A moment that changed me: I saw my father in court – and knew I had to turn my life around
The Guardian: When I was a child, and friends asked me what I would do if I ever met my dad, I always replied that if I had a gun I would shoot him. I was a young teen in a small east Yorkshire market town with, at best, minor connections to a burgeoning petty criminal underworld. Even if I had been able to get a gun, I would have been more likely to shoot off a finger in error than aim correctly at my absent father. It was an empty threat that clearly revealed a deep, simmering anger.
My mum was a teenage tearaway who met an older guy, left school at 16, ran off to get married, and had me weeks after her 17th birthday. He turned out to be a violent alcoholic who was abusive. Thankfully, bravely, she left him before I was two, worried about the repercussions of me reaching an age when I could talk back. My dad did a runner to avoid paying child support and that was the last we heard of him. Until 14 years later, when the letterbox clattered open one morning: he had been found and summoned to court, in relation to the thousands owed, and Mum had to go. I insisted I go too.
Leading up to this, I had been on rocky terrain. I’d been suspended from school; fighting, drugs and crime were becoming an inescapable part of friends’ lives and encroaching on mine. One particularly terrifying day, involving buckets of weed and a psychotic-episode-inducing knock to the head, resulted in a friend trying to kill me. I was hardly thriving, and the paths that lay ahead contained some troubling signposts.
My situation was an amalgam of boredom, idiocy, hormones, white cider and, with hindsight, some unresolved feelings of hatred towards a man who never played any significant part in my life but still cast a looming shadow over it. I was never angry with my dad for not being there. You can’t miss what you’ve never had and I didn’t feel like anything was absent – we were super-broke, but Mum and I were a good little team. Any anger came purely from knowing what she had been through, and perhaps feelings of helplessness around it. Courtrooms truly are life-sucking forces. Bad news hangs in the air like an impenetrable fog – every room having absorbed a lifetime of heartache, pain, misery and grief. Everything is ominous grey or faded brown. The grand courtrooms I had seen in films, filled with suited mobsters awaiting their fate, had bent my reality and seriously ill-prepared me for the bleak realities of Bridlington magistrates court.
My visions of revenge dissipated as soon as my dad walked into the waiting room. In a crumpled suit, with his mum in tow, he shuffled to a seat with his eyes glued to the floor.