Into the void, p.2
Into the Void, page 2
While painting, we could hear cheer after cheer coming from the ground, even more of a racket than normal. What the hell was going on over there? On my way home, I asked a Villa fan what the score was. “Eleven to one,” he replied with a big grin on his face and his thumbs up. It was one of Villa’s biggest ever wins and I was fuming. Needless to say, my friendship with Francis was never the same again. Even now it makes my heart ache.
ANIMALS
Sadly, I wasn’t much good at playing football. I only got picked for the school team a few times, and dear old Scamp was probably better in goal than me. I got Scamp for my seventh birthday. I’d take him for long, rambling walks and we became inseparable. I got to love him more than any human friend.
Back then, people would let their dogs roam the streets unaccompanied. One night, Scamp came home in terrible agony, because someone had thrown acid on him. It was burning a hole in his back, so we rushed him to the local vet, where my parents spent a good deal of their life savings on his treatment. It took months for the wound to heal and he was left with a huge visible scar, because no fur could grow over the affected area. A few days after the attack, there was an article in the local newspaper about a cowardly bloke who had thrown acid on someone. He also admitted that he had tested the acid out on a dog. I hope he had a horrible life.
Our house was full of pets. The rag and bone man, who went around on his horse and cart shouting “any old iron, any old rags,” would swap baby chicks for anything you had going spare. We had a rabbit and a goldfish, tiddlers and tadpoles, and even a tortoise, which I found in the entry behind the house. That tortoise was constantly escaping and wandering over to the local pub. He was always barred from entry, and the White Swan wasn’t fussy. But it was mainly because of Scamp that I became a vegetarian, which was a weird thing to be in Aston in the 1950s.
When I was a little kid, I didn’t know where meat came from, it was just something that appeared on my plate (Mom rarely ate it, but she cooked it for the rest of us). But one day, I cut a piece of meat open and blood came out. I said to Mom, “Where did this meat come from?” She replied, “From animals.” I thought it was the most disgusting thing imaginable. Who’d want to eat the rotting flesh of a dead creature? And what was the difference between Scamp or a pig or a cow? I haven’t touched meat since.
ALRIGHT, GEEZER?
I got on great with my siblings, but most of them were too old to play with. Jimmy and Paddy were called up for compulsory National Service, so I didn’t see much of them in the early fifties. Jimmy is the reason I got the nickname Geezer (my real name’s Terence). He was stationed with a lot of Cockneys and when he came home on leave, he was suddenly calling everyone “geezer” (people in London say, “Alright, geezer?,” in the same way Americans say, “What’s up, dude?”). And because I was only about seven and looked up to Jimmy, I started calling everyone “geezer” as well.
Jimmy loved fighting. One Saturday night, he came home from the pub covered in blood and with two black eyes. I said to him, “Oh no. Did you lose?” And he replied, “No, the other bloke’s in hospital.” Jimmy also loved the army life and wanted to join the SAS, but he discovered he had vertigo during training, when he was meant to jump off a tower to simulate parachuting.
In 1956, Paddy was sent to Africa to take part in the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt (otherwise known as the Suez Crisis). That was the first time I saw Mom cry. Paddy was a sharpshooter and had been through special combat training. When he came home from Egypt, he was awarded a medal. He stuck it in a drawer and it was never seen again. One night two muggers jumped on him, and with two flicks he had them both on the floor, whimpering. His special training came in useful after all.
Peter, Mom and Dad’s second-youngest son, wasn’t eligible for National Service as he was partially deaf in both ears from a childhood accident. He became a Teddy Boy instead and caused mayhem on the streets of Birmingham. He dressed all in black, with a drape coat, drainpipe trousers, brothel-creeper shoes and a bootlace tie. His jacket was specially adapted, with razor blades sewn into the lapels. If anyone grabbed him by those lapels, they’d cut their fingers to ribbons. He also had an elongated inside pocket, in which he stashed a rubber cosh, with a three-inch piece of lead attached to the end, and at least three flick knives. Once, when we were visiting family in Dublin, a witty Irishman saw my brother and said, “Look! Death takes a holiday!” Everyone fell about laughing; even Peter raised a smile. But that old fella had actually hit on the truth: Both Peter and I had a morbid fascination with death.
Because we were only a few years removed from the end of World War II, during which my parents and siblings had survived air raids, near-starvation levels of rationing and evacuations to live with strange families in the countryside, there was a tangible air of trepidation in the house. Paddy being sent off to the Suez Crisis and the Cold War–era fear of nuclear annihilation didn’t help. The house was filled with air rifles, air pistols, knives, bayonets and even a revolver, which I’d found hidden under the copper boiler in the kitchen. All these weapons were left over from the war, from the fear of invasion.
I’d seen a poster for the film The Camp on Blood Island, which showed a Japanese soldier about to behead someone. That poster probably made some kids queasy, but I found the threat of violence strangely thrilling. I’d pretend I was a Japanese soldier, too, and carry out beheadings with a bayonet, complete with a wooden stump where the imaginary victim would lay his head. One day, one of my brothers sent me to a petrol station to get some paraffin for their bedroom heater. I walked in wearing a gas mask and a German helmet, and the attendant went berserk: “A lot of people from around here died fighting that lot! Take that helmet off!”
Peter was fascinated with Hitler and the Nazis. Some readers might find that odd, especially since he was born during the war. He and his friends played English and German war games, like me and my friends played cowboys and Indians, probably because they only knew wartime for the first six years of their lives. Who knows what being constantly bombed and confined to air raid shelters does to an impressionable young mind. Peter collected Nazi regalia, badges, medals, uniforms and even taught himself a bit of German. He found a record shop in Dublin that sold records of Hitler’s speeches and IRA rebel songs, both of which were banned in Britain. He’d smuggle them back in, hidden inside record sleeves of traditional Irish singers, and play them on a windup gramophone in his bedroom, as there were no electrical outlets upstairs.
Dad was inked, so when Peter was sixteen, he took himself off to the tattoo parlor and got himself a swastika with a sword running through it on his forearm. Dad went absolutely nuts when he saw it. The tattoo got infected, which served him right. And when Peter recovered from his fever, Dad made him return to the parlor and get it changed to something less offensive. He ended up with some roses, with “MOM” written underneath. Mercifully, once he discovered girls, Hitler and the Nazis became a thing of the past—and I’ve never wanted a tattoo because of what happened to him.
Mercifully, once he discovered girls, Hitler and the Nazis became a thing of the past.
Every Saturday morning, me and Peter would have wrestling matches. Then one morning he got carried away and gave me a black eye. No more wrestling after that, he’d got too rough. I spent a lot of time with my youngest sister, Eileen, and we teased each other mercilessly. And when I wasn’t with her, I hung out with friends from school or the neighborhood. I didn’t have tons of mates, but I wasn’t shy. That came later, after years of touring with Sabbath and craving privacy.
Our favourite playground was a bomb site, literally, because those two houses and the shop that got obliterated by the Luftwaffe hadn’t been rebuilt. One day, I found a huge fragment of the bomb that had done the damage. An abandoned lorry on the site became our den. We’d thieve bread and milk off neighbors’ doorsteps, retreat to the den and fill our faces. And across the road was an air raid shelter, which was half flooded and which we’d dare each other to enter. My parents and siblings used it during the war, when the bombing got too heavy for them to use the Anderson shelter in our backyard.
Having a bomb site as a playground might sound a bit grim. Far from it. It was a child’s paradise, a place where a young imagination could run wild. I certainly had a more adventurous childhood than many kids today, sitting in their bedrooms staring at computer screens. I’d stomp around the bomb site firing toy guns—a space gun or a cowboy gun, depending on what character I wanted to be that day—and be transported to another place. And because the local shops sold surplus army gear, on the cheap, us kids could buy army accessories, which made our war games that much more realistic.
I always carried a knife, although that was mainly for show. I only brandished it once, when another kid pulled a knife on me. We jabbed at each other for a while before deciding we didn’t really want to get stabbed. Things could get pretty rough, though. One time, I was sword fighting (they were wooden!) with my neighbor Johnny Smith on the roof of the local school. I got a bit carried away, knocked Johnny off the roof, and he broke his arm. Another time, I was playing with Johnny’s brother Robert and cut his head open with the edge of an opened tin can. He had to have stitches and tetanus shots, and his mom came around to our house to complain about me. I couldn’t really blame her.
DIVERSITY
With us kids, it was mostly just rough-and-tumble. But I witnessed a lot of proper violence, especially in and around the White Swan. When I was little, our neighborhood was mainly Irish, with a few Scottish families and one from Yorkshire. But as more families from the West Indies, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh moved into the area, attracted by work in the various industries, interracial clashes increased.
One night, I saw a West Indian have his head bashed in by a brick, thrown by an Irish bloke. His crime? He wanted to have a drink in the White Swan. Another time, a young Pakistani man was stabbed outside the pub. Mom cradled him until the ambulance arrived. Then there was the time I came home to find a man slumped against our front wall, being shredded to pieces by a couple of Pakistani men with broken milk bottles. His flesh was hanging off his face, and he was barely breathing by the time an ambulance and a couple of coppers arrived on the scene.
Some of what I witnessed was just weird. For example, a West Indian bloke, who moved into one of the houses across the road, would hang out of his bedroom window and shout, “Go back to Africa, ya Black bastard!,” at any Black person who happened to walk past. Who knows what was going through his head, but he didn’t last long in that house—probably taken off to a mental institution.
A teacher told us to welcome Asian newcomers by saying as-salamu alaykum (“peace be upon you”) if we saw them on the street. But the first time I tried it out, the bloke produced a knife and chased me. I’ve no idea why he did that, but he obviously felt offended. On another occasion, I was walking along Victoria Road with my girlfriend when we were stopped by an Asian man. I thought he was lost and wanted directions, but eventually I worked out he wanted to pay for my girlfriend to go to his house. I told him no and was again threatened with a knife, but we managed to give him the slip.
However, it wasn’t all misunderstandings and hostility. When an Indian family moved in next door, I became friends with the son Magenlal and developed a crush on his sister Madhu. The day they arrived, the mother came knocking on our door in a panic. I followed her into her house and she pointed at a running tap, which was causing the kitchen sink to overflow. She didn’t realise that she only had to turn the tap anti-clockwise to turn the water off.
I was always intrigued by their home. Because they couldn’t readily get Indian ingredients, they’d grow herbs and spices in their backyard and dry chapatis above the roof of the outhouse. Inside, they had pictures of an elephant god and gurus on their walls, much like our pictures of Jesus and Mary. As Dad had been in India with the army, he explained that the elephant god was the Hindu deity Ganesha and that a guru was a Hindu spiritual teacher. Dad made friends with the father, and they’d often talk over the garden wall while smoking cheroots, which Dad hadn’t had since his time in India.
My parents would never admit they were discriminated against, but being Irish in Britain at the time was often difficult. I struggled to understand that, because Dad and thousands more Irishmen had fought for Britain in both world wars. My uncle Tommy was wounded in Burma, where he pretended to be dead so the Japanese wouldn’t take him prisoner. He lay in the mud for so long he caught malaria, and he had to recuperate in our house in Aston until he was well enough to go home to Dublin. I suppose the hostility had a lot to do with the IRA’s bombing campaign around the start of World War II. One bomb killed five people and injured seventy in nearby Coventry, so a lot of British people assumed the Irish were on Hitler’s side. I suppose some were, but the vast majority—including my dad and uncle—were not.
One day, me and a friend from Belfast were playing outside when a binman said, “Get out of the way, you little Irish cunts.” I’d never heard that word before. That evening, we were all sitting around the dinner table when I blurted out, “What’s a cunt?” Our house had a strict no swearing rule—if as much as a “bloody” or a “bleeder” slipped out, Dad would tell me that only ignorant people swear and beat me with his belt—so it was as if I’d announced I was the devil.
My brothers and sisters almost choked on their food. Mom and Dad blessed themselves and said about ten Hail Marys. Undeterred, I followed up with, “Is it like the Count of Monte Cristo?,” because that was on TV at the time. After a long, awkward silence, someone finally told me that it was a bad word and not to be used again. Even now I seldom swear, despite spending thousands of days in the company of Ozzy Osbourne.
We never went on holiday in Britain or ate out in restaurants or cafés. On day trips to seaside towns like Rhyl, Weston-super-Mare and Aberystwyth, we’d take our own food. My sister Maura once booked to stay in a bed-and-breakfast in Blackpool. When she turned up, she saw a sign on the door that said: NO IRISH. NO BLACKS. NO DOGS. She turned around and came straight home.
We’d go to Dublin every other year, by steam train from Birmingham to Holyhead, and then boat to Dún Laoghaire. During one train journey to Holyhead, we were in a compartment with two nuns. One of the nuns was eating sandwiches from a tin, and when she finished them, she launched the tin through a tiny open window. Because she had such an accurate shot, I thought she must have had special powers. The first time I boarded the boat to Dún Laoghaire, I noticed it had big barrel-shaped attachments on each side. I presumed they were depth charges and started panicking, because I thought we might be attacked by submarines.
We’d stay at my granny’s house on Upper Leeson Street and visit aunts, uncles and cousins, and sing Irish rebel songs like “Kevin Barry” or “The Rising of the Moon.” Granny Butler was the only grandparent I knew, because the others died before I was born. From her house, we’d go for walks along the canal on Mespil Road, or down to St. Stephen’s Green. At the green, I’d notice people crossing themselves when they walked past a building across the road. I asked Dad why, and he told me that some time ago, a cross had appeared in the window and people thought of it as a miracle. Other walks weren’t so pleasant. One time, I got into a fight with two Irish kids who were offended by my English accent. I couldn’t bloody win!
2
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
BRAINWASHED
I was raised a strict Catholic and enjoyed the rituals of Mass, Communion, confession and Benediction, as well as that intoxicating smell of incense and everyone dressing up in their Sunday best.
All religion is inherited brainwashing, in my opinion. Every religion is portrayed as the “one true faith,” even though each religion’s doctrine was made up by some bloke who just didn’t want to follow the previous one. I was a bit of a fanatic as a kid. I liked the idea of Jesus, Mary and the Holy Ghost. It reminded me of a fairy tale. Even the horrific sight of a man nailed to a cross with a big gash in his side—which was deemed suitable for young children—didn’t put me off.
I became fascinated with souls, so that whenever one of my fish died, I’d cut it open with a razor blade to see if its soul was still present. When I was six, our dog Rusty died and he was buried in the backyard. A few months later, I dug him up and cut him open as well. I couldn’t see his soul, so I assumed it had escaped.
After my First Holy Communion, when I was seven, I began spending my pocket money on all sorts of religious ephemera. For a while, toy guns and comics were passé. Instead, I’d buy rosaries, crosses, medals, prayer books, pictures of Jesus, anything my pennies would stretch to, and which was stocked in the repository of the Sacred Heart church.
My first ambition was to be an altar boy, but there was a long waiting list. I obviously wasn’t the only religious nut in Aston. When I finally got my chance, when I was about eleven, I overslept and missed my audition. God’s calling obviously wasn’t that great and getting up early has never stopped being one of my weaker points.
