reading

The right of Howard Gayle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be left liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by the way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for photographs used in this book. If we have overlooked you in any way, please get in touch so that we can rectify this in future editions.

To my knowledge my dad was the only black person working at the Ford car plant in Halewood. He earned respect and status as a shop steward.

During my first few months at Melwood I was small, skinny and largely alone. Great challenges lay ahead. (MIRRORPIX)

I loved playing in the Merseyside derby. Although I never featured in one at senior level, the reserve team games between Liverpool and Everton were contested with the same ferocity. (MIRRORPIX)

The European Cup final in Paris. Liverpool beat Real Madrid 1-0 thanks to a late goal by Alan Kennedy. As a substitute, I celebrated like a fan. (PA)

In 1977, I was playing football in Liverpool’s parks. In 1981, I returned to Liverpool Airport from Paris as a European Cup winner. (MIRRORPIX)

My first goal for Newcastle United was a match winner against Derby County the day after Boxing Day. Kevin Keegan’s inclusion in the team after injury helped raise the level of my performance that afternoon. (MIRRORPIX)

Of all the managers I played for, my best relationship was with Ron Saunders. I reacted well to his mixed approach of fair discipline and leeway. (MIRRORPIX)

My eighteen months at Birmingham culminated in relegation to the old Second Division.
The season was bittersweet because it was also marked by a call-up to the England under-21 team – a sign my progression as a footballer was being recognised. (MIRRORPIX)

I never managed to feature on a winning side against Liverpool. This game at St Andrews in 1984, where I am in hot pursuit of Alan Hansen, finished in a 0-0 draw. (PA)

The Birmingham derbies with Aston Villa were aggressive encounters.
The thrill of scoring a defining goal against the old enemy was unmatched. (MIRRORPIX)

Despite a struggle for the club – and despite my frosty relationship with Lawrie McMenemy – I enjoyed playing for Sunderland and I enjoyed playing at Roker Park. (PA)

Stamford Bridge was not a ground I liked playing at. It was a place where many black players suffered from racist abuse on the terraces. (MIRRORPIX)

The 1988/89 season at Blackburn Rovers was my best goalscoring campaign as a professional footballer. Although we narrowly missed out on promotion, my relationship up front with Simon Garner was an effective one. (PA)

For to be free is
not merely to cast off one’s chains,
but to live in a way
that respects and enhances the
freedom of others.

In memory of my mum and my dad
and for my brothers and sister,
my extended family, and the people from
Norris Green and elsewhere in Liverpool
who made a positive impact on my life.

KIDNAPPED MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN BOARDED A BOAT AT THE mouth of the Sierra Leone River. From the natural harbour of Freetown, they were forcibly sailed forty minutes to Bunce Island, a small patch of jungle off the country’s coastline. For more than a century this was the site of some grim trade.

Humans became slaves here. They were sold from their homes, packed inside the island’s stone fort, shackled together, and shoved into holding pens. After a wait of weeks or months a ship arrived at the end of the island’s stony pier. Those who survived the subsequent ten-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean would find themselves in an entirely new world: the rice plantations of the American colonies.

Slavery was not unique to Sierra Leone. It affected the whole of West Africa – an enormous area, stretching all along the Atlantic coastline and inland for several hundred miles. Within this hugely diverse region are many cultural groups, each shaped by its environment. The Fulani, Hausa, Igbo, Akan and many other peoples developed sophisticated cultures long before the arrival of the Europeans in the fifteenth century.

I cannot speak any of the languages of these distinctive tribes. Sierra Leone, indeed, is not a place I consider to be home. But it is the place where my family’s story begins. What happened there centuries ago impacted especially upon my early life and continues to do so today.

Europeans began exploring West Africa even before they discovered the Americas. The enslavement of Africans by Portuguese traders began almost straight away.

The Portuguese had developed sugar in Brazil in the 1540s. As demand grew, plantations were established in the European colonies in the Caribbean. Other profitable commodities also entered the plantation system, including cotton, coffee and tobacco.

The movement of sugar, particularly, required a large workforce. Local labour in the Caribbean plantations was scarce because millions of indigenous people had perished after the colonisation of their lands. Many were killed in battle and others were worked to death; European diseases also wiped out considerable numbers. The consequence was colonists – other imperial countries like Spain, England, France and the Netherlands – looking towards Africa for a new supply of labour.

It was not long before Africans were being transported across the Atlantic Ocean to work in the Americas in the largest forced migration in human history.

My great-grandfather made a similar journey – beginning in Ghana and landing in Jamaica. Eventually, he joined the Maroons, a fugitive group who fled to the inland mountains and formed their own settlements, where they were able to live their own independent lives. Much later he returned to West Africa and made a home in Sierra Leone.

Europeans had used their own strict theories of civilisation to justify this manipulation and abuse of Africans, considering the prosperity and achievement of European civilisation to be essential. Because African societies and culture were unfamiliar, Europeans denounced the continent as barbaric and overrun with savage tribes and religious despotism. These racist beliefs would later be used as a justification for colonial intervention in Africa. The consequences in the twentieth century were tangible, shaping the future of the Gayle family in Liverpool, thousands of miles away.

Official UK government records suggest British connections to slavery began in 1627 when a group of British settlers landed on the Caribbean island of Barbados. During that trip, the captain of a British ship seized a Portuguese vessel and imprisoned the Africans on board. These were first black African slaves in the British Empire. They were set to work on a sugar plantation.

British explorers had planned to convert an unpopulated wilderness in Barbados into pasture, by using their own workforce brought in from other parts of the world. Many who arrived were called ‘indentured servants’. In effect these poor people had sold themselves to masters for a labour term of five years. Having already been transported, they received some sustenance and refuge. There was also the promise that, at the end of their term, they would be presented with ten acres of land. Yet the swift evolution towards slavery meant that promise, in many cases, was not kept.

In the first decades, Barbados grew by farming tobacco and cotton. Soon, thousands of slaves were being transferred across the Atlantic Ocean. The historian David Olusoga in his documentary Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners says it created the world’s first genuine global economy.

For the businessmen involved, slavery made economic sense. A labourer would work for his master for five years; a slave was for life. Any children slaves produced automatically belonged to the master.

LIVERPOOL 8, OR TOXTETH, IS DIVIDED INTO TWO DISTINCT DISTRICTS: the one I grew up in on the south flank of Upper Parliament Street and then the other more prosperous-looking side, closer to Liverpool’s city centre.

I was born on the site where Liverpool Women’s Hospital is now, which lies directly on the border between the two.

While the area I lived in had a clear immigrant identity with much cheaper lodgings, the Georgian townhouses that lined the wealthier streets elsewhere masked a dark chapter in Britain’s history. These were the homes of lawyers, doctors, vicars, sea captains and, most significantly, slave owners.

Until his death in 1851, John Gladstone resided on the majestic Rodney Street. Gladstone was a Scottish merchant, a Member of Parliament and the father of future British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone.

John Gladstone was also a wealthy slave owner, an objector to the UK 1833 Slavery Abolition Act and therefore an exploiter of human life. And yet, a dock that remains in Liverpool, and flourishes today, is named after him.

Gladstone was not the only slave trader in Liverpool. From 1730 the merchants of Liverpool made huge profits from the slave trade. When a famous stage actor visited Liverpool at the end of the 1800s, he was booed when he told the audience that every brick of their town was ‘cemented with the blood of an African’.

Liverpool, of course, was equally not the only city with links to slavery. The profits from slave ownership were entrenched in British society. Commanding dynasties amassed fortunes by exploiting enslaved labour in lands the majority of people in Britain had never even heard of.

Due to the huge sums of money needed to make money out of slavery, the profit-making of the slave owners started some of Britain’s credit networks. Because of the huge sums of capital invested in slavery projects, this system required extremely violent suppression.

For two centuries, slavery was the engine of the British economy and, before it was abolished, slave owners wanted more: impacting on the class structure still evident today.

Abolition kept the rich very rich and the poor in their place. At the time of abolition, many members of the House of Lords were slave owners. Their position in the establishment ensured that the slave owners’ interest and the nation’s interest were clearly aligned. Others who were not already in parliament used money to win seats in parliament. Wealth helped them acquire political power.

The compensation from abolition – worth £17billion in today’s money – seeped into every corner of the empire. Investment in industry, education, the arts and commerce followed, helping lay the foundation for our modern world.

The reality was bare and brutal: the only way to end slavery was to pay the slave owners for the loss of their property. In order to force legislation through, therefore, the anti-slave campaigners were forced to abandon their central principle: that the slaves should not be considered as property.

Abolition of slavery is considered a historic triumph of British liberalism. Yet the slave owners only walked away with the biggest bail-out in British history because government placed a price on freedom.

LIVERPOOL ENTERED THE SLAVE TRADE IN 1699. FROM THE 1740S, it became Britain’s largest slaving port, responsible for 50 per cent of Britain’s trade and nearly 5,000 voyages. Between 1790 and 1807, Liverpool was also the largest slaving port in Europe. Very few enslaved Africans were brought to Liverpool directly from Africa, however. Instead, those with African roots often arrived from the West Indies, bought by merchants to work as servants in their homes. Had my great-grandfather been born in a different time, it is possible that he would have ended up in the city rather than in Jamaica.

Liverpool’s links with the slave trade are visible: everywhere you look in the city, there are reminders. Take the story of Richard Watt, for instance. As a boy, he drove a one-horse carriage in the town; later, he went to Jamaica to make his fortune. When Watt returned in 1772, he’d become a wealthy plantation owner. He bought property in Liverpool and Yorkshire and invested in shipping. In 1795, he bought Speke Hall and its estate. It remained in the family until 1921.

Then there are the docks. Liverpool’s free port takes its name from the now demolished Seaforth House, which was built by John Gladstone: the plantation owner and someone who received more than £90,000 (around £83 million today) in compensation when slavery was abolished in the British Empire 1833.

Liverpool, though, retained its links with the dubious trade as cotton produced by slave labour in the American states was imported through the port and sent to the Lancashire mills. Goods made in the mills were then exported all over the world. Consequently, there was much support for the Confederate cause in Liverpool at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. Many ships were built secretly on the Mersey for the Confederacy, the most famous being the steamship Alabama, built at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead. It is clear that although slavery was not permitted through the port of Liverpool, the city still grew strong from the trade of people elsewhere in the world.

Well after the abolition of slavery, African seafarers were still required to crew the ships. The palm oil trade was expanding and Liverpool’s port remained as busy as ever all the way up to the 1960s. Many of those that settled in Liverpool lived in the inner-city neighbourhood riddled with social and economic deprivation (such as poor housing and high unemployment) we now know as Liverpool 8: Toxteth.

My father entered Liverpool for the first time from Sierra Leone, having taken a job as a deckhand with one of the major shipping lines, Elder Dempster or Blue Funnel. Records are bleary.

My father’s background was middle class by Sierra Leonean standards, but his story reflects how precarious life can be. For a long time he was comfortable. My grandparents worked as moneylenders and could afford to send him to a well-respected secondary school called St Edward’s. Established in 1865 by a French Roman Catholic priest, many of the pupils there progressed to attend institutions of higher education including the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. Students of St Edward’s were easily distinguished by their uniform, which consists of a white shirt, dark shorts and a matching tie. In a country where there is no free compulsory education, attending secondary school is a rare privilege and the school uniform was and remains a badge of honour.

Some of the most famous Old Edwardians include the former prime minister of Sierra Leone, Sir Albert Margai, and President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. In more recent times, Mohamed Kallon went to the school before embarking on a professional football career that included spells at Internazionale and Monaco.

The foundations of its success were based on a traditional British-style education of discipline, commitment and routine. The school’s second headmaster, Father Mulcahy, introduced a house system at St Edward’s in 1934 in order to encourage competitive sportsmanship among the pupils. Following the Eton model, St Edward’s employs a system that divides the pupils into five houses. Each house has a house captain and games captain. House captains are usually selected from the sixth-form students. Games captains are chosen from the school’s most talented athletes – and my father was one of them: tall, powerfully built and versatile in a sporting sense.

Life began to change for my father when his mother died. I am informed that my grandfather soon became fixated with a maid who worked in his house. Under the bewitchment of this particular lady, he was convinced that it was a good idea to remove his own family from the house and replace them with her offspring.

My dad was intelligent, fluent in French and Spanish. But with no financial support and nowhere to live, he found a job in Freetown’s docks as a runner. (He was fortunate in comparison to his siblings. On a return trip to Sierra Leone later on in life, he found out that all of his brothers and sisters had died on the street.)

Setting to sea during the war years, the long months in the Atlantic were dangerous even though he was only on the trading ships.

THIS BOOK IS A TESTIMONY TO WHO AND WHAT I HAVE BECOME in a life that has spanned from 1958 to 2016. All of the experiences that I have had in my childhood growing up in Liverpool have shaped the person I have become today, which in turn has educated me in understanding the complex issues that young people have to face.

I hope that this book goes a long way in addressing core issues around race, tolerance and mind-set and enlightens people about the things that have influenced some of the decisions that I have made as a child and also as an adult.

MUNICH
i

Dusk was setting and the brooding floodlights around the Olympic Stadium in Munich were switched on. The stage was set for a performance between two great football teams. I did not envisage that my role would become key to the narrative.

It was late April and warm, and yet Bob Paisley, Liverpool’s manager, was wearing his beige trench mac, as if he was preparing for winter. ‘Get the boys to go and warm up,’ he croaked, speaking to Joe Fagan in his distinctive yet indecipherable County Durham accent. Those ‘boys’ were Avi Cohen, Jimmy Case, Ian Rush and me, Howard Gayle.

Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool’s star player, was really struggling with an ankle injury. Clearly agitated, he kept patting it, as if it might somehow disappear. He tried to carry on but ultimately he could not. He signalled across to the bench that he could no longer continue.

Bob did not so much spring into action; he sat in his seat and, after a brief discussion with his assistant Fagan, he had chosen his plan.

I was the plan.

An athletics track separated the pitch from the bowl of the terracing. I stretched my hamstring, stretched my calf and tested my groin before setting off on the claret-coloured asphalt.

That’s when the monkey noises started. I didn’t realise what was happening at first because all of my concentration was with the warm-up; making sure my body was ready for the biggest moment in my life.

And then I looked around, away from the pitch. More monkey noises; a few grown men making Nazi salutes.

Great.

Jesus Christ, Howard, how did you get here? I thought to myself. Before I could take it all in, I spotted Ronnie Moran waving his hand furiously, having emerged from the dugout in the way that only he did, like a sentry or a patrol dog.

I sprinted in his direction before Ronnie got angry, because Ronnie could get very angry indeed. I removed my black jumper and shiny red tracksuit bottoms, tucking my gleaming white jersey with a golden liver bird on the breast into the black shorts, tying the top strings as tightly as possible.

I was told to play down the left-hand side, leaving David Johnson (the Doc) to forage on his own up front.

I was a month short of my 23rd birthday.

I was number 16: the last number in the match-day squad.

It was the ninth minute of the European Cup semi-final, second leg.

The linesman checked my studs.

I was going on.

CHEAPSIDE,
1976

IT WAS A ROASTING SUMMER’S DAY YET THERE WERE NO windows in the Liverpool magistrates’ courtroom. The air was stuffy and the staleness of people’s breath could raise the dead.

The stone-faced judge stooped forward, looking down at me from his chair high up, like a headmaster addressing a badly behaved pupil.

‘The court has run out of patience with you, Mr Gayle,’ he boomed. Aged eighteen, I was in the same position again – for the eighth time.

I had misjudged the seriousness of the charge. I had bitten a policeman who tried to arrest me for shoplifting in the city centre while I was out with mates.

Wrangler jackets were the height of fashion in the 1970s and the must-have item to be seen in. We had mooched around town for most of the afternoon but did not realise that plain-clothed officers had been following us.

Normally, we’d operate with more vigilance and cautiousness. The process was simple: distract staff in the shop by getting them to serve you, while others stuffed goods into bags or inside bigger coats. From the shops, middlemen would then sell the stolen goods on – many of them ending up in markets across the length and breadth of the country.

It was a lucrative business that on a good day would yield hundreds of pounds. This one was a bad day and complacency had got the better of us. I, in particular, would pay a heavy price for my role in the events that followed.

It was coming towards the end of the afternoon when we entered a camping outlet. It was my turn to do some shoplifting while the others covered for me. The target was a denim Wrangler and the plan was straightforward: two jackets into a changing room; try one on; come back out and show everyone it didn’t fit; return to the changing room and put the jacket back on its hanger, while placing the spare jacket underneath the coat you arrived in; then replace just one of the jackets on the rail of the shop. That’s how it was supposed to happen anyway.

As I reached the shop door, I felt a hand on my shoulder. A horrible feeling washed over me. I knew it was either going to be a policeman or a shop assistant. I hoped it would be an assistant as, normally, they wouldn’t want confrontation with a gang of six lads and would just ask for the goods back.

It was a policeman, though. All hell broke loose.

One policeman grabbed me and another blocked the door. The rest of the gang were able to scatter, leaving me to try and escape alone.

A struggle ensued and a crowd gathered. I recognised some of the faces in the crowd and begged them to help me. I reckoned that, with a little help, I could free myself from the policeman and get away. But this bastard was not letting go.

The crowd swelled and, in desperation, I bit the policeman in one last attempt for freedom. The attempt was in vain.

The charge that followed was theft and assault on a policeman. It was a Friday and there was no chance of bail. So the weekend would be spent in Cheapside, Liverpool’s main police bridewell’.

I am told the policeman’s name was Mr Pigg. In the Liverpool Echo, the headline supposedly ran, ‘Youth Bites Pigg’. I found the irony quite funny. It reflected my brazenness.

Crime and violence was something I had grown up around. When I was ten years old, I was suspended from primary school for head-butting another pupil and throughout my teenage years I was in and out of the police interview room regularly. Now, I had used up all my credits and I was going to receive a long-overdue punishment.

I didn’t fear the sentencing. When I was given four months, I smiled at the judge, bowed my head and followed the screws down the stairs into the bowels of the bridewell to await transport to a detention centre.

I had confidence that I’d be fine. A short stretch in a young offenders’ institute didn’t scare me.

I was an angry young man. I was angry that my mother had died, leaving me with my father alone in the Norris Green area of Liverpool. My brothers and sister had left home. Norris Green was white and black people were scarce.

Racism was not endemic in Norris Green, but sufficiently deep-seated in certain quarters to be a threat to families like the Gayles and the few other black families that lived there, including the Bartels. Many of those living on the council estates were from families displaced by Liverpool’s slum clearance programme of the 1950s. Some felt trapped by the comparative deprivation, while others used the clannish atmosphere to build a criminal power base.

I was angry with the levels of racism I was subjected to. I was angry with my father for his treatment of my mother before she died and for not realising how difficult it was being me in Norris Green.

I was angry too with the lack of opportunities, forcing me deeper into a world of petty criminality.

I remember the doors slamming shut in the court cell rooms next to the police headquarters in Cheapside, central Liverpool. A small barred window offered a vision of the world beyond the walls surrounding me. It was August and England was suffering from drought. Parts of Britain had gone 45 days without rain. As the dry weather continued, devastating heath and forest fires broke out across the country. Crops were badly hit and food prices subsequently increased dramatically. It was the hottest summer in 350 years of records. I was starting at four impenetrable concrete walls.

I did not stop to think how I’d reached this dark corner of the city I was born in. It felt like it was my destiny to follow this dubious path. Where it would end was anyone’s guess. I wasn’t really bothered. I had no lofty aspirations. I had resigned myself to being this way: hustling on the streets, in and out of prison – trying to find a way to survive.

Survival was a mission enforced upon me from the day my parents were told it was necessary to move out of Liverpool 8, or Toxteth as it is known nationally. It would be seventeen years until I returned there.

I was born on Saturday 18 May 1958 in Toxteth, L8: the area that for me still represents home. Yet I grew up on the sink estates of Norris Green, to the east of Liverpool; the place that probably had the most profound impact on my life.

In the same year, America’s first satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral and the microchip was developed, which formed the very early stages of the PCs we all now use at work and at home.

This was before the Beatles became the Beatles. In July, a band known as the Quarrymen paid seventeen shillings and six pence to have their first recording session, where they recorded Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and ‘In Spite of All the Danger’, a McCartney/Harrison original. It was a very different world and primitive compared to the one we know today, certainly in terms of technology and – as I would learn – in terms of social acceptance too.

My earliest memory is of a lie being told. I wonder now how that affected me in the long term, especially when it was delivered by a parent, though my mum did not realise she was lying because the information supplied to her proved to be wrong.

The Gayle family included my mum Alice, my dad Purcell, Alan – my brother – who was twelve years older than me, Abdul, who was eight years my senior and Jan, my sister, four years in advance. I was the youngest.

Our house in Liverpool 8 was on 36 Carter Street, a beautiful Georgian terrace, not far away from the border with Dingle, another tough yet vibrant inner-city area.

The council had told my mum that the Gayles would have to live in Norris Green while it refurbished our house in Liverpool 8. After a few weeks, one of my mum’s friends phoned her to say that the house on Carter Street had been demolished.

My mum was heartbroken and I can remember the regular visits to the housing office on Storrington Avenue where she would plead with officers to transfer us back to the south end of the city, closer to family and friends. She’d often leave in floods of tears because of the rejections, although I never knew why at the time because she kept her reasons to herself.

I grew to hate the office on Storrington Avenue. Although her brother, Uncle Willy, lived on Broadway, a twenty-minute walk from our house in Norris Green, I know my mum felt isolated in the area. It wasn’t the same as the south end. My mum was a lovely woman and most of the best things that happened to me growing up was because of her. All of the good things that I am today, indeed, are because of her care.

So I remained in Norris Green. My sister Janice was there too. My two brothers Alan and Abdul did not settle and moved back to Liverpool 8 to live with my grandmother, my ‘Nin’ as we called her; seeing the family break up by moving in different directions made life even more difficult for Mum.

Only at weekends would I be able to return to Liverpool 8. My dad would take me for a haircut at Mr Peewee’s barber shop on Granby Street – the eclectic shopping thoroughfare of the area that sold everything you could ever want – before spending the afternoons playing football in Princes Park with my two brothers.

On those Saturdays, my dad would drop me off at the barber and pick me up an hour or so later. Mr Peewee seemed to take forever with his work – he had a real pride. The clock never seemed to move. I was desperate for him to hurry up because I valued my time in Liverpool 8 and wanted to do other things while I was there – before my dad showed up. I can still hear the hum and buzz of the cutters and the sound of Radio Four in the background.

Much later, when I was in Liverpool’s first team, Bob Paisley voiced concerns about the amount of time I was spending in Liverpool 8, which wrongly held a reputation as being a rough area to live. In reality it was no different to any other inner-city borough. The riots of 1981, however, changed everything.

The media played a powerful role in telling the story of what happened there. The first thing journalists did was label it ‘the Toxteth Riots’. For the black community, Toxteth was always Park Road – a white area. The riots actually took place in what was widely referred to by its postcode as Liverpool 8, or the Granby ward. The media needed a tag so they called it Toxteth, which we never used in our community. It was quite clear to me that someone in London’s press saw the sign ‘Toxteth’ without appreciating the nuances of its boundaries.

Now, when people think of Toxteth, they think of a bad day in Bosnia. Beforehand, it was a self-governing multicultural municipality where problems were sorted out internally. There was a level of respect between most of the people that lived in Liverpool 8 and to me it was a sanctuary from Norris Green, where outsiders were distrusted. Black families like ours were scarce in Norris Green. I was the only black pupil in my school year and I wasn’t allowed to forget it by the majority of other kids.

All week, I’d look forward to going back to Liverpool 8, where I always felt part of the majority rather than the minority. Years later, I retraced my father’s steps to Africa and I got the same feeling there. I could be myself in Liverpool 8 but in Norris Green I had to take on a tougher demeanour from day one. At home and around friends’ parents, I was polite and respectful. In school, I was a brute. I had to be to get along. There was no other way; otherwise I’d have crumbled.

Liverpool 8 was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody else. In the early part of the twentieth century, it was one of the most affluent areas of Liverpool to live in. Even today, there are some majestic-looking town houses in Canning Street that used to be owned by sea captains and wealthy merchants as well as judges and bankers. On the leafy avenues off Upper Parliament Street and close to the brooding, mysterious Anglican Cathedral, there are huge Georgian and Victorian homes that are used to shoot period dramas like Peaky Blinders, which is meant to be in Birmingham.

After the Second World War, with Liverpool’s docks hard hit by German bombers, a lot of the seamen moved out and worked out of other ports around the country. They left behind the houses and soon they were split up into flats. Among the bulldozers and the rubble, Liverpool 8 took on more of a working-class identity with the building of terraced accommodation stretching up towards Dingle and Aigburth.

It was during this time that my dad, Purcell, moved to Liverpool from Freetown in Sierra Leone. He was in the merchant navy and liked the city, so he stayed. My dad wasn’t a talker and never really described what life was like back in Africa. It was only when we became older that he told us that he was a strong believer in the occult and black magic. It convinced him there was a curse on him and that he would suffer ill fortune if he were ever to return to Sierra Leone. He started going back in the late 1980s but on one trip in 1994 he returned from Africa and within two weeks had died of bronchial pneumonia. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t.

In the years before I was born my dad operated as a seaman out of Liverpool’s port and was away for long periods. In Liverpool 8, my mum took in lodgers to help with income while he was not there. A seaman was only paid at the end of a voyage, so money was tight.

Upon moving to Norris Green, my dad got a job as a bus conductor and his route was the number 79, which ran from the Pier Head on Liverpool’s waterfront to Netherley. He later worked in the Ford car plant, starting off in the paint shop, where he became a shop steward. He wasn’t the sort of person to flit between jobs; he valued employment. His loyalty was almost blind, not unlike a lot of workers from his generation.

Yet my dad was also blind to a lot of life’s challenges. Though I suspect he’d been through many himself before arriving in Liverpool, he wasn’t the sort of person to go into detail about his problems. He had a stiff upper lip.

We never spoke about racism or the environment we lived in. Not once. Maybe inwardly he believed that the best way of dealing with it was ignoring it. It’s sad that I don’t really know. I wish I’d been able to speak to him: to learn from him. Outwardly, he was not an emotional man. He was very formal: smartly dressed, always in a shirt and tie. His hair was cropped short and his skin was incredibly black – much darker than mine. He was six foot four inches tall and very powerful-looking. Around friends back in Liverpool 8, he would speak in Creole.

He did not seem to appreciate that, although we lived together, my life and his life were very different and that the lives of my siblings were different as well. They managed to escape Norris Green and the problems that the area posed for a young, lonely black person pretty quickly. I did not.

When I applied for jobs, my dad did not seem to want to admit that racist attitudes were in the 1970s were prevalent and that it would stop me from finding employment. I left school without any qualifications but I wasn’t the only one. Britain remained an industrial country and it seemed as though opportunities were there even if you failed at school.

On leaving education I had to find a job. I did not realise there would be so many difficulties and barriers ahead of me. I applied for so many apprenticeship schemes. I’d get phone calls from companies and they’d invite me for face-to-face interviews, which would last no more than five minutes. There were no letters explaining why I had not been successful.

After a while it got to the point where I didn’t bother applying. The rejection wasn’t frustrating – it was soul-destroying. I didn’t feel as though I was being judged fairly. Instead, my dad concluded that I was being idle, and because of that our relationship deteriorated. It was easier for me to hustle on the streets, by which I mean dealing in stolen goods; whatever I could get my hands on. It enabled me to have a few quid in my back pocket.

Like Dad, my mum, Alice, was of West African descent. She was a gentle lady who always tried to understand the difficulties me and our Janice had to face on a daily basis.

When I close my eyes I can still hear her voice. She was well spoken and did not talk in Liverpool slang. She always wore a dress and a petticoat and had a scarf in her hair. She was mixed race, lightly skinned and very attractive. While her father came from Ghana, her mother came from a prominent white family called the Austins.

The Ethel Austin clothing retail outlet started out in Liverpool and before long there was a shop in every major town and city across the north of England. My grandmother was an Austin daughter and she had fallen in love with my Ghanaian grandfather.

Unfortunately for both of them this happened at a time when mixed relationships were not encouraged, especially in wealthy families. It led to my grandmother being shunned by the family as she chose to follow her heart instead. Sadly, it resulted in my mum and her brothers and sisters not being able to see or have any sort of relationship or contact with their grandparents or cousins.

LIVERPOOL IS A CITY APART, DIVIDED BY ACCENT AND ATTITUDE from the rest of the country. It has more in common with Marseilles, Naples or Dublin than it does with Birmingham, Sheffield or Leeds. Wave after wave of immigration, traditionally from West Africa, the Caribbean and Ireland, has seasoned its distinctive slang. Especially in the inner city, independence, verbal wit and physical robustness are prized characteristics of its people. Authority, on the other hand is begrudged.

Toxteth was and probably still is the grittiest of the inner suburbs. It is one of the few genuine multicultural areas of the city. But by the time I was born at the back-end of the 1950s, it maintained an ebullient image. Granby Street mimicked a bazaar with its Muslim butchers and Arab, Pakistani and Bangladeshi mini-markets selling exotic fruits, unusual vegetables and red-hot spices. West Indian mommas sat on the doorsteps of old dilapidated buildings where their husbands, wearing Panama hats, smoked hash, watching the days go by. There were faces of every creed and colour, while accents and dialects were also diverse. There were problems – like there are in any other metropolitan area of the country – but in the main Hindus, Muslims, Rastafarians and Christians got on pretty well.

The atmosphere spawned an exciting nightlife. From the seaward end of Parliament Street towards Smithdown Road on the way to Wavertree, it always seemed like there was somewhere to go. By the docks, the alehouses overflowed and ladies of the night hung around close by offering sexual favours to testosterone-filled partygoers and seamen who were passing through Liverpool en route to Asia or West Africa. In the Granby ward, I would watch customers pile into an array of drinking dens. There was the Gladray strip joint, the Somali Club, the Alahram, the Tudor Club, the Olympus, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean on my doorstep during weekends. All of them offered something towards the identity of Toxteth, but I was far too young to contemplate offering my custom.

I was very young when my parents announced that the family was moving from Toxteth and inland to Norris Green.

In Norris Green we lived upstairs in a maisonette on Stalisfield Avenue. Many of the other houses in the area were terraced with small gardens, but our prefab was even smaller, with a kitchen, a living room and three bedrooms.

Gradually we got to know a lot of other families in the area, mainly through my mum who, like most mums, would spend endless afternoons talking to other parents at the end of our front path. The Cavanaghs lived underneath us; there were the Nelsons next door and the Lowes just over the road. There were also the Todds, the Robinsons and the Whittakers.

Much later on, a few other black families were relocated into the area, but initially there was just us – standing out alone.

Upon being enrolled into St Teresa’s secondary school, Alan was placed in the bottom sets. It was assumed that because he was black, he was automatically uneducated. He’s a naturally intelligent person though, Alan, and within two weeks he was sent up to the top sets after they invested time in getting to know him rather than making ignorant assumptions.

Abdul converted to Islam in the 1980s. His name was Paul before. We were brought up as Christians and we went to church every weekend as children. My dad had enforced a policy in our house that if we didn’t attend church on a Sunday, we couldn’t go out with our mates until the following weekend. He never wavered from that rule, so most of the time we respected it. As soon as we had the opportunity not to go, we stopped.

The church, to me, spread misinformation: it was an institution that was supposed to promote love, wellbeing, happiness and togetherness, but in reality was executing a culture of the exact opposite values.

The rumours about priests touching up young boys would not go away. We also had a nun at school, Sister Gerard, who handed out punishment that was sadistic and evil. It did not matter whether you were a boy or a girl, whether you were guilty or innocent; you’d end up feeling her wrath.

If someone was heard talking during one of her religion lessons, one of her favourite tricks was to turn around and launch a blackboard duster or piece of chalk roughly in the area where she thought the noise was coming from.

It was a careless thing to do because, often, an innocent party would get hurt. I don’t think it mattered to her, though. All children were guilty by association.

On another occasion during a music lesson in the main hall of the school there was a song with the lyrics ‘. . . and here we sit like birds in the wilderness . . .’

Bored children changed the lyric to ‘. . . and here we shit like birds in the wilderness . . .’

Unfortunately, one girl and one boy sang the words with a bit too much vigour and were caught by the nun. She proceeded to stop the class and drag the culprits out in front of everyone by the ear, brandishing two rulers. Rather than strike the rulers across the palms of the children’s hands, she used the edge of the rulers and applied them to their knuckles.

The screams from both of them could be heard all over the school, so much so that other teachers left their classrooms to come and see what the commotion was about. This wasn’t punishment, it was abuse and humiliation of the highest scale.

As a result of this brutal act, the school changed its policies on caning and designated teachers were put in place to carry out punishments. Punishments that involved knuckles were also outlawed.

I REMEMBER TRYING TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH SOME OF THE OTHER kids in the council estate. I’d be OK playing on the street with them, but if a gang of us tried to pile into a house, the other kids’ parents would often stop me from going in. They didn’t want a black kid in the house. I didn’t understand it and the rejection hurt me. I’d speak to my mum and she’d tell me to hang in there: that people would learn to accept us. But I didn’t bother disclosing this information to my dad. He’d have probably found a way to blame me: that I wasn’t trying hard enough to fit in.

Being on the outside became normal and, as a child, I didn’t realise the severity of the effect that it must have had on me. I could hear the parents saying, ‘Don’t be bringing that lazy nigger to the door.’

If you are told you’re something often enough, you begin to believe it. Eventually, you become it. Racism can institutionalise not only the person being racist but the person on the receiving end if it happens often enough. Racism imprisons you and it’s incredibly difficult to escape.

After progressing from St Teresa’s infants’ school on Utting Avenue, my mum enrolled me at the junior school over on Storrington Avenue.

It took me a long time to begin to integrate properly. The kids would encourage one another to make jibes at me and I’d constantly be fighting because of it. I was scrapping with boys that were older and bigger. My brothers always told me to never give in to them and if I had to pick up a brick or a glass bottle to protect myself, then I should. ‘Just make sure you get your hit in first,’ they said. Abdul told me that if I had to make an example of one of them then that was what I was going to have to do.

That attitude has followed me throughout life. Quite easily, I could have killed somebody because I was acting on a basis of self-defence. If someone attacked me, I’d make sure that they knew they’d been in a fight and, sometimes, I didn’t know when to stop because I was constantly being challenged.

I look back at one fight at eleven or twelve years old as one of the defining moments of my schooldays.

During a sports day at the Scargreen playing fields, just around the corner from the Gayle house on Stalisfield Avenue, a boy came to me for no reason at all and called me a nigger, laughing at my hair. The insults were indiscriminate.

There was no messing around, so I started punching him in the head. Eventually, after kicking him to the floor, I pinned him down, grabbed his hands either side of his body, and head-butted him as hard as I could. It knocked him out. That prompted another boy to come over. ‘What have you done, you fucking nigger?’ He got hurt as well.

News of the fight spread quickly and parents of the other boys were already at school by the time I returned there. I knew it was serious. The headmaster grabbed me by my hair and hauled me into his office. No questions were asked about what happened or what had provoked the fight. All the fingers were pointed at me. My parents weren’t asked to be there and I was cast as the instigator without listening to any of the facts. The result was a suspension from school. Before I was escorted from the gates, they used corporal punishment to enforce their message and the strap was applied to my hands twelve times, an unprecedented penalty. Most kids got three straps.

The pain didn’t bother me a great deal. Neither did the suspension. I was more concerned about my dad’s reaction. I’d take the cane, strap or slipper all day long rather than explain to my dad how I’d been chucked out of school. Getting into trouble and missing education or bringing the police to our door was the worst thing you could do.