Nigel Benn Read Free Page A

deserved it — he would say in a broad West Indian accent, ‘If you don’t hear it, you must FEEL it.’ And feel it I did, far too often for my liking because, when he hit, it was like being struck with the force of an express train.
    While today it seems that most parents wouldbe arrested for the type of discipline he administered, I’m grateful for it. Were it not for my father, I’d probably be in prison instead of enjoying success as a world champion.
    I sometimes wonder what I would be doing now if my parents had stayed in Barbados. They left behind them enough relatives to fill Wembley Stadium.
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    Mum tells me I was a good baby. That probably means I didn’t cry much, only occasionally sucked my finger and was generally easy to manage. Unfortunately, she was in for a tough time, for my infant years were to be the lull before the storm.
    School was never much fun for me. I first went to Woodlands Infant School in Ilford and then to Cleveland Primary, where I was extremely boisterous and grew up well before my time. After that I went — sometimes — to Loxford School, where I took my CSE exams. As a child, I never felt I was a black kid in a white community. There had never been any racism in our family, although we were aware of its existence. Here again, I have to thank the sensible attitude of my parents. They upheld good old-fashioned virtues, which included respect for others, no matter what their creed or colour might be and, at the same time, gave us a feeling of equal standing in the community, so there was never a feeling of inferiority or superiority.
    Until the age of eight, the worst thing that happened to me was getting lost at a fairground. I’d wandered off and each of my parents thought Iwas with the other until they met up and realised I’d disappeared. They were terrified that I might have been abducted and quite overwhelmed when they found me sitting casually on a chair, with my feet up on the table, in the Lost Property office. My mother wept with relief. As for me, I just hadn’t a clue what they had been going through and sat there without a care in the world. My other memory of the early years is of being on a school coach, stuffing my face with orange cheese and then being sick on the bus. That experience turned me off orange cheese for good.
    While each of us boys had very different personalities, Dad tells me that I was probably a little more steamy than the other kids. I always had to be moving, he would say, and my parents also noticed I had unusually strong vitality and bags of energy. As I grew older, this vitality had to have an outlet and that is when I began treading the same path as Andy.
    Looking after myself came naturally with five older brothers. We were always fighting and squabbling, whether it was for food, clothes or out of sheer malice. I guess my first lessons in fighting started at home. We also progressed to such things as lock picking, because Mum would desperately try to eke out the weekly provisions by locking some of them away. Inevitably, we would pick the locks and gorge on the spoils. There would be fights over cans of beans, loaves of bread and milk.
    When the food ran out, we’d knock up ‘bakes’ from flour, water and sugar and sometimes we’d have to live on that for days. Mum would do theweek’s shopping on a Friday and, if she left it around, it would be gone by Sunday evening. Toast, butter and sugar became another favourite, as did chips and bread.
    Although money was hard to come by and there wasn’t an abundant supply of food, we brothers somehow managed to dress with style, although this would also lead to fights. Clothes were probably more important to us than food, and from an early age I would admire the way my older brothers dressed and looked. My brother Mark would buy exotic crocodile, lizard and emu skin shoes. They cost a king’s ransom but were essential accessories to