Knuckle. James McDonagh Quinn

– that he wanted me to face someone else but the club had reserved that fight for another boxer, and he felt I was being overlooked. I don’t know the ins and outs of all this and I wouldn’t like to speculate, but I don’t resent what happened. All I do know is that I was due to take part in the biggest fight of my life so far – I would have won a national title if I’d won that fight – and we were going to move abroad before it could happen.

      I wish now that I’d been given a chance to pursue that boxing career, to see whether it would have taken me along a different path than the one I ended up on, and whether it would have got me a career inside the ring. I believe I could have done something with the boxing. I believe that I could have faced the challenge. I wasn’t a sports person, so to find a sport I liked, one where I could control the opposition and do what I wanted with them, made boxing very exciting to me. I was good as a boxer and I wanted to carry on with it. I don’t know how far I could have gone but I would have loved to have had the chance to find out. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have found myself boxing out on the street.

       Chapter 3

       ENGLAND

      My father hitched up the caravan and we all set off to England on 13 April 1984. The ferry runs from Dublin to Holyhead in Anglesey, off the north-west coast of Wales, but we weren’t expecting to stay in Wales for any length of time but to drive straight on into England. When we got off the ferry, though, my father was taken to one side; it turned out that he was banned from returning to England after he was imprisoned there in the 1960s. He was supposed to stay out of the country for twenty-five years, he was told. He said he had no idea that the ban was still in force but no one took any notice of what he said and he was taken off by the police and put into a cell to await an appearance in court.

      We were stuck in Holyhead. We couldn’t leave without my father, as we didn’t know if he was going to be locked up again, told to leave the country, or what. My mother was in distress. We got in touch with some of my father’s relatives and they came to see how he was doing and whether or not there was anything they could do to help us. It was my uncle Johnny Boy, my cousin Joe Joyce, and his cousin Tim Joyce who came to see us. Paddy was 17, I was 16, and the three of them took us to the pub. We had a few drinks and then went to see my father. The policeman who took us to the cell said, ‘Lads, there’s no problem, really. He’ll go to court and they’ll deactivate the banning order and he can come out. If he’d committed crimes in Ireland it would be different, but as it stands there’ll be no problem.’ And he was right: after a couple of days my father was released and we were back on the road again.

      We headed to a little village called Wing in Buckinghamshire, between Aylesbury and Leighton Buzzard. This is where my uncle and cousins had come from to see us in Holyhead. We stayed there on their site with them for a couple of months and then moved on to Eye, outside Peterborough, where we stayed in a lay-by.

      My father and my cousin would go out looking for work together – we call it hawking. They’d spend the day hawking and then, if we were lucky, they’d come back having got themselves some work for the next day. It might be shifting something in the van, or laying tarmac on someone’s drive. If anyone needed labourers, Paddy and I would do that. They were the foremen – we were the workforce, the ones actually doing the work. Except when it came to laying tarmac; you had to be skilled to do that, not because the work required it, but because the skill came in making money out of it. The thinner the layer of tarmac you laid the less your outlay, and that’s where you made some profit. The older men were far more experienced than me and my brother at getting the thinnest layer possible, so they did that work, while we cleared the ground and kept the tools hot in the fire. That’s not to say we’d do a bad job – my father and Joe were proud of the work they did – but we weren’t doing it for love but for money. And once we had one house in a street getting their drive done, then Paddy and I would be up and down the road, asking people if they wanted theirs done too, ‘because we’re in the area doing your neighbour’s drive and we’ve a little tar left over’. That worked a treat every time.

      Meanwhile I found a boxing club to go to, the local one in Leighton Buzzard, in Bedfordshire. When I had warmed up a bit my first time there, the trainers asked if I’d go in the ring and spar with their top boxer, a 17-year-old ABA season champion. I don’t know why they asked me. Maybe they’d run out of sparring partners for him and wanted fresh meat. I suppose I can’t have looked much of a threat to him, as he was massive, like a fully grown man, with a crewcut and tattoos, and there was me, a scrawny thing of about ten stone, slightly younger than him to boot. But I’d forgotten to mention to them how much fighting I’d done in Dublin, so I had that up my sleeve, and when we got into the ring I punched this lad around the ropes, and in two or three rounds I took him apart. I kept him away from me, so he couldn’t touch me, and when I stepped in and hit him I got my punches away cleanly. He was livid but the trainers were delighted. They wanted a proper test for the guy, and they thought they’d found another boxer for their stable. ‘Have you boxed much before?’ someone now bothered to ask me. ‘Well, a little,’ I told him. ‘A year or two in Dublin. I won a few fights for the club.’ He studied me a bit. ‘We’d like to enter you for some fights here, you know.’