The big move
So six years old and life wasn't going that great but what happened next was the worst thing possible for me. We moved house. Infact we not only moved house but we moved to the other side of the city. Me and my brothers and sister sitting in the back of my Dads work van all off on a big adventure, but I was dreading it.
You see at least where I was I had a few friends that I had grown up with, I didn't know how I was going to make friends, I didn't even know whether there was going to be anybody to make friends with. I felt as if I had nobody other than my Mom.
I didn't really know my Dad that well as he worked long hours and when he came home at night it was normally dinner, a quick sleep in his armchair, a quick wash and shave and out to the pub and this was only when he was working locally, you see he did work out of Birmingham sometimes. I remember he spent many months working up in Newcastle once and would only come home every fortnight. I remember because we all went on Holiday one year up to where he was working. We stayed in the works accommodation and everyday we would go to Whitley bay to play with the jelly fish.
My dad was an electrician and worked on building tunnels, which was really exciting especially when he would take us with him to work on a weekend. The first time I went with him I was so small that he carried me down the ladders on his shoulders. It was about two hundred foot to the bottom of the shaft. The only way down was using the ladder bays which were built in to the side of the shaft. There were about four sets of ladders he had to carry me down. It was so exciting. Then at the bottom there was just a few scaffold planks to stand on. It was very wet and very muddy but I loved it. I had made up my mind at this point I was going to be a miner like my Dad. It was so dark down there butit would get even darker in the tunnel itself.
It was great, there were little electric trains called loco's which they used to carry the earth out of the tunnels. There was only enough room for one person so I sat on my dads lap and he let me drive the loco. Into the darkness we went, the only sound was the pump in the shaft which made a whooshing sound as it pumped water from the shaft up to the surface above and the sound of the loco hitting the joints on the tracks below us. As we went the whooshing of the pumps got further and further away and the little light that was coming in from the shaft diminished until the only lights were the electric lights positioned every twenty feet or so. The only smells was that from the fresh water seeping in through the concrete and the clay that mudded the water being pumped from beneath us. My heart pounded in time with the noise of the wheels on the tracks. I loved it. I think I still do today and if I had the opportunity again it would be the most ideal job for me to do. I did get the chance to work on the tunnels later in life but, as with most things in my life, it was short lived.
I gone into detail about this as it was a happy time in my life that I remember. i don't remember there being all that many to be honest. obviously there were some but nothing really stands out for me to shout about.
The other main thing that I remember about my Dad working away was that when he came home the first thing he would do was to empty his pockets of all the change and count it into piles for me and my brothers and sister. It was the only time we had pocket money. Mine would normally go on sweets and comics.
Things were to happen later on in my life which would bring my Dad very much back into the spotlight of my life but for now the only real adult influence I had in my life came from my Mom.
I loved her to bits and I guess I was what you would call a mommy's boy, at least that was what other members of my family called me. I hated being apart from her so much that on the day I started my new school I wouldn't let her put me down, which resulted in me smacking my head against her mouth knocking her front tooth loose.
There was quite an age gap between me and my brothers so I didn't really have a great deal to do with them other than doing things that would annoy them and generally get on their nerves. I was to do worse as I got older but that will come later.
My sister and I did spend more time together and I loved her to bits, but as we got older we became more distant and eventually I did things that led her to be frightened of me. Consequently, I have only met her twice in the last twenty years.
So as you see my mom really was the only person that I had and couldn't bear to be away from her.
It was worse now that we had moved. I hated where we lived.
It was a big house in a much nicer part of Birmingham than where we had come from, but I hated it. The only park was a good mile away but I wasn't allowed to go on my own as I was too small. Our neighbours were either very old or I thought were too stuck up to have anything with us. They probably wasn't but that was my perception. I had grown up listening to Irish accents and tales of the Irish rebellion and how the British had done terrible things to the Irish and there I was living in the heart of middle England with a very poor perception the people who dwelt there.
The fact was I only had two perceptions of people: they were either better than me or worse than me. It didn't matter in to which category you fell, they both kept me from communicating with you. Even at the age of six the signs of low self esteem were there, but it wouldn't be long before the ego kicked in to compensate for it.
Worse was too come as I started my new school and 10 years of misery.