My last foray into merchandise was toasters. I bought a job lot for six quid each, sold them for a tenner. I bought 200 of them; nothing could go wrong this time.
Well. My mate had just decorated his mum’s kitchen all white, beautiful. To finish off the look, my mate had paid me a tenner for a toaster. One morning, his mum put the bread in and it was Bonfire Night all over again. Bang, wallop, the bread flew up in a spray of sparks all the way up to the new white ceiling. There were burn marks and black shit everywhere. It seems the toasters hadn’t been wired correctly; I heard a few houses got fried, a few fuses blown here and there.
But Tans thought it was as hilarious as I did. She always stood by me, even when things went bang, or when TVs didn’t work, or when furniture resembled the Leaning Nesting Tables of Pisa. She’d never say, when are you going to learn your lesson? She just knew I loved all that shit, the wheeling and dealing, the craic.
A year or two after we got married, I was driving back from training to Redbourn when I got a call from the Arsenal boys – Tony Adams, Ray Parlour, Paul Merson and John Hartson. They were at the Watersplash Hotel in London Colney, which they knew was just up the road from Redbourn, about 10 miles. And that’s all it took. ‘Alright, I’m on my way,’ I said – M25, bosh, do me lovely. I arrived at about half past two in the afternoon … and somehow didn’t leave until eight o’clock the next morning. Card games had led to more card games had led to me calling up my mates and neighbours in Redbourn and in the end everyone turned up.
It wasn’t as bad as the time I went to the races at Sandown one morning and woke up the next morning in fucking Dublin and had no idea how I got there. I remember looking at the phone in the hotel, seeing the Irish code on it and thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ But it wasn’t good, all the same. When I drank, I drank, and there were too often consequences to pay. That was the problem with my drinking: I was a binge drinker and I just made terrible decisions.
One such bad decision was to take the Arsenal lads back with me to Redbourn in a black cab, figuring, unwisely, that there might be eggs and bacon in the offing. We all sort of bounced out of the cab and there was Tans, just taking Kaley to school. She took one look at me, slammed the car door and drove past us at high speed. We dived out of the way and Basil, my mate down the road, said, ‘I’m off. I ain’t going to be here when she gets home.’
When she got home, things were a bit … frosty, shall we say, for a couple of days at least. But I didn’t sleep on the couch – she would always wake me to go to bed with her, always, and that night was no exception, even though there had been no dinner. She knew I’d slept on couches as a kid and she hated sleeping alone too, so however mad she was – and with good reason – I never woke up on the couch in my own home. And I always knew when she was mad because her voice would get higher pitched. She may have thought herself a lovely farm girl from Little House on the Prairie, but cross her and the tough girl from Garston would show up.
After the Arsenal night, Kaley reckons I probably got Tans a card. And even though there was no dinner the first night, the next night maybe I got a little bit of something, and eventually things settled out. It never took too long because we never believed we had too long. We knew deep down that life was going to be short for us, although you stick your head in the sand about it. But still, we sort of agreed that we didn’t have time to not talk to each other for a week.
Tans would stick up for me in so many ways. Sometimes it was comical – even I couldn’t stick up for myself for some of the things I did, but she’d be there, backing me up.
I was lucky enough to play nine times for Wales; the players even voted me captain, which probably pissed Bobby Gould off (he was the manager). Needless to say, even though I’d learned the Welsh national anthem from Gary Speed (god rest his soul) and put my heart into it, I still managed to screw up.
In June 1995, after about half an hour of a game against Georgia in the Euros qualifying rounds, I stamped on one of the Georgia players and was sent off. As soon as I stamped on the guy, I remember thinking, ‘Why? What are you doing? No need for it, no need whatsoever.’ Back at the hotel, Maureen, Lou and Tans and everyone were waiting for me, and Tans just said, ‘Well, he shouldn’t have been lying there, should he?’
Two years later, I tested her patience in a much more serious way at Redbourn.
We heard the helicopters before we saw them.
I was standing at the kitchen sink, running my bloodied knuckles under the tap. I’d really done it this time. Tans was looking at me with a mixture of fear and anger, but mostly I could tell she was starting to get really scared; in fact, she was hyperventilating.
This was the bit I always hated. I could handle myself; I’d had a hundred fights; I’d been arrested; I’d done some overnights in the custody of Her Majesty’s; I knew how to deal with the Old Bill, all that. But Tans hated it. Hated it. It was the look on her face I couldn’t stand. That great, angry, strange-coloured dog – the animal I couldn’t contain – had gotten out of its crate again and now there were helicopters circling the farm.
Next to the Redbourn house, a guy called Timothy Gear lived with his parents in a mobile home – we reckoned they were living there till they got planning permission for something more permanent, which was fine by me. The real problem was that the local lads thought it would be fun to nick cars in Hemel or Luton or wherever, race them on the adjacent M1 (which was less than a mile across the fields from our place), jump off at exit 9, then down along our dirt track to Rabbitfield Springs, a small area of woods in the shape of a triangle near the farmhouse. The kids would do donuts and spins in the fields until they got bored and burned the cars out in the woods. I wasn’t having that – Aaron and Kaley were little, and I was afraid they’d get hurt one day.
Plus, it scared Elvis and Priscilla, and I really couldn’t afford for them to fly off again.
I decided to spend a bit of money to fix the problem. I paid about fifteen hundred quid to have a five-bar gate installed across the dirt lane and I padlocked it. There were four keys: I kept one; I gave another to Bill, the guy we’d taken in; the third I gave to Timothy Gear’s father who lived in the mobile home and the fourth went to the girl who looked after all my bigger animals. Now there was nowhere for the kids to race the cars, and peace returned to the farm.
That day – 11 November 1997 – the drinking had started early. As much as I loved the outdoors, I also loved drinking, and the two often went hand-in-hand for me. I’d started with a lunchtime glass or two of red and, as the afternoon had gone on, I’d kept up a fairly steady rate. The shooting done, I headed to the Bell and Shears to have a few before home.
It was always notable that when my car pulled up outside the Bell and Shears, by the time I’d locked up and walked inside, every pint glass was empty inside. I suppose it was a coincidence; in any case, as usual I stood everyone a pint, including Bill who was in the snug.
‘Oy, Bill, what’s up mate? Everything OK up home?’ I said.
There was a pause. Not a good sign.
‘Not really, boss,’ Bill said.
‘What?’
‘Your “mate” next door, the son, has put a rope around the fence and ripped it all out with a tractor because he couldn’t get through with the padlock on.’
This guy had obviously not communicated with his father – who had a key – and must have thought I’d padlocked it so he couldn’t get through. Now, I’m not sure what colour I saw when I heard what he’d done, but it wasn’t good – something like a red mixed with black or something. If I hadn’t had the drink all day I might have seen sense, but this kid next door already thought he was a tough guy and now he’d gone too far.
It didn’t take me long to get to the farm; all the way there I was thinking, ‘bastard’, and the rage had grown and had eaten into me. The lad must have heard my car squeal up because when he appeared at the door of his mobile home I didn’t even wait for him to come out – I gave him one right through
the window.
And then I really let him have it.
What I didn’t know was that Bill had only given me half of the story. The father had put the fence back in place before I got home, knowing I’d be upset. If I’d walked another 50 feet, I’d have seen there was no problem and gone about my evening. But the dark forces had gotten me and I set about the bloke with a real fury.
On the walk from his trailer to the farmhouse, my first thought was, how am I going to explain this to Tans? How am I going to turn it around to my favour? I might have been in the right to be angry – this lad had no reason to rip out the gate except to be a dickhead – but now I had to face Tans. And I hated – hated – upsetting her. I could deal with repercussions, because I’d had a lifetime on the edge. But she deserved better than this.
Her reaction? She was just worried I’d overdone it with the neighbour. That says everything you need to know about her.
But before we could really get into it, we heard the helicopters and then the armed response arrived (they knew I had guns on the property). A voice through a loud hailer told me to come out of the farmhouse with my hands up, and to get on the ground.
A cadre of men with guns drawn even edged past the garage. If they’d opened it, they’d have seen 150 knackered Russian TVs with questionable parentage. I think they might have asked me why I had a garage filled with Argos TVs …
As it was, they made me turn around, take the cuffs and lie there. I asked one of the officers if I could give Tans a cuddle before I left. He ignored me, put me in the back of a car and took me to St Albans’ nick.
At the nick, I was processed, placed in a cell and then the worst thing of all: they took away all my clothes and made me wear a white paper suit. I hadn’t been dressed up for a fight – I was still wearing my Wellington boots and plus twos. It seemed like overkill to me, but the police said they needed to look at the blood on the boots – it was pheasant blood, at least that’s what I thought – but they needed everything to ‘do forensics’. They put everything in brown paper bags and sealed them …
Forensics?
As the door of the cell closed, I suddenly started shaking violently. Forensics meant one thing: I’d killed the guy. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my entire life. Every time an officer came to the cell through the night I asked if I’d killed him, but they said they couldn’t tell me.
I thought of Tans at home, alone all night, listening to the owl and wondering if I’d ever make it back. I’d let her down again and that was a terrible, terrible feeling. Because Tans had saved my life, over and over and over. And this was how I repaid her. She had been my defender for so long – sure, she’d let me have it once the dust settled, but in the moment she would step up for me again and again. She must have seen something in me that was better, purer, than the guy who drank too much and punched people through plate-glass windows. In fact, she must have seen more in me than I saw in myself. And that’s one of the reasons I loved her so much – she saw a better version of me than anyone else ever had. I knew what my reputation was: the guy who grabbed Gazza by the danglies; the guy who got booked after three seconds of a match, and sent off in 12 others; the guy who delivered that famous leveller to Steve McMahon in the F.A. Cup Final in 1988, just 14 minutes after he’d shaken Lady Di’s gentle little hand; the guy who’d had too many fights when he’d been drinking.
Tans knew all that, but she didn’t think it was all of me, or even the important part of me. She saw the innocent kid. I wish everyone could have someone like Tans in their life – someone who knows you and still loves you.
I still have no idea how to live without that. I really don’t.
The guy I’d beaten up didn’t die, not even close; but I had made a mess of him. At the subsequent trial in St Albans, I was convicted of actual bodily harm and criminal damage. It was pretty obvious I was going down the steps, perhaps for as much as six months.
Once again, Tans had to face the consequences of what I’d done. She was terrified; we both were. The magistrates could have easily sent me away, but instead I got 100 hours of community service and a fine of £1,150 for what I did that night. (If they’d seen the TVs, it might well have been 200 hours.)
Tans got only heartache. I wish I could go back and change the years when I was in the drink. Without it, I was fine. With it, well, she worried that things were going to go wrong. She’d say, ‘Vinnie, everything is going great,’ but she’d say it with trepidation.
I’m glad she got me sober for the last six years. She deserved more than that, but at least she got the little boy back full-time, the kid before the pain kicked in, a pain that was softened by the drink.
But she loved me whatever I was. That was the thing. She just loved, and when she loved – be it her grandfather, her mum and dad, her brother, her daughter, her friends, or me, who deserved it the least sometimes – well, it was without boundaries, a love bigger than the sky.
We couldn’t stay at Redbourn after the fight – it was ruined – so we bought a new place we called Highfield House, on Box Lane in Boxmoor, about ten miles away. I’d been driving past it one day and seen the sign; I called the estate agent who said I was welcome to go in and have a look around. Well, the owner was a smart lady – she had a chocolate fountain on the go and, as you stepped in the house, all you could smell was the lovely aroma of melting cocoa. Done. I put ten grand down immediately. I was a movie star, now – yeah, me and Lassie – and that’s how things went. Chocolate fountain, check, boom, the place was ours. (Other things that they recommend when you’re trying to sell a house are brewing coffee and baking bread, of course, but a chocolate fountain would take some beating.)
It was a huge white house, which I made even bigger with an extension, but it wasn’t ideal. The place was on a main road, so people honked their horns and rang our security bell over and over.
We moved into the house on Box Lane the day I thought I might be going to prison. When I wasn’t sent down, we celebrated hard in our new home, but the problems didn’t end there.
We had brought Bill along, and his caravan. It was a nice caravan, but I’m not sure the neighbours were delighted, to be honest. Thanks to her huge capacity to love, Tans used to take Bill to his doctor’s appointments – years of drinking had really taken its toll, so much so that he spent a fair amount of time at Harefield, which of course Tans knew all too well. But he found it too hard to follow the doctor’s advice and he was spiralling downwards.
The final straw came on the night of the premiere of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. At an early screening, Tans had turned to me on the train on the way home and had told me that it was going to be huge. She was always so proud of me. Lock, Stock was the first script I’d ever read. Tans and I would sit in bed at night as I learned my lines. She’d read the other parts and, accidentally, the stage directions, too, which was hilarious.
BIG CHRIS [me]: I have got something for ya. Well, for your boy, actually.
JD [as voiced by Tans]: Well, I suggest you speak to him, then.
But then Tans carried on …
TANS: They all look rather shocked. He is carrying their bag and he places it on the table, which increases the shock factor.
I’d look up confused, then realize what had happened.
‘Tans, just read what he’s saying.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she’d say. Sometimes she’d throw the script on the bed. ‘I’m useless at this …’
‘No, you’re not, babe, you’re not! Come on, let’s keep going.’ It was the best time; we were so excited and she was my biggest supporter.
By the time the premiere came around, I knew that this was the start of my life as a movie star, and Tans and I and her friend Mandy had gone into London to celebrate. (To prove that I still had one foot in the football life, though, I took Ray Harford and Iain Dowie to that premiere!) It had been a great night. And I realized then and there that this was my future. I felt at ease acting; I could
do it, and I could do it well. The reviews were positive, and the laughs kept coming throughout the night.
But as ever with me, the good times were leavened by the bad.
It turned out that Bill had finally lost the plot while we were in London at the premiere. He’d been drinking heavily again and he thought it would be a good idea that night to come into our house, steal all of Tans’ transplant medication, then drive off in Mandy’s car – some beat-up old Renault. He crashed it and was arrested. We only knew about it when Maureen, who was babysitting Kaley, called us to tell us that she’d been woken up with a bright light in her eyes. Figuring she’d finally thrown the celestial seven, she’d been amazed to see that instead of the holy host and the choirs triumphant, what was standing there instead was a local copper. Not Jesus, or the Blessed Mother – just Officer Plod, holding a torch. We already thought the house was haunted – there were various tales of a former lady of the house skulking around and scaring the crap out of people – so you can imagine Maureen’s reaction when this big lunk of a copper woke her up by shining a light in her eyes.
By the time we got home, we knew it was the end of Bill in our lives. We’d looked after him for four years but we could no longer trust him.
As the years went by, Tans, too, no longer felt safe at Box Lane. After Snatch, and my first lead role, in Mean Machine, my fame was at its height and too many people were ringing the bell or trying to get autographs, while I just wanted to give Tans the most beautiful, wonderful life I could, and one that was as private as possible, given what she had to go through every year of it.
12
A DAY AND A LIFE AT HAREFIELD
Tans was so brave about her regular trips to Harefield, but the truth is they scared her so much. After the transplant, she had to be monitored regularly, as the doctors really didn’t have a timetable for how long the heart might work. Remember, these were still the early days of transplants, so Tans was an important marker for the whole endeavour. Consequently, they had her back to Harefield regularly to check her progress, which was good for both sides: she got looked at closely and her case was then used for research (she was especially fascinating to doctors because she’d been so young and seemingly healthy before her first heart had collapsed).
Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya Page 11
