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aggressive couldn't-care-less delinquent; they could not see the confused and frightened child I knew myself to be. I wish I could have broken and poured everything out to someone. Instead, I continued to act out my bad-boy role, because at least that way I could get a bit of adoration and recognition, which is what I craved. I soaked up the attention of my minions. In my mind I felt I was beginning to win the fight against those who tried to impose their authority on me. I thought I was becoming a somebody - a status they had said I would never achieve. In reality I was systematically destroying myself and my future.
    At home, throughout my early teens, I would harm myself, gouging my stomach with a craft knife or broken glass. I did not want to feel 1 was being butt by my father and when 1 realised I was I hated my weakness and wanted to harm myself: emotion and pain were for weak people. I had learnt that from my father and he frequently underlined the point: once when I was about 13 1 accidentally cut my hand wide open with a knife while playing. I ran into the house crying with pain. My father looked at me with contempt and said: "What you fucking moaning about? Put your hand here and I'll fucking stitch it." And he did: he got a needle and thread and stitched it. As I moved into my teens my father continued to use me as a punchbag, so I used to try to avoid him. I would sit on the pavement outside the house some nights waiting for every light to go out. When I thought he was asleep I would slip in quietly by the back door and go silently to bed.
    In November 1974, four months before my 15th birthday, the IRA blew up two pubs in nearby Birmingham, killing 19 people and injuring 182. My brother Paul was one of many employed to clear up the wreckage. The bombing caused an outpouring of anti-Irish feeling throughout the country, but especially in the West Midlands. We all felt it: my father was attacked at the Wolverhampton tyre factory where he worked. Unfortunately, he was not badly hurt. My mother found people ignoring her in the shops and giving her dirty looks in the street. Even today when something dramatic happens in Northern Ireland she doesn't like leaving the house.
    The bombing became an issue for me at school when I got into an argument with my history teacher. We were studying the Second World War and the teacher made a comparison between the brave RAF pilots who flew bombing missions over Germany and the IRA cowards who planted bombs in pubs. I said that in my opinion it did not take a lot of courage to fly over Germany in the dark and press a little button to bring death to the unseen men, women and children below. Planting a bomb in a pub, on the other hand, where you would have to look into the eyes of those around you - especially women's eyes - knowing you were going to kill every one of them required either great courage or inhuman coldness. I was not supporting what the Provos had done: it had shocked and disgusted me. In fact, it had turned me completely against the IRA - the effect it had on a lot of one-time republican sympathisers - and I hoped the perpetrators would themselves die horribly. However, for all that, I still couldn't regard them as cowards - and that was the main point I wanted to make. I suppose an underlying point was that people never looked at the atrocities committed by their side, but always rushed to condemn those committed by the enemy. But I had hardly chosen the best time to express such opinions and I caused a huge row. I felt I had made the teachers hate me even more than they already did.
    Not that I cared: their opinions meant nothing to me.

 
     
     
     
4
     
The Fall Of The Tyrant
     
     
    By the time I was 15 I had come to regulate myself by my own rules: laws enforced by police officers as part of what I saw as the no-justice system had become irrelevant to me. I had developed my own warped values — and my behaviour soon became even more warped.
    I started