Chris Eubank: The Autobiography. Chris Eubank

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СКАЧАТЬ nostalgic bric-a-brac from over the years. There was also money lying around.

      In those days, I never had a penny, so I started to take $20 bills from Dorothy’s room. This went on for about two years and added up to over $2000. I knew it was wrong, but I assuaged my guilt by telling myself that Dorothy wasn’t using the money and my mother didn’t notice.

      There are certain things you do in your life that you regret but, if you put them right, you feel so much better. I knew I had to give that money back, especially when it became clear Dorothy was becoming progressively more fragile. By now, my fledgling boxing career had progressed quite nicely and I was taking bouts in England, flying back and forth between Brighton and New York. At that point, I was earning a small weekly allowance plus £700 a fight, so I saved up the equivalent of $2500 over a period of months and the very next time I visited Dorothy, I put the money back in her home. If I hadn’t done that, my indiscretion would have weighed very heavily on my mind. Thankfully, I paid her back.

      Dorothy died two weeks later.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

       A HARD-KNOCKS LIFE

      My father, Irvin Eubank, was a great storyteller. One of the many anecdotes he recounted described how he acquired his limp. When he was just a toddler, his own father had put some breadfruit in the stove. He was told not to take the breadfruit out and eat it, which, of course, was exactly what he did when he found himself alone for a few moments. When his father found out, he slashed the youngster’s lower leg with a machete. My father had a severely hard life, but he would have told this tale to one person one way and told another person a totally different story! Another version had him being cut out of a terrible car wreck and losing his calf muscle in the process. He was such a character, and I see some of that in myself.

      He was born on 28 August 1929, in the district of Mount Airey, Clarendon, in Jamaica. He cut sugar cane in the fields for most of his younger years. That is where he met and eventually married my mother Ena who was then, and always will be, deeply religious. She was well known in church circles in Clarendon. She had been married previously and had five children, my older half-brothers and sisters, whom I rarely see. My mother was born on 15 March 1931 in Clarendon. She left school aged 17 and became a nurse’s domestic helper. She met her first husband and married him at the age of 2 5, but unfortunately he died only three years later, leaving my mother on her own with their five children. Then, in 1960, she met my father.

      My father saved diligently for many years for the plane fares to migrate to the UK, stuffing his hard-earned cash under a mattress until such a time as the move could be made. They settled in south London and life was very difficult, an endless grind of poverty and hard work. I was born in East Dulwich on 8 August 1966, their fifth child, after David, the twins Simon and Peter, and Joycelyn. My mother told me their main goal was to get their own home and to do so with five kids around was very hard. So, we were sent to Jamaica to be with our grandmother, on my mother’s side, when I was still only a baby. My earliest memory is of being pulled on a banana leaf in the hills by my cousin Woodia. Other than that, I have no recollection of my time there. My grandmother was called Constance, but we called her ‘Uncun’. She has passed away now. When she was still alive and I had become world champion, I hired and flew in a helicopter packed with supplies of clothes and foodstuffs to Callington, the mountain-top village where she lived. To this day, when I travel to Jamaica, they say, ‘You’re the man who came in the helicopter.’

      My mother visited as often as she could and was always sending money over too. On one of these visits, she came with the good news that they now had a house in Crystal Palace Road in south east London. Taking fright at how ill we looked, she convinced herself that we were malnourished, knowing as she did how tough life can be in the countryside of Jamaica. She immediately rounded up the four boys, packed our belongings and took us back to England, leaving Joycelyn to stay with grandmother.

      I don’t remember coming back from Jamaica, but I have clear recollections of my early life back in the UK. We lived in various council estates in London, including Crystal Palace Road, Peckham, Stoke Newington, Hackney and Dalston. My first memory in the UK was of my mother slapping me senseless for pretending I had a stomach ache, when I actually had four packets of Wotsits shoved underneath my coat that I had stolen from a sweet shop while with her in Stoke Newington. I was also quite adept at stealing from the bread van owned by the nearby bakery.

      I started smoking at six years old. I used to follow my brothers and go round to Old Ed’s house nearby. He must have been in his late eighties and used to give us cigarettes. If he wasn’t around, I would make roll-ups by stealing Old Holborn from my father’s tobacco tin as he was sleeping on the settee.

      Although at times we were desperately poor, I was a happy child. I adored the very ground my mother walked on, still do. I went everywhere with her. Unconsciously I used to follow her every step around the house. Sometimes she would suddenly stop, playfully stick her bum out and boom! I’d crash into her backside. I adored her, my mum. She ruled with a firm hand too – in Jamaican households you do what you are told and you do it the first time. That said, she only used to beat me with a foam slipper which weighed about two grammes! It was like being hit with a piece of paper, but I was more concerned about the expression on her face. I was desperate not to upset her. She never smacked me with her hand and my father only ever used a belt.

      Despite my father’s difficult circumstances, he always said he had a good life. Why? Because he never let it weigh him down, he never had a chip on his shoulder. These are two facets of his personality that I have inherited and are vital factors in my psyche and subsequent success. Like father like son.

      At first, life in the UK had been happy and in 1974 my parents were married in Hackney. However, shortly after, when I was eight, my mother left my father and went to live in New York. I didn’t see her very often between her leaving and me travelling to New York aged 16. It wasn’t until then that I found out one of the reasons why she had left. I kept asking over the space of a year why she had moved away; she broke down and explained the situation to me several times. She told me that when she would come in the front door another woman would leave out the back. He was a womaniser and she had had enough. At least, that’s what she told me. That is not what I subsequently found out to be the case, but I will come to that later in my story. Even then, as a 16-year-old boy, I knew that this is what some men are like, and I did not think ill of my father. The laws of morality are expounded by the scriptures but, to some people, actually applying these principles can prove very testing. I understand that a lot of men stray. I know men who stray; that is life.

      Back in 1974, however, leaving the marital home was not a decision my mother could have taken lightly, especially in the light of her deeply religious views. I think removing herself from that situation as a wife was relatively easy; what was hard was walking away from her children.

      Growing up without my mother, I knew that we had very little money even though my father worked incredibly hard. He took a job at the Ford plant in Dagenham, where he smoothed iron on long shifts, six days on days, six days on nights. He was a hard man, not least because he’d had a tough upbringing himself, but also this was back-breaking work for a pittance of pay. I can vividly recall us all getting up at 5am to jump-start his Ford Cortina so he could get to work. He earned £90 a week.

      It is fair to say that my father was a disciplinarian. However, I wouldn’t say my upbringing was a hard life; it was correct. We got the strap as punishment so often that I began to become quite apprehensive of him. In retrospect, I have no problems whatsoever with him using the strap, even though I would not do the СКАЧАТЬ