Copyright

HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Kerry Irving 2020

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

All photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise credited

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Kerry Irving asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008353490

Ebook Edition: March 2020 ISBN: 9780008353506

Version: 2020-06-08

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 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008353490

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Contents

6  Dedication

7  Prologue

8  Part One

9  1 A Boy on the Beach

10  2 End of an Idyll

11  3 Hard Times

12  4 Into the Wild

13  5 School of Life

14  6 New Horizons

15  7 About Zak

16  8 Loss and Love

17  Part Two

18  9 The Accident

19  10 A Cold, Dark Place

20  11 Out of Milk

21  12 Small Steps

22  13 Max and Me

23  14 Opening Doors

24  15 The Head of Security

25  16 Lost and Found

26  17 Stay with Me

27  18 Home

28  Part Three

29  19 Beyond Ben Nevis

30  20 Max Out in the Lake District

31  21 The Great Flood

32  22 Reaching Out

33  23 And Then There was Paddy …

34  24 Meet and Greet

35  25 Star Springers

36  26 The Notorious Brown Leg Gang

37  27 From the Yard to the Palace

38  Acknowledgements

39  Picture Section

40  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the animals

who have ever helped a human.

They walk beside us when we

are beside ourselves.

Prologue

‘Are you ready, Max? If anyone’s going to help me do this, it’s you.’

The dog sitting at my side looks up and meets my gaze. His tail swishes back and forth across the ground, sweeping pine needles aside. Behind us is the little tent we’ve just slept in overnight in preparation for this day. In the distance, beyond the forests, crested by snow and looming high against the dawn sky, stands a rocky summit that I hope to conquer.

Once upon a time, the prospect of hiking up Ben Nevis would be something I’d just take in my stride. People from all around the world come to this pocket of Scotland to follow the path to the top. Today, it represents something so much more than Britain’s highest mountain. For me, this is a challenge that until recently I’d have considered impossible. It is, I believe, a chance for me to face my fears.

If it wasn’t for Max, in fact, I wouldn’t be here at all.

‘Let’s go,’ I say, and so we begin our walk.

We’re up so early, there’s nobody else around. Early bars of sunshine push through the forest and fall across the path. Max trots ahead, nose to the ground and with his shoulders moving like pistons, before circling back around with an eye on me. He’s such a watchful dog. It’s characteristic of his breed, but there’s something special about this Springer Spaniel. Nobody understands me better than Max, or knows the sense of trepidation in my mind as we negotiate a stile and begin the challenge that could make or break me. Alone, it would be very easy for me to just turn around now, head home and say, ‘Yeah, it’s amazing at the top!’ and nobody would be any the wiser. With Max here, I’m reminded that I’d only be fooling myself.

I decided to leave at this time for two reasons. Moving at my pace, it’s going to take a lot longer than most for us to reach the very top. Every step I take requires care and consideration, while I’m constantly braced for a jolt of pain that could stop me dead. We’re following the pony track, which is also known as the tourist route. By mid-morning, I could expect the path that begins to zigzag across the mountain’s lower flanks to fill with hikers and that’s the main reason why I’ve set out so early. I don’t want anyone to see me but my dog. Right now, the last thing I need is for some 75-year-old carrying a big rucksack to go bounding past and then wonder what’s keeping a seemingly fit man in his forties from going at the same pace. Part of the problem, I always think, is that I look fine from the outside. In reality, I have to watch every footstep because one slip could lead to searing pain.

It’s hard for me to relax, but I never feel under pressure from Max to move faster. He’s off the lead and investigating the path as if to check it’s safe for me. He’s never been the kind of dog to race off, into a world of his own, or to leave me feeling as if I’m holding him up. Nor does he stick so rigidly at my side that I risk tripping over him. That’s not what makes him tick and one of many reasons why we’ve bonded this closely. He gives me space to breathe along with the sense that I’m not alone.

Max is here for me, just as I’m here for him. We’re doing this together because only he understands that if it all goes wrong then I tried my very best. If I’m going to fail, I’ll do so with just Max. He’s my little friend, my constant companion and guardian angel rolled into one frequently muddy, slightly smelly Spaniel.

We pick our way up the path, clambering over loose stone and steps cut into the hillside. I stop frequently just so I can get my breath and also to enjoy the view. This is something I have thought about doing for some time and it’s hard to believe I’m actually here. As the sun is only just climbing into the sky the temperature is perfect. It’s a crystal-clear day, with a freshening breeze that stiffens up as we go. I have supplies for us both, but right now, Max is focused on not dropping his stick. He’s just picked it up from a gulley and I can be sure he’ll carry it all the way to the top and back down again. Once he commits to something, he never gives up and I remind myself of this as I battle my misgivings about coming so far.

It had taken us over half a day to drive here from my home in the Lake District. The journey turned out to be torturous for me. It was probably the furthest I’d gone since my life changed so dramatically several years previously. Behind the wheel, I found that everything from braking to turning caused shooting pains to travel from my neck and radiate through my back and arms. Max travelled up front in the passenger seat beside me. It’s where he chooses to sit and I love having him by my side – especially during testing times.

Despite hours of discomfort on the road, I was excited about the trip. It’s all about my dog and me. A boys’ weekend away. It was only after we arrived at the campsite, and I had put up the tent, that the effort of just getting here caught up with me. All I wanted to do was sleep. It was the first time that Max had spent a night under canvas, however. I wasn’t even sure he’d settle. He sniffed around while I laid out my sleeping bag and his blanket. Then I invited him inside.

Max slipped in without hesitation, curled up as if this was where he belonged, and that was that.

We spent the next day just enjoying short walks through the woodland at the foot of the mountain. I needed to rest, recover my strength and prepare for the climb. I didn’t sleep much overnight, but once we had set off and left the pine trees behind us I found that my reservations about this hike started to lift. We have quite a distance to go, but Max isn’t just here for the fresh air, sights and sounds. He’s a comforting presence, content for me to move at my own pace and with something in those long looks he gives me that says: ‘I’m here for you.’

Ben Nevis is one of those mountains you can’t truly appreciate from a picture. It’s only when you’re here, looking up at the summit, that you think: ‘Wow, that’s pretty big!’ It’s a fair distance to the top and not the easiest hike. I had studied the map, only to discover that the path had been redirected due to erosion. It means I have to follow a bigger loop and I’m not prepared for that. I have to keep stopping from about a third of the way up to loosen my shoulders. This is down to the fact that I’ve been tensing my body as I walk, fearful one wrong footing would drop me to the ground in agony. At one point, where the path cuts around an outcrop, I stop and lean against it just to shake out the tension. Max is at my side immediately, looking up at me as the breeze ruffles his long ears.

‘I’m not giving up,’ I assure him. ‘Have faith, we can do this.’

The terrain begins to change as we climb higher. For one thing, the steps become bigger and more testing. So, one minute I’m walking normally and the next I’m forced out of my comfort zone as I grab at grass clumps and rocks to haul myself upwards. That’s when it starts to kick in what a big deal this is for me. At the same time, we’ve reached a point where I can look out across lochs and tarns at a seemingly infinite horizon. It makes me realise how far we’ve climbed and that there can be no stopping us now.

When we reach the mountain’s snowline, Max switches into a different gear. He loves the snow and as he hasn’t seen any since the winter, it’s a chance to come into his own as a Springer Spaniel by leaping into the drifts. It makes me smile to watch him bounding, his paws sinking into the powdery drifts, and though I can hardly follow suit, it’s enough to push me onwards.

Shortly afterwards, with one of my regular checks to see how far we’ve come, I spot a figure striding towards us. He’s a long way down, but moving so much faster than anything I could manage, and that focuses my attention. I’m happy being alone with Max, but having set off so early, I’ve got it into my head that I could be the first to reach the summit that day. I’m hardly the first to try conquering Ben Nevis, but just then I feel like a pioneer and I don’t want anyone to get there before me.

‘Let’s push on,’ I say, and not just to Max.

We don’t have much further to climb, but the hiker continues to close the gap. I try not to panic, or overreach myself, because the last thing I want this far from help is to find myself locked up in agony. To focus, I kept my gaze trained on Max. I remind myself just where this began, at a point in my life that could not get any lower, and how close we are to reaching a high.

Towards the summit, the path opens up onto a stony plateau. It’s bitterly cold at this height, much of which is down to the wind chill, and so I’m glad that I’ve come out in my extreme weather hiking gear. With my eyes smarting, I sight the famous cairn a short distance ahead: a 10-foot pillar of stones that also serves as a trig point to help climbers and hikers orientate themselves. It also marks the very top of Ben Nevis. My heart begins to gallop. I check over my shoulder once again. The hiker is now close enough for me to determine it’s a young man, and yet despite his brisk pace there’s no way now that he can overtake me.

‘Max,’ I declare, and he registers my voice immediately, ‘we made it.’

I lay my hand on the cairn with Max at my side and my eyes brimming with tears. What had seemed all but unthinkable to me only recently has become a reality. We have scaled well over 1,300 metres from the campsite to be here. It’s taken us three and a half hours and I stand upon that summit a changed man, someone who could do anything from this moment on. I feel elated, relieved, and with so much love for my loyal little friend.

‘Well done!’ The voice behind me catches me by surprise. I turn to face the hiker who had been closing in on us. He beams broadly and reaches down to ruffle Max’s head.

‘Congratulations to you, too,’ I say, and smile cheekily at him. ‘You’re the second person on the summit today. The third if you include my dog.’

The hiker, a tourist from Germany, laughs and shakes my hand. We chat for a couple of minutes before he sets off to take in the view from the other side of the plateau. I am quite content to sit against the cairn, out of the wind, and just relish this moment. From my pack, I fish out a drinking bowl for Max and a thermos of water for us to share, along with some treats to mark our achievement. I let Max enjoy the gravy bones while I eat a slice of malt loaf. I had packed a banana in an outside pocket of my pack, but it turns out it’s frozen solid. I don’t keep my gloves off for long.

It’s too cold to stay at the summit for more than a few minutes. Before we leave, however, I have one final thing to do. Even before I press the phone to my ear I have tears in my eyes once again. After everything we’ve been through, my emotions are never far from the surface.

‘Ange?’ I say when my wife answers my call. ‘It’s me, Kerry. We’ve done it!’

‘Done what?’ she says after a pause and then seems to remind herself. ‘Oh, the climb.’

‘We’re at the top! Ben Nevis! Max and me, we made it all the way.’

‘Well, that’s nice,’ she says cheerily and I know just what this means. Angela works as a hairdresser from home. Her friendly but formal tone tells me she has a customer with her just then. Alone, she wouldn’t hold back like this. I smile to myself, tell her I love her and will call again when we reach the campsite. ‘Yes, that would be great,’ she says to sign off. ‘Thanks very much! I’ll see you soon.’

I stow my phone while grinning at Max. It feels like he knows just what’s going on at home as well. Then I rise carefully to my feet and look around one final time. With magnificent views across the rugged wilderness below, I feel like a king of the world and so proud to have Max alongside me. I hope he shares my sense of achievement for in recent times we have both come such a long way.

‘Let’s roll,’ I say, because this isn’t the end of our journey. With Max at my side, it’s just the beginning.

Part One

1

A Boy on the Beach

My home is in the Lake District, and also my heart. It’s where I belong, and that feeling of being rooted is so important to me. The rugged landscape is where I am happiest. It’s also seen me at a desperate low point in my life, and where I met a very special dog who changed everything. The fells shape the backdrop to the story of Max and me, along with majestic expanses of water that reflect the sky above, and yet my earliest memories aren’t from here. Those were formed far from the northwest of England, in a small coastal town called Fish Hoek on South Africa’s Cape Peninsula.

I was born in Shropshire, the youngest of three boys. I have never known why we were there when I arrived. We just didn’t stay for long enough to set down any kind of roots. My dad was a naval engineer. He spent a great deal of time at sea. Soon after my arrival in the early sixties he was posted abroad. Rather than stay behind, my mum packed up our belongings and we took the long trip by boat to start a new life halfway around the globe. As a family, we went on to spend five happy years in a world of our own.

The one thing I remember most about that time is the beach. The sand was the colour of bleached bone, backed by a string of pastel-painted beach huts overlooking a boundless blue bay. I learned to crawl and walk there, and splash about it in the surf under supervision from my mum. Sharks patrolled the waters around the cape, so she never let me stray. During the heat of the day, we took to the shade and drank sugar cane water. At low tide, I developed a fascination for picking over rock pools in search of crabs. Sometimes I would test my parents by smuggling home my new crustacean friends in a bucket for a sleepover under my bed.

When I think back to those formative years, it’s really just a melting pot of images, sounds, tastes and smells, from the giant clouds that would cluster over the mountain ranges to the sea salt on my skin. There is no narrative in my mind. I just remember it to be a safe and pleasant time, with no sense that everything was set to change.

We returned to the UK when my father’s navy service came to an end after years of working on ships in dock and at sea, but by then my parents felt it was time to move on. Both my mum and dad come from Penrith, a small market town just east of the Lakes in Cumbria’s Eden Valley, and so they decided to return to their roots.

Despite leaving a job he loved, my dad’s years of experience earned him solid employment in the area as a service engineer for a washing-machine manufacturer. That afforded us a nice house in a little terrace under the railway bridge within view of open countryside and the distant trace of the fells beyond. Best of all, for a lad my age, was the fact that we were just a stone’s throw from a farm. I loved to visit the animals. I was enamoured by the pigs and the chickens. I’d ask my older brothers if they would take me, but more often than not they’d each be doing their own thing. They didn’t dislike me, I was just too young for them. So, when they took off without me, I would drift down the track to the farm gate to see my livestock friends. I was quite happy on my own, I always have been. You could say that was the beginning of my life as a loner, but at the time I didn’t see it that way. In fact, once that little boy made it through the farm gate, he found himself in good company.

Talking to the animals seemed like the most natural thing in the world to me. Yes, it’s what kids do, but I’ve never grown out of it! There’s something magical when you know they’re listening. It’s a connection, and we all need those in life. More than anything, however, I loved to be outdoors. I liked the birdsong and the breeze on my face and the sense that I could go anywhere. I was happy in my own company; the kind of boy who could pick up a stick and transform it into a sword in my imagination, or create a den from branches and ferns and turn it into a castle. I was also oblivious to any sense of danger. I liked to play down by the river, where the current could pick up forcefully whenever rainwater drained off the hills. Even the abandoned steam train line was another good draw for me. It had once been the main connection between Penrith and Keswick in the Lakes. In those days, the stoker on board the train would discard lumps of coal onto the side of the track if they were too big for the firebox. Knowing that I liked to spend time there, my dad would even send me down with a bucket to pick up what I could find for the fire.

While I felt at home outside, life inside seemed increasingly uncomfortable. I would come back to find an air of tension between my parents. I was too young to understand what had come between them; I just knew something wasn’t right.

To bring us together, my dad came home one day with a Collie. We called him Rex, which was almost compulsory as a dog name in those days. I was too young to think of Rex as my dog. Still, I considered him to be one of the family. I used to take him for walks across the fields – I think we both got cabin fever quite quickly inside the house, and so it was a good excuse to get out for a short while. I didn’t feel as if I was in charge, watching him run and gambol through the grass and the reed beds. It just seemed like we were equals in the world.

We also took on a cat, but my father didn’t get on with it at all. I suspect the feeling was mutual, because the cat always made himself scarce whenever he was around. Even so, my dad considered him to be a nuisance we didn’t need. One morning, I was told the cat had gone to live on a farm across town. I remember listening to my father explain his absence while wondering what had caused the livid scratches on his forearms. Who knows? It may well be that the innocence of childhood protected me from the whole story, which was certainly the case when it came to the state of my parents’ marriage.

2

End of an Idyll

‘Get out! And don’t come back!’

When my dad shoved my mum from the house, I just stood and watched in shock. A shouting match had broken out just moments earlier, which was so intense that neither of them seemed to register that I was in the kitchen with them.

‘Stop, Dad!’ I cried, but he was too busy blocking the door with his shoulder as my mum fought to get back in. ‘Stop it!’

Whatever had caused them to go to war like this, I was caught in the middle. I had never seen Dad this furious before, while Mum screamed and hammered on the door so forcefully I wanted to cover my ears.

‘Give me my boys!’ she yelled. ‘Kerry!’

I tried to pull my dad away, but I was only little and had never felt so useless. Mum even tried to climb in through the kitchen window, but he just pushed her back.

‘Mum!’ I cried hysterically, ‘I want Mum!’

It was a fight I will never forget, and one that saw my parents’ marriage end in wreckage. Mum moved out that day and took me with her, while my two brothers stayed with Dad. There was no negotiation or calm conversation, I just threw myself on Mum at the first opportunity while Dad just vowed that it was over between them.

With a suitcase packed in a hurry, we went to stay with her parents in Penrith. They were old school about marriage, and failed to understand why she and my dad could even consider separating as an option. Still, they took us in. When my mum stopped crying she kept telling me that she loved me and that everything would be okay. I was barely eight years old, however I had seen and heard things that just undermined my place in the world. I’d spent more of my life in South Africa than here, and now that happy boy on the beach had all but disappeared into the past. At such a young age I just struggled to process what was going on. On the one hand I was told not to worry, and on the other, it was just there under the surface all the time.

The fight I had witnessed turned out to be the opening conflict in a horrible, messy divorce. As children, we became weapons in a war. What’s more, my older brothers resented the fact somehow I managed to stay with Mum and left them behind. They just made me feel guilty when I saw them, as if I had let them down. At the same time, life at my grandparents’ house wasn’t easy. While I felt deeply unsettled at being uprooted without warning, my grandmother had Parkinson’s disease. I had no understanding of what that meant, of course. I just saw the symptoms: the tremors, sense of detachment and the slowness of movement, and with no explanation, she scared me. I couldn’t relax in the house, fearing she might creep in at any moment. We were also some distance from the countryside. Living in a built-up area just wasn’t the same. At times when I needed space, I had nowhere to go.

The only saving grace was my grandfather and his outside interests. He had an allotment nearby, which was his pride and joy. While he had spent most of his life in my grandmother’s shadow, he came into his own with a spade in his hand, and I found his knowledge mesmerising. He showed me how to grow vegetables from seed in his greenhouse, plant them out at the right time and care for them as they grew. In summer, we’d sit outside to eat tomatoes picked straight from the vine. I’d make a complete mess of mine, but the taste and that fresh, tangy aroma was bewitching. My grandfather also loved to play lawn bowls. He spent a lot of time at the club opposite the railway station in Penrith. I have fond memories of just watching a game shape up and feeling like I was on his team. He was a really good player as well. When he died some years later, his ashes were scattered on the green there.

As well as my grandfather’s allotment, the bowling club became another place where I could go to escape from the house. It also took my mind off the sense of longing I felt every time I thought about my brothers and my dad. Mum was doing her very best for me, of course, but with the divorce going through, she had her issues. It was just a confusing time. If I went back, Dad would try to score points against Mum, and she would do the same when I returned. Over time, the relationship between them just broke down completely, while my brothers continued to give me a hard time about living apart from them. I felt I had to make it up to them somehow and badgered them to help me find parts for a big go-kart we used to play with in Cape Town. It had been shipped back in several sea chests, but bits had gone missing en route. They didn’t want to know, much to my dismay, and yet all I wanted was to fix things.

‘Mum,’ I said one day, and it took me all the courage I could muster, ‘I want to be with my brothers.’

Quietly, on the inside, I imagined hearing this from her youngest son must have broken her. But from where I was sitting across from her at supper one day, she offered me a brave smile and then promised she’d see what could be done. In reality, as my parents had stopped speaking to each other, they couldn’t come close to an amicable agreement. The matter was dragged into the divorce proceedings and ended up going to court. It meant I had to sit in stuffy side rooms with solicitors and a panel of strange people asking me questions about who I wanted to live with.

By now, it was clear that my mum didn’t want me to leave her. That made it so hard for me to speak up and say that’s what I wanted to do. I felt like I was letting her down, but they asked me to be honest and so I did as I was told. There was no way I could make everyone happy; all I could do was be truthful and the hard fact was that I felt miserable away from my brothers. In lots of ways, when the court made the decision for me to rejoin them, it just made things so much worse between my parents. I moved back to the terrace, and while I found more life there, my mum didn’t like it all. She started accusing Dad of manipulating me behind her back, and he lashed out in return with similar force. They would talk badly about each other to me, and I just found it confusing and upsetting.

I was a primary school kid and the two people who were supposed to take care of me were at war with each other. All trust between them had completely broken down and I was caught in the middle. I had wanted to be with my brothers, but frankly, they were rarely at home. I couldn’t blame them, given the way Dad spoke about Mum. In fact, soon after I moved back, my older brother fell out with him. He left to join our mother, before turning 18 shortly after that and striking out on his own. Surrounded by upset and conflict, I found myself back in a world of my own with Rex and the farm animals for company and adventures to be had across the countryside trails.

Despite the turbulence that engulfed my parents, we did have what seemed like good times. At the end of the week, Dad would come home from work and take us all out to the pub with him. He’d pick us up in his transit van and we’d drive out for the evening. We were too young to join him at the bar. Instead, we’d wait inside the van or in the beer garden and he would bring us a shandy each and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. It felt like a treat, even if we had effectively been left to our own devices. In my eyes, it was a taste of normal family life. What we didn’t begin to recognise, until one evening when a roadside breathalyser tested positive, was that our dad had a drinking problem.

It happened one evening during the week. Dad was on a call-out to service an appliance at a big hotel overlooking Ullswater. On the spur of the moment, he’d decided to take my middle brother and me with him. All day, a storm had been brewing, and as daylight faded on the drive out, so the wind picked up and the rain came down. From the lake road, we looked out across a body of water that looked like hammered metal. Normally, accompanying our father on a job like this, we’d have played down by the shore. By the time he had parked and scuttled into the hotel with his toolkit, the storm was so intense that it felt like we were under siege.

My brother had bagged the front bench. I was just sitting amongst all the electrical junk in the back, which wasn’t much fun at all. Bored and fractious, we bickered about cracking open the windows to stop the van from steaming up. Over an hour later, when Dad finally hurried out of the darkness with his collar turned up against the downpour, he was quick to bellow at us to behave. I don’t know whether he’d been offered a drink on the job or had brought his own supplies. Either way, he shouldn’t have slotted the key into the ignition, fired up the engine and the headlights, and set off back along the lake road. It was a bumpy ride in the back at the best of times. That night, as the wipers struggled to maintain a clear view ahead, I found myself sliding around as if we were at sea.

‘Dad,’ I appealed to him at one point as we followed a bend just a little too quickly for my liking.

Sliding this way and that, but restrained by his seat belt, my brother giggled to himself. Without that luxury, I failed to see the funny side.

‘It’s the weather,’ our father reasoned, as if that was to blame for his driving, and then scolded my brother for laughing.

I didn’t dare say any more after that. With just the glow from the dashboard to cut through the darkness, I anchored myself as best I could in the back. Every time we cut through standing water on the road it would crash against the chassis, which my father sought to drown out by cranking up a song on the radio. The crooning sounded completely at odds with the ferocity of the storm. It was all I could hear, in fact. Minutes later, when the van skipped onto two wheels and then left the road, my first thought was that a bolt of lightning had struck us. The noise was deafening, from scraping metal to fragmenting glass, while the vehicle rotated onto its roof and then by another 90 degrees like a sticking drum in one of my dad’s machines.

When the van came to rest in the road, with the radio still playing but a sense that the world had tipped onto its side, Dad was quick to call out to us both. Shaken and bruised, and miraculously spared from serious injury, we crawled out of the wreckage in turn. I was last to make my way through the buckled frame where the windscreen had once been. As I did so, I picked out the rear-view mirror that had been smashed from its moorings. Dad reached in to help me out. As my brother sobbed behind him, all I could see were scratches and concern on his face. I showed them the mirror, shocked to the core but desperate for everything to be alright.

‘This will look great on our go-kart,’ I declared.

3

Hard Times

The accident resulted in a driving ban for my father. More immediately, such a narrow escape for us all shook our family to the core. Sadly, it didn’t bring my parents any closer. As soon as Mum learned what had happened, she went straight to court and contested that our dad wasn’t fit to look after us. Until that moment, my middle brother and I had never once questioned whether our father’s drinking was an issue. At the hearing, our mother claimed it was more than an isolated incident. From that moment on, I started looking at my dad in a different light whenever he had a beer, which seemed to be more frequently at home after he lost his licence.

Mum also had other pressing reasons to have us back. Shortly after the accident, my dad started seeing a woman from the local shoe repairers, who would quickly become our stepmother. Through my mother’s eyes, her arrival in his life saw us sidelined. We were frequently left to feed ourselves and wore dirty school uniforms held together with safety pins. At the same time, whenever we saw her, Mum stopped being a shadow of her former self and began to sparkle once again. It wasn’t long before she introduced me to the man who would become my stepfather. He seemed nice, and clearly made her happy, so that was alright by me. As the relationship duly developed, they even found a place to live together in Penrith. It all helped her case when she argued that her boys would be better off living with her.

So, along with my middle brother, I went back to live with our mother. Once the divorce came through and Mum remarried, it really did seem as if she was creating a new chapter in our lives. In some ways it was a honeymoon period for us all. Had I been a little older, I would have known that it would always come to an end.

If my stepfather resented the fact that his new wife came with kids as part of the package, he didn’t keep it to himself for long. After a short time, it became clear to my middle brother and me that this new family figurehead considered us to be a nuisance. To begin with, he would fall silent in our presence, as if we were interrupting something, which just made us feel uncomfortable. It didn’t get any worse than that when my mother, who was just too enamoured with him to notice, was around. She worked in a restaurant, often through the evenings. That’s when things really began to change. Alone in the house with us, my stepfather made no attempt to hide his true feelings. When he didn’t just blank us completely, or mutter that we were in his way, he’d launch into profanities about our dad. It was as if he regarded him as responsible for the fact that his new life with our mother was weighed down by her boys. I couldn’t blame my middle brother when he turned 16, left school and announced that he was moving out. He’d found a live-in job at a hotel, which left me alone with a man who openly despised me.

‘You’re a good-for-nothing bastard, Irving,’ he would mutter, like my surname was some kind of curse.

Then came the house rules. My stepfather just seemed to introduce them at will in a bid to contain me. I wasn’t allowed to switch on the lights unless he was in the room because I’d be wasting his money. In the same way, the television was a luxury only he could afford. Come winter time, lighting the fire to keep warm was out of the question. If my stepfather was chilly, however, then he’d demand to know why I hadn’t got it going and then reprimand me until the house was an acceptable temperature. Life revolved around him alright. If he tolerated me under the same roof as him by the thinnest of margins, then it was on a seen-but-not-heard basis. Any kind of noise I made, from scraping a chair to sit down or causing the stairs to creak as I crept upstairs, would earn me a tongue-lashing. The control he exerted became increasingly stifling. It reached the point where I practically couldn’t even breathe in his presence. In short, it felt as if the sole purpose of his existence was to make me feel as unwelcome in his house as possible.

As a boy approaching his teenage years, all this affected me greatly. Inside the house, feeling like I didn’t belong and constantly on edge in case my stepfather turned against me, all I could do was go to a place in my head that shut it all down. As a result, I just took every opportunity to stay away. As long as I obeyed his evening curfew, and was home before eight o’clock without fail, I spent as much time outside as I could.

One year, my grandfather from Penrith presented me with a bike. I don’t know if he had a sense of how things were for me at home, but I leapt upon it as a chance to get away. The Raleigh Arena was a racer with drop handlebars. In those days it was popular with kids as a first grown-up bike, and I loved the freedom it gave me. I had learned to get away on foot from an early age, but this changed everything. No matter how bad things got at home, I could climb onto the saddle and pedal my way as far away as possible. To begin with, before I found my riding confidence, I would head for the paths around the school playing field and ride around the perimeter. Sometimes the caretaker would come chasing after me, which just made me all the more determined to keep going. Anything but break away and head back home before I was ready. I imagine I drove the poor man to distraction! He only got a break as I became more adventurous and took myself further afield. I probably only went a couple of miles, but to a young lad feeling this trapped, I felt like a bird with wings.

For some kids with troubled backgrounds, school can become a sanctuary. I wanted it to feel like a place of safety, somewhere I could be myself, but if it was raining on a school day, my stepfather would refuse to take me. As I plodded through the puddles, he didn’t even glance in my direction if he happened to pass. I’d just watch his car drive on by, so I suppose it’s no surprise that I struggled to fit in when I got there. It was tough, I think, to switch off the defences I had built to survive at home. In general, I just kept my own company and had a very small circle of friends. Even then it was a struggle to find common ground. Sometimes they would come into school talking about programmes they had all watched the evening before, like Grange Hill or Mork & Mindy, and all I could do was nod along and try not to feel left out. They knew about my stepfather and his treatment of me. But then if I ever dared bring anyone home, he might choose to be really nice. Much depended on his view of their intelligence. Having left school at 11, my stepfather basically regarded people who showed a hint of wit or brains as being a legitimate target for his scorn and condescension. If he deemed them to be unthreatening in that respect then he’d crack a joke with them, usually at my expense. He could even be funny and they would laugh. In a way that made it worse because they’d wonder what my problem was with him.

As the years ticked by, my stepfather continued his campaign of venom towards me. A couple of years after I started secondary school, though, my mother was given a puppy called Prince by my uncle. Prince was a black and white Sprocker, which is a mix between a Springer and Cocker Spaniel. It was great to have a dog again and finally have a fun, joyful companion. I would take Prince out on walks, and attempted to train him to sit, fetch, lie down and roll over. He was a smart dog, and my first introduction to the Spaniel breed. Alone with Prince, there was just something about the look he would give me that made me feel special. He depended on me for guidance, even if it was just a glance back at a fork in the woodland path to see which way I planned to turn. Nobody had ever turned to me like that before. On walks, it gave me a sense of purpose, and also a familiarity with dogs that would stay with me throughout my life.

I could never let on how involved I was with Prince. Had my stepfather found out, he would’ve got rid of him in the blink of an eye. In some ways, I came to consider Prince to be the heart of my family in that home. He didn’t judge me or make me feel bad, and while our mother always watched out for me, she just wasn’t aware of the bigger picture. She knew my stepfather could be difficult with me, but had no idea what he could be like when her back was turned.

Quite simply, every second under the same roof as my stepfather left me feeling isolated and inadequate. I just couldn’t tell Mum. He was just too important to her, after everything she had been through, though I failed to understand what she saw in him. Then again, it wasn’t all sweetness and light between them. When they fell out, they did so dramatically and made a poor attempt to hide it from us. Sometimes I would listen to their rows from my bedroom and silently urge her to leave him. Once or twice I even heard her scream at him that they would be better off apart. I just crossed my fingers, squeezed my eyes shut and hoped that she would appear at my door at any moment and ask me to pack my bags. Instead, whenever she did come to check on me, she’d observe that it looked like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.

‘What’s wrong?’ she would sometimes ask, whenever life with my stepfather became too much. ‘Why won’t you talk to me?’

I wanted to feel close to Mum, but never opened up to her about anything. Over time, I just learned to shut away difficult thoughts and feelings, and that’s how I felt safe. Besides, I had already broken her heart once. I was only young when I told her that I wanted to be with my brothers. This time I knew what revealing my stepfather’s true nature would do to her.

‘I’m fine,’ I would say instead. ‘It’s nothing.’

Through the years, many times I tried to tell my dad what life was like back home. I didn’t feel any need to put my worries into words, I just saw him as someone who might intervene. He didn’t get on with my stepfather, but when I hinted all was not well, he just told me to stay out of his way. I was disappointed, but also aware that Dad had issues of his own. Having rolled the van, his relationship with drinking slowly spilled into the light. Eventually, it became quite clear to me that he had a problem with alcohol. What’s more, he was one of those drinkers who becomes unapproachable when intoxicated. It also brought out an angry, impatient and sometimes violent streak in him.

Whenever I went to stay with my father and his new wife, I found myself living under threat of the belt. I didn’t have to step far out of line for him to reach for it, and my stepmother never stopped him. Sometimes, I could spend all day out in the woods and fields. I’d only go home for lunch if I knew that they were out for the day. Despite everything going on behind closed doors, I look upon that time in the wild with great fondness. I got up to all sorts, often on my own or sometimes with local kids from the farms. I learned to shoot air rifles and lit more campfires than I’ve had hot dinners. It’s a wonder I didn’t come to any harm, but frankly, it was safer than being in the house.

By the time I turned 16, I found myself gearing up to face the world as if I was wearing an invisible suit of armour. From the outside, I looked like I could take care of myself. On the inside, where nobody could see me, I was a lonely and insecure young man with little self-confidence. I was desperate to get away from my stepfather and leave my dad to his drinking habit. I just didn’t want to leave an area I had grown to love. Because outside the two suffocating houses I was supposed to consider home, the fells, lakes, trails and valleys of the Northwest were where I could breathe freely.

From the moment I set off with Max from the campsite at the foot of Ben Nevis, my focus was on reaching the summit. As a physical challenge, it was down to me to keep putting one walking boot in front of the other. As a leap of faith, however, I just focused on my dog in the belief that he would lead me there.

‘We did it!’ I say to Max as much as myself when we finally stand upon that highest point and look out towards the horizon. It seems hard to believe we are really here. It’s something I have thought about constantly since making the decision for us to come here – something that would have been unthinkable before I met Max. ‘We did it after everything we’ve been through.’

Conquering Ben Nevis is a milestone for any hiker. The German who joined us shortly after our arrival at the top looked thrilled to be there. Even so, he had no idea what a momentous achievement this was for us both. Having swapped pleasantries and taken photos, and also called my wife at work, I turn my attention to the descent. Looking at Max, who is busy exploring the scree, only one of us is feeling the effects of the climb. Even so, I can’t think it will be as challenging to make our way back down.

Within minutes of setting out, I realise how drastically I have underestimated the challenge.

When you’re living in constant pain, and then become tired and fatigued, that pain becomes much harder to manage. As Max and I make our way off the top, I have to think hard about every placement of my lead foot. I can’t afford to slip or slide. One false move would cause white-hot pain to shoot up my spine to my neck, and I know that could drop me to the ground in agony. Within a short space of time, exhausted by the efforts of the day, I begin to catch myself on the cusp of making mistakes. Instead of being loose and free, and able to react to any slip before it catches up with me, I just tense my body as if braced for the worst. As a result, with my footing becoming heavier, I sense the muscles in my neck go into spasm. Pain radiates into my jawline, which is excruciating. All I want to do now is get off that mountain, but there is no shortcut. It’s just me, my dog, and a sense of sheer determination.

At times, where the path became too steep or technical, I have to turn and shuffle down on my hands and knees. I even slide a few yards on my backside. Max keeps a close eye on me throughout. He doesn’t wander off, or lose himself to a noise or smell. Every time I look around for my dog, I find his watchful expression that has become so important to me as well as that blessed stick clamped between his jaws!

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, aware that he could probably race down this mountainside in no time at all. ‘If I make it to the campsite in one piece, I promise you an ice cream at the earliest opportunity.’

I smile to myself. Max may not understand, but that dog has a taste for a vanilla scoop like no other.

As the gradient becomes less challenging, we begin to pass people on their way up. Some are dressed in mountaineering gear, others have set out in deck shoes and board shorts. It’s a mixed bag of ability and age, but it lifts my spirits whenever we pass anyone. They probably wonder why a man in his forties is moving like a geriatric, with what they must assume is an assistance dog at his side. All I know is that Max and I have achieved something that would have been impossible for me only a short time ago. So, despite the odd look of concern, I come down that mountain carrying a huge sense of pride.

By the time we clamber back over the stile and clear the forest path to the campsite, that pride has transformed into euphoria. My cheeks are wet with tears as we pass through the entrance. Rather than head for our pitch, I steer Max towards the river so we can cool off. If it had been bracingly fresh at the summit, the heat of the day has pooled at ground level. What’s more, if there’s one thing Max likes in this world more than anything else, that’s the chance to get wet.

Minutes later, having coaxed the stick from Max, I watch him launch after it from the bank, his tail rotating in excite ment. All I can do is shield myself from the splash, cheer, clap and recognise that without this dog, I wouldn’t be here at all. As I gingerly follow my best friend into the river, I realise I am lucky to be alive to enjoy such simple pleasures that make this life so precious.

4

Into the Wild

One day, when I was 13, my dad summoned me round to his place. It was unusual for him to want to see me beyond agreed visits. Even when I did spend time there, his only interest wasn’t in talking to me, but mocking my stepdad. I just knew that something was up.

‘I’m moving away,’ he told me soon after I arrived, and placed his arm around my stepmother. ‘We’re emigrating to Australia.’

‘Oh,’ was all I could say in response. ‘Right.’

I felt no sense of elation or relief that this would spell an end to being fearful of my own father. Just then, I wasn’t particularly sorry to see him go either. After years of putting up barriers so I couldn’t be hurt, I just looked at him blankly. I nodded as he explained that life just hadn’t been the same since rolling the van, but felt nothing at all.

‘We’ll be having a going away party,’ he said, like this would make everything better. ‘I hope you can join us.’

Once the news had sunk in, I did start to think that I would miss him. I associated the outbursts of anger and the threat of punishment with the smell of alcohol on his breath, but that wasn’t a permanent state. When my dad wasn’t drinking, I reminded myself, he could be alright. We shared the same sense of humour and at times I felt like he really cared for me. Sober, he could talk to me on a level, as if he recognised that I was no longer a kid. While his older sons were long gone, it struck me that this was his way of making up for lost time. In fact, as he made preparations to pack up and begin a new life, he began to look ahead with me in mind.

‘One day, perhaps you can join me,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a business up and running. We can work together and when I’m gone, it’ll all be yours. Every last penny, son. You can have it all.’

As someone with no clear goals or even a belief that I could be ambitious, this sounded like an invitation I couldn’t ignore. Dad stressed that now was not the right time to be taking me with him, and besides, the custody terms prevented any such move halfway across the world. All the same, he made a solemn promise that when the right opportunity presented itself, I could join him on the other side of the world in making this fresh start.

My mum, of course, interpreted his offer very differently. She saw it as a direct provocation, a means of disrespecting all the hard work she had done in raising me. Mum refused outright to let me discuss his proposal with her. In fact, she even forbade me from going to his leaving party. That really upset me. Despite living in fear of my dad for so long, I wanted to believe that he had changed. Compared to the way I viewed my stepfather, I was always looking for chinks of light in the picture I painted of my dad. He was quite the showman when he wanted to be; he could make people laugh or talk things up to fully engage them. I always held out hope that he could peel away the drinking and the behaviour that went with it like a villain suit he no longer needed. It could be that easy, or so I thought, for him to reveal the man I wished he could be. After the offer he had made, I figured his farewell party would be my chance to restore our relationship as father and son before the time came when we could be together again. By then, however, my mother was so enraged by his decision to just fly away and leave us that her final word on the subject drove a wedge between us.

‘You’re just like him!’ she snapped at me once. ‘Good for nothing and useless!’

‘Well, maybe I am!’ I raged back at her, and I meant it. Not only was I my father’s son, I just didn’t feel as if I was capable of shining at anything.

By now, my grades had flat-lined. While my brothers had gone to grammar school, I just wasn’t good enough to follow in their footsteps. They used to joke and call me thick and I took that to heart. For me, the classroom was a place where I would sit in quiet confusion and simply tune out. Maths was a case in point, and just undermined my self-confidence even further. I enjoyed some lessons, like geography, and looked forward to playing sports like rugby because that meant being part of a team. Even so, as the terms ticked by I came to accept that I would never be academically minded. The only subjects where I showed a glimmer of promise were practical ones like metalwork and woodwork. I found that I was quite good at putting things together, and by extension, taking them apart to see how they worked. I liked breaking things down into component parts, especially if something wasn’t working properly. Unfortunately, I never thought to do the same thing to myself, and figure out what was essentially making me so unhappy. Instead, I carried on finding ways to lock in my feelings so that nobody knew what was really going on inside my heart and mind.

As a teenager, it was girls who came close to finding a way in. While I struggled to trust anybody with my emotions, I enjoyed going on dates with someone I liked so that we could get to know each other a bit better. At the same time, it wasn’t me who eventually shut down on them; it was my stepfather who ensured that any blossoming romance would be killed off with a single visit to my house. If I invited a girl back for tea, proud as punch that someone would be interested in me, he would basically just blank her completely. Even if we walked in to find him in a good mood, his face would fall as soon as he saw that I had female company. He wouldn’t look around, even after I had introduced her or she made efforts to talk to him. I wanted to die of embarrassment. It was as if my stepfather had spotted a chance for me to be happy and killed it stone-dead. As a result, any blossoming romance I might have had with a girl just ended with an excuse to go home early and then a distancing from me because, frankly, my stepfather was toxic.

Over the years, his attitude towards me didn’t soften one bit. Even when I was a young man, he still set about threatening and intimidating me in the same way that he did when I was a bewildered little boy. While my dad’s propensity to reach for his belt had tapered as I developed, and he’d begun to talk to me rather than tell me off, my stepfather considered my growing physical presence to be a direct threat to his authority. With his ever-tightening rules, constant gripes and threats, he left me feeling as if I was taking up too much space in the house and effectively eating away at the food budget. Being older, and with a little more independence, I just found more reasons to stay out of his orbit, which is where the Army Cadet Force came to my rescue.

I joined up because it was just something a lot of my friends had done. The idea of being out in the fresh air twice a week, toying with rifles and tents, certainly appealed to me. Plus, I thought I might make some new friends. I just hadn’t anticipated that it would be so fulfilling. Within a short space of time, I was attending not only to fit in but because I loved every aspect of the experience.

Every session was an opportunity for me to join young people who shared a similar love of being outdoors. We wore the same uniform, so everyone was equal, in a disciplined but fun environment in which the rules were something to respect rather than fear. As cadets, we were given the opportunity to master new skills and supported in this by both leaders and peers. We went on several training exercises and shared experiences that really helped me to come out of my shell.

Quite simply, for the first time in my life I had found a family. It felt like I belonged and was welcomed in that tribe. I suppose I came to appreciate this more than most because it was something I had never truly experienced before. It certainly pointed me towards a career in the army, which I considered seriously for quite a while. What stopped me was the fact that any sense of purpose the cadets gave me just drained away whenever I headed for home.

Without fail, my stepfather would take one look at me breezing back through the door in my uniform and set out to remind me who was in charge. I might have been too noisy coming in, or brought mud in on my boots. One way or another, he would pick a quarrel with me and quickly escalate it. He used to enjoy watching the wrestling on television, with theatrical bouts between fighters with names like Giant Haystacks, Big Daddy and Kid Dynamo. I don’t know whether he saw himself in those guys, but given the opportunity, he’d pounce on me. It began when the wrestling was on one time. I had been sitting beside him on the sofa, tuned out from his running commentary about how he could do better, when suddenly he turned his attention to me. It was just play fighting, or so he said, but I didn’t like it from the start. Grinning at my protests, as if I’d reached an age where this kind of thing was acceptable, he’d twist my arm behind my back or pin me to the ground as if we were in the ring. Then slowly, over time, his idea of fun and games became a means of putting me in my place.

‘Kerry, you’re late,’ he said one time when I returned home from cadets.

My stepfather was in the front room, his attention turned from whatever he was watching on the box. I had just closed the front door behind me. I was also well aware of the time because my curfew had yet to begin.

‘It’s not quite eight o’clock,’ I said, and that was enough to bring him to his feet.

‘Look at you,’ he said, sizing me up and down. I was so proud of my cadet uniform, from my boots to my beret. It gave me a sense of identity that had nothing to do with living in this house. ‘Army boy.’

The way he levelled his gaze at me made me feel like he had just declared the start of a bout. All of a sudden, I felt quite alone. I glanced into the kitchen and up the stairs: there was no sign or sound of Mum. I guessed they were out on a late walk with Prince. It was just us in the house. The realisation made me want to reach for the door and walk right out again, but it was too late for that.

‘What are you watching?’ I said, hoping to distract him as I ducked around him for the front room. ‘Hey!’

My stepfather grabbed me forcefully by the scruff of my shirt and squared me round to face him.

‘Come on!’ he bellowed, practically nose to nose. ‘Don’t they teach you to fight?’

Before I could draw breath to remind him that cadets wasn’t about hand-to-hand combat, he had grabbed me in a headlock.

‘Get off!’ I yelled. ‘Leave me alone!’

Trapped under his arm, I felt just as gripped by shock and sheer humiliation. Even though I had grown, he was still bigger than me and just laughed when I struggled. I pleaded with him to let go, only for him to urge me to fight back like a man.

‘Do it, Kerry! Prove yourself to me, show me what you’re made of!’

If he still considered this to be a lark, I wasn’t laughing in any way. I’d had a great evening with the cadets, only to come back to this. If anything, it just trampled on my belief that I could be good enough to join the army. If I couldn’t deal with my stepfather, I thought to myself, what use would I be? Then, as I flailed and thrashed around that sense of helplessness in me turned to anger. In that moment, for the first time ever, I’d had enough. All I wanted to do was show him that he couldn’t push me about any more. I tried to swing him against the wall, but my stepfather just picked up on it. ‘Is this the best you can do? Is it? Is it?’

I wanted to lay that bastard on his back, but he simply had me pinned. Bent double, with my head trapped, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other to keep me contained. I gave it one more shot to break free. Then, choking back tears, I submitted. It felt so pointless to me just then, and summed up how I felt about my life.

For the more I struggled, desperate to be free, my stepfather just tightened his grip on me.

5

School of Life

At 16, I left school. I just saw no point in sitting in classrooms feeling 10 steps behind everyone else. At the time, national unemployment levels stood at a record high of three million. In walking out of the school gates for the final time, I was doing little to keep my options open. If anything, I saw it as the only path open to me.

While I had little by way of self-confidence, I wasn’t lazy. I wanted to work, if only so I could earn enough money to stand on my own two feet and get away from my stepfather. With no plan to speak of, or faith in my abilities, I headed for the local job centre. It was a grim, desolate experience. I joined a queue, filled in forms, and then sat across from a man who worked his way through my answers like his mind was on other matters. Despite this awful introduction to working life, I left with appointments for two interviews.

The first one took place at a poultry processing plant. The job, I learned, involved plucking feathers from freshly slaughtered chicken carcasses as they swung by suspended from hooks. I may not have known what I wanted to do with my life, but I understood myself well enough to be sure this wasn’t for me. The smell of the place was suffocating, the tedium second to none, but above all, I just felt uncomfortable with the fact that the chickens arriving at the plant in crates on the backs of lorries had lived such miserable lives.

I headed for my second interview with similar reservations. It was with a local butcher, who was looking for an apprentice. Before I arrived, having turned my back on the poultry plant, I felt like my world was caving in on itself. Was I good for nothing else but this? I asked myself, on checking my reflection in the shop window. I looked smart, but felt wretched, and during the interview, I felt as if the old butcher was sizing me up like a slab of meat. I could’ve cried, but kept my composure and looked him in the eye as he told me all about the family business. I did register the fact that he was big on animal welfare. Everything that came into the shop, so he said, was carefully sourced, and that struck a chord with me. I listened with interest, in fact, even though I had already decided that he was just going through the motions with me.

Back home, I told my mum all about my day. She understood about the poultry factory and made us a cup of tea as I brought her up to speed on my chat with the butcher.

‘It doesn’t sound so bad,’ she said, despite the fact that I had been so down about it. ‘We’d get free meat for one thing!’

I wasn’t sure if she was joking, but we shared a chuckle all the same. I was dreading the return home of my stepfather, who would no doubt find some fault in the way I’d presented myself and then pick a fight about my prospects.

As it turned out, by the time he appeared I could happily report that I was in full-time employment.

The knock at the front door came soon after the shops on the high street closed for the day.

‘Is your boy here?’ I heard a familiar voice ask my mother when she opened up. I joined her at the door, and for a moment failed to recognise the old man without his apron and hat. Then he saw me, and beamed. ‘There’s an apprenticeship waiting for you, Kerry, if you want it?’

I couldn’t think of what I had done to impress the butcher. I honestly thought he would have written me off. Just then, any doubts I had about working in the shop evaporated. It was such a rare thing for me to feel valued and so I seized the opportunity. Even better, on arriving for the first day of my apprenticeship, the butcher decided to set me to work in the back room. I had been so worried about standing behind a counter. That would have meant dealing with people and I didn’t feel cut out for that at all. Even the thought of greeting a customer made me feel sick. So, it came as a surprise and a huge relief when he asked me to follow him through a door and stationed me at a steel-topped table with a radio for company. There, with a selection of knives in a block, he then set about teaching me the basics of butchery.

In his view, I had the job nobody else in the shop relished. That old butcher worked me hard. He had high standards, too, and I was eager to please him with the quality of my work. So, whenever I made mistakes, I was determined to learn from the experience and made a point of asking for advice as well as appraisal. In many ways, working with knives took me back to my time alone in the woods. I enjoyed the craftsmanship involved. Yes, I was doing all the horrible things that nobody else fancied, but I made it mine. For almost a year, I could tie on my apron for a day’s work knowing that I wouldn’t get any grief from people around me. There was banter from the butcher and his assistants, of course, and constructive criticism as my apprenticeship progressed, and that was fine by me. Basically, that back room was my kingdom. Then, one Tuesday morning, a member of staff fell sick without cover.

‘Kerry, put your whites on and come in the shop today.’

How I froze when the old butcher put his head around the corner to tell me this.

‘What?’

‘We need help behind the counter.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing,’ he said, cutting across any excuse I might have come up with, and then held my gaze for a moment. He knew this was my comfort zone, but as a business he needed me front of house. ‘Just be yourself, Kerry. You’re a decent young man, that’s good enough for me.’

A few minutes later, I emerged into the main shop with a face as pale as my butcher’s coat. Just then, it felt like I was on a front line. Anyone who walked through that door was a threat, it seemed to me. Thanks to years of being made to feel so worthless, I didn’t feel equipped to deal with people.

‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked when the butcher noted that my hands were trembling. ‘I don’t want to let you down.’

In response, before he could draw breath, the bell above the door signalled the arrival of the day’s first customer. A woman entered with a tartan shopping bag on wheels. The butcher greeted her warmly and then shot me a wink.

‘How can I help?’ I cleared my throat to start again, because my voice sounded tissue-thin. I had expected her to scowl at me, but the woman just smiled and asked for bacon rashers.

It might not seem like much, but for me, that day was a trial by fire. I didn’t relax until it was time to flip the sign on the door to signal we were closed. By then, I was exhausted but also elated. I had served a string of customers and found that I enjoyed it. Okay, I was scared, but that fear quickly vanished as soon as I greeted them and received a friendly reply. It helped that the counter formed a physical barrier, a line nobody could cross. All the same, that soon became invisible as I continued to serve. People weren’t monsters, as I had led myself to believe. Not everyone was like my stepfather or my dad. Nobody had set out to make me feel small or threaten some kind of punishment. Customers had treated me in the same way that I treated them and I had loved every minute.

That day was supposed to have been a one-off. As I’d made such an impression on the boss, however, he asked me to give it another shot the next day, and the day after that. Within a week, I was dividing my time between my duties in the back room and serving customers at the counter. Just like my introduction to butchery, once I’d overcome my fears I wanted to learn all there was to selling. It wasn’t just about being pleasant, but understanding the customer’s needs and learning how to meet them. That meant coming out of my shell and connecting with people, and it proved to be the making of me.

During my apprenticeship, and afterwards in what became a secure job for me, I found myself becoming more outward-looking. I had friends and joined them on evenings out in Penrith. Even as a teenager, I was tall and broad for my age. It meant I could drink in pubs and get into local nightclubs long before I turned 18. Going out after work also proved to be a good way to avoid spending any more time than I had to at home. At every opportunity, I tried to avoid my stepfather. Having reached an age where he could no longer impose a curfew, I just stayed out late enough to feel sure that when I crept home, he would be fast asleep.

In effect, I grew up in that butcher’s shop, turning from a shy boy to an outgoing young man who finally believed in himself. It wasn’t an instant transformation, and what confidence I gained was fragile, but outwardly, I learned how to project myself. I felt ready to make my mark in the world.

When my boss, the old butcher, announced his retirement, I knew it was time to move on. Having gained a reputation in my role, I quickly found a new position in a bigger shop. I had hoped it would provide me with new challenges, but after a short while I realised it wasn’t the same. I didn’t feel like I belonged as I had at the old place. It no longer seemed like family. Rather than risk a return to feeling unhappy, I took a temporary job as a warehouseman. It earned me enough money to pay my rent, which of course my stepfather insisted on, and to make the most of my evenings out with friends. I would come to drink like the best of them and survive on little sleep. At the same time, I learned to drive. Not only did that give me more independence from home, I found that I loved being out on the road. So, when an opportunity arose to apply for a role as a van driver for the local bakery, I jumped at it.

The job had perks, and not just free doughnuts. With no desire to spend time at home, it was the antisocial hours that appealed to me. I started work at three in the morning, delivering bread to homes and businesses around the region before the world woke up. My shift was also split. So, I’d return home for lunch, knowing my stepfather would be out, and basically, have the place to myself all afternoon. After a nap I’d be back on the road to pick up flour to deliver to the bakery, with enough time after I clocked off to sink a few pints with the lads before the pub shut.

For almost a year, I barely saw the man I had grown to despise. It was something my mum and I never discussed. I would see her from time to time and we got along just fine. I imagine my stepfather was quite content with the fact that I had found a way to avoid him. Even so, it did little to dampen the tension between us on the rare occasions that we were in the house together. One lunchtime, I came home to find he had taken time off work. He looked up from his paper at the kitchen table and his expression just darkened on seeing me.

‘Don’t they have a canteen at work?’ he asked.

By now, we were barely speaking. We could be civil, especially when Mum was around, but just then we were alone except for the dog. Prince was in his basket, looking like he’d prefer to keep out of it.

‘I won’t be stopping long,’ I told him, and headed for the kettle.

‘Good to hear.’

‘Unbelievable,’ I muttered under my breath with my back turned to him.

‘What was that?’ The sound of my stepfather scraping his chair back to stand brought me round on my heels. I found him glowering at me. The dog whimpered and curled tighter in his basket.

‘Nothing,’ I said, raising my palms. I didn’t want a row – I’d come home for a bite to eat and a chance to unwind after a busy morning in the van. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

‘I want to know what you just said.’ My stepfather took a step forward, squaring up to me. ‘Speak up!’

Over the years, I had learned to back down quickly from a situation like this. He’d still catch me with the back of his hand, or put me into one of his wrestling holds, but if I was quick, I could get away without too much grief. I was younger than him and also bigger now. This time, trapped between the kitchen counter and my stepfather as he advanced on me, and feeling like I didn’t deserve this grief, I stood my ground.

‘Don’t do this,’ I warned as he raised his hand to me.

I caught him by the wrist, only for him to shove me hard. Instinctively, I grabbed his shirt to steady myself and that’s how the fight broke out. It was over quicker than I could process, but in that moment, we traded several punches before I put him on his back.

In shock at what had just happened to him, my stepfather stared up at me from the floor. I stood over him, panting hard.

‘Get out!’ he snarled, but I didn’t need to be persuaded.

Without another word, furious, frustrated and in despair, I turned for the door and slammed it shut behind me.

‘I’m gone,’ I said to myself, and like a balm the breeze blowing across from the Lakes cooled my face.

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