Thicker Than Water

His mum died when he was eight - of what my mum and dad, when they talked about it at all, called ‘the big C’ - and the rest of his growing-up followed a template of his own making. His dad worked at the Metal Box, then at Dunlop, then at Mother’s Pride, racing ahead of the bowwave of industrial collapse and chasing the work wherever it could be found. He turned his three sons over to his elderly mother to look after when he was away, but she was too old and they were too wayward, so they did their own thing and she lied to cover their tracks.

Kenny was the toughest of a tough brood - only two years older than me if we’re talking strict chronology, but he was the kind of kid who seems to go straight from infancy to adolescence, becoming big and muscular and intractable and getting into the kind of fights that leave blood on the pavement while his peers were still making the difficult transition to lace-up shoes.

He was a bully’s bully, ruthless and arbitrary to a fault, and he brought fear and pain into my life on a number of occasions.

In the urban wastelands that we swept through like a swarm of grubby locusts, he was a moving hazard that none of us ever figured out how to negotiate. Once he decided he was going to write his name on all the younger kids in the street - a literal sign of his authority over us. His rough-hewn scrawl on my upper arm turned into an archipelago of bruises that lasted a good few days after the ink had faded.

Another time he pushed me out of an apple tree that we were both scrumping from, in the high-walled cider orchard behind Walton hospital.

We were twenty feet or so above the ground and I would have broken a leg or maybe my back if I’d fallen the full distance. As it was, I slammed into a branch four or five feet below the one I’d fallen from and managed to cling onto it. Kenny laughed uproariously: something about the spectacle of me dangling over nothing with my legs churning the air struck him as great slapstick humour. When my brother Matt climbed down to rescue me, Kenny pelted him with apples and swore at him, threatening to push him out of the tree too if he didn’t leave me to struggle back up onto the branch by myself. Matt ignored him and hauled me to safety, crab apples raining down around the pair of us.

None of this was personal, though: Kenny terrorised everyone with equal enthusiasm, including his own two kid brothers, Ronnie and Steven.