxi ranks emptied and six or so policemen just looked on helplessly. More teenagers, middle-aged men, bikers and even a postman joined the lawless procession. The group of 20 swelled to 50. Their bravado swelled too. Someone kicked in an Asian shopkeeper's window. The sound of smashing glass seemed to act as a signal for the mob to go on the rampage.

  Everyone started running. Shoppers were knocked flying, more blacks and Asians were beaten up, small shops were swiftly ransacked. I saw one black youth run into a shop doorway in a bid to escape. He tried to open the shop door, but the terrified female assistant had already locked it. She stared out the window in horror as four skins and a middle-aged man attacked the youth. They kicked and stamped on him as others looked on, chanting, 'Pull, pull, pull that trigger. Pull that trigger and shoot that nigger.'

  I hadn't hit anyone or smashed anything, but when a couple of police vans pulled up, sirens wailing, I ran with the mob. Officers leapt from the vans and gave chase. I ran into a large department store with six of the skins. Two ran down into the food hall in the basement. I got into the lift with the others. We went up to the top floor. The skins were hyped up. I felt flattered when they talked to me as if I were one of the gang. They asked me if I was 'all right'. I said I was, although I hadn't done anything to make me feel otherwise. They talked excitedly. When one paused for breath, the next would chip in, 'Did you see me do this? Did you see me do that?' They all laughed like hyenas after a feed, revelling in the chaos they'd caused.

  We decided to take the stairs back down. As I was dressed in 'normal' clothes and had a 'normal' haircut, they asked me to walk down in front of them to check each floor for police. Once outside, I jumped on a bus home, though not before one of the skins had given me a National Front sticker. It was decorated with a Union flag and contained a slogan about hanging IRA terrorists and muggers (black muggers, of course, which was a relief as I was active in that field myself). As I looked out of the bus's upstairs window at the aftermath of the chaos, my whole body buzzed. I felt like a fugitive, but I'd done no wrong. The skins' sheer lawlessness shocked and delighted me. They'd strolled down the street in broad daylight, assaulting people and destroying property, and the police hadn't dared take them on till they'd had plenty of back-up. I knew little or nothing about their politics, although obviously I'd gathered they might be anti-black. I just loved their utter contempt for authority and normal society.