By age five, I was a child prodigy of the ancient world. While my teachers at Valley Primary struggled to teach the basics, I was reading Daniel Defoe and the Book of Daniel. I hated school because the system was already too slow for me; I was a time traveller trapped in a classroom where the highlight of the week was “Show and Tell.”
When my father didn’t pay the electric bill, I’d sit by candlelight and trek through the deserts of Mesopotamia and the temples of Egypt. I didn’t know then that I would eventually stand in those places for real. I just knew that books were my exit ramp out of a world that felt like it was built on shaky ground.
School was supposed to be the place where things made sense, but it only taught me that adults were liars. My mother had packed me an apple in a bright, striped C&A bag — a little piece of home I’d trusted my teacher to guard. When it vanished at break time, so did my faith in the people in charge. If the “guardians” couldn’t protect a piece of fruit, how could they protect a soul?
Mum used to walk us to Valley Primary in Shortlands — Selina and me first, then Guy, with Becky in the pram. She marched at about 30mph, no exaggeration. Even now nobody can keep up with me, and that’s down to her. We’d be strung out behind her like little tail feathers, legs going like pistons just to stay in range.
We got the usual cuts and bruises kids do, but Mum had been a trainee nurse, so we were always patched up properly — bandaged, cleaned, plasters on straight. She cooked us lovely meals too. Her crumbles were spectacular, the kind that steamed up the kitchen windows and made the whole house smell warm. Sunday roasts after the meeting were our highlight: lamb, beef, pork, all the veg and proper roasties. We’d spent the morning knocking on doors, smelling what the householders were cooking, and by the time we got home we were ravenous beasts. Whatever else was going on, she never fed us the rubbish kids get today. Everything felt homemade, solid, real. She was a great mum — right up until she got with Peter.
The Fighter and the Fall
My father had a unique talent for public humiliation. I told him I needed a football kit for school, and all the kids had their favourite team colours. A few weeks later, he presented me with one. You’d think it would be a Liverpool strip, right? He knew they were my team. Instead, he handed me a Manchester City third strip — dark blue with red and white diagonal stripes. The ridicule from the other boys was total, especially when they saw my boots, which looked like relics from the early 1900s. I stood there like a ghost of the past, wearing a Colin Bell shirt with the boots of Tommy Johnson.
Decades later, I was in Durham and saw the exact same boots in a display about Sunderland’s early players. I pointed them out to Yvonne and Shannon. “There they are,” I said. “My childhood.” They laughed — and so did I — but a part of me felt vindicated. At least now there was historical evidence that I hadn’t exaggerated. I really had been sent onto a school pitch dressed like a pre war full back.
“If Dickens had written about school PE, this would’ve been the outfit.”
But I had a secret weapon: my left foot was a two ton sledgehammer. I broke goalkeepers’ fingers like women break a nail. At the Boys Club, they called me “Dynamite Dan.” I loved that. I was fast, powerful, and developing a stocky, resilient body. I was becoming a weapon in a world that offered me no protection.
I loved Bromley, to be fair — the parks where Selina, Guy, and I spent whole summer days running wild. Those places felt endless back then, big enough to hold all the noise and trouble we carried with us. I’d spend hours on my own practising football, curling the ball again and again until I could bend it exactly where I wanted it to go — the goal from the corner flag, with both feet, until it wasn’t luck anymore but muscle memory. There was something calming about it: repetition, focus, a small piece of life I could control when everything else felt unpredictable.
Being a “Witness” kid meant I was already a ghost in the hallways. I stood outside assemblies while the “normal” kids sang about Jesus, and I sat in silence when the birthday cakes came out. Because I wasn’t allowed to hit back, I became the school’s favourite punching bag. I was a martyr in a grey school jumper — until I wasn’t.
Most Jehovah’s Witness parents had no idea what their kids went through at school. Unless they’d been Witness kids themselves, they couldn’t imagine it. School is hard enough when you’re normal. Try doing it as the child who won’t sing, won’t celebrate, won’t salute, won’t fight back, and won’t join in. No birthdays, no Christmas, no Easter. It was worse in our house because we didn’t get presents year round either, but we still had to lie to the other kids — “We don’t get birthday or Christmas presents or chocolate eggs… because we get them all year.” We didn’t. Not once.
Memoir of an Ordinary Man
By Melvyn Fairclough (With Counter-Notes by Daniel)
I was seven when I first planned to run away from home. I eventually succeeded when I was fifteen by hitch-hiking to Paris. I stayed there in a hotel for five weeks without anyone knowing. I hoped to become an artist, penniless in a garret and die of tuberculosis before I got old at thirty. I’d become famous posthumously.
He didn’t achieve immortality by dying beautifully, in that tragic way, in a Parisian garret of TB like Modigliani — he died on his bathroom floor in Kent, like Elvis, minus the fame. What makes it sad is that he had the talent — real talent — to be an artist, a great photographer, a gifted furniture restorer, even an author. But he let his libido lead him to places his talent never could.
I mean that. I always saw him as a flawed genius, and all I ever wanted was for him to be proud of me. I never cared about money or things — I just wanted him to look at me the way I looked at him. The worst thing is he died without ever fulfilling that wish.
My first memory, however, if I have read the signals correctly, was of being in my mother’s womb. This particular recollection began when I was about two years old and continued until I was at least six. Every night, during this period, as I fell asleep, an odd sensation came over me. It was the feeling of being enshrouded in something that was both smooth and rough at the same time. I didn’t know what it was but sensed it was a memory that I was recalling. I tried my hardest to remember where and when the original experience occurred.
As a young adult, having learned something about human reproduction, it finally dawned upon me that the only significant length of time before this period was during the weeks preceding my birth. It occurred to me that the roughness I was remembering was the rough inner surface of my mother’s womb. The smooth sensation was the amniotic fluid. I have since read that recent research concluded that pre-birth memories, though uncommon, are not unique.
He claimed he remembered the inside of the womb. In truth, he spent his whole life trying to crawl back into a world where he was the centre of everything — and it becomes painfully clear when you realise he spent the next seventy nine years trying to get back into every womb he could find.
My boyhood heroes in the 1950s were Tarzan, Superman, Robin Hood and the biblical Samson whose story, when I discovered it, I read and reread. Jesus too became a hero as a result of attending afternoon Sunday School. Africa was too far for me to run away to and live the way Tarzan did. Also, I didn’t have the money for the ship or air fare. I would never be as strong as Samson because my mother wouldn’t let me grow my hair long until the 1960s arrived, when it became fashionable. Superman was from another planet and was a powerful messianic saviour, but not as much as Jesus. Jesus, like Superman, was from outer space, if that is where heaven is. Also, I wasn’t from another planet. Unlike Superman I couldn’t fly, although I did every night in my dreams. I can’t remember any occasion before the age of ten walking down stairs after waking up and getting out of bed. I always flew down. I must have still been half-asleep and half-dreaming.
I couldn’t be like Jesus because he was the only begotten son of God who was in heaven and I was the only begotten son of Ernest Fairclough who came from Bolton.
He even fancied himself a bit like Samson — a man of destiny and divine purpose — but the only thing he ever truly dedicated himself to was whichever woman his libido pointed him toward. Samson lost his power when Delilah cut his hair; Dad never needed a Delilah. Male pattern baldness beat her to it, and he still managed to ruin lives without the slightest hint of divine intervention.
When I was Ten, I believed that if I had enough faith in God to protect me from harm, I could jump off a cliff to fly and not crash to the ground. I had an image of this cliff in my mind. It was not a massively high cliff like you might find in the Grand Canyon, or even our own Lake District. No, the one I saw in my mind’s eye was just high enough to ensure that anyone jumping off it would certainly not live to tell the tale. I intended to put a note in my pocket, beforehand that if I did die the person finding the note would read that I had not deliberately killed myself. After all, I read in The News Chronicle that suicide was a crime. I later reasoned that the mere act of writing that note would show I did not have enough faith and so I decided against the idea.
That leaves Robin Hood. My plan was to live in Sherwood Forest and live off venison for the rest of my days. I was seven in 1952 and that year Walt Disney’s The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men was on at the Odeon in Radcliffe, my home town in Lancashire. The film was shot in Sherwood Forest. Richard Todd played Robin and Joan Rice played Maid Marian. I haven’t looked up these names, I do actually remember sixty-eight-years later (When I first started writing this). It demonstrates how immersed I was in the story. Later that year a book based on the film was published. I do not recall the name of the woman who played King John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but I recognised her as the actress that played Miss Havisham in David Lean’s version of Great Expectations.
One day I got into trouble with my parents over something I can’t now remember, so I planned to run away early the next morning. I intended to make sure I was seen by a railway guard at Radcliffe Station, boarding the train to London. That way the police would be looking for me in the capital, unaware that I had jumped off the train as it passed Nottingham, making my way to Sherwood. A map of England showed that Radcliffe was in the top left-hand corner and London in the bottom right-hand corner, with Nottingham in the middle. So, I knew my plan would work.
My treasured copy of my Robin Hood book along with my bow and arrows and Robin Hood outfit, were packed into a sailor’s valise we had. Being of a practical disposition I also packed my one-man bivouac tent, a spare shirt, a vest and underpants and a change of socks.
My Mam usually rose at 7am, so that morning I rose at six, went into the spare room for the packed valise and when I got to the top of the stairs my mother came out of her bedroom.
"What are you doing up and dressed so early. What are you up to?" She demanded.
"I’m going. I’m going to live in Sherwood Forest."
"Get back ter bed yer daft bugger." So, I did.
It was to be another five years before I discovered that no trains ever ran from Radcliffe directly to London and another twenty years before I first tasted venison.
Even at ten he was auditioning for a life that didn’t exist — cliff flying, Sherwood Forest, venison for breakfast, and a railway guard as his unwitting accomplice. He wasn’t dreaming of escape; he was dreaming of significance. The boy who thought faith could make him fly became the man who thought fantasy could excuse him from responsibility.
My favourite part of his story is the only moment anyone ever brought him back to earth: my grandmother catching him at the top of the stairs with a packed valise and telling him, “Get back ter bed yer daft bugger.” If only someone had done that later in life. Instead, he never stopped leaping — into fantasies, into women, into disasters — and the rest of us were left to deal with the landing.
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