‘IT WAS A WAR’

“WHAT was I like as a kid? Some people said I was shy, a lot of people said I wasn’t. I suppose it depended on the company I was keeping. I lived in a block of flats, then moved over the road to Pentonville Road and another block of flats in an area called Priory Green Estate, which was built after the war.

I can remember playing on the bomb ruins, we used to go out and collect wood to build big fires; there’d be rival estates, we’d go and nick their wood and they’d nick ours.

I was the manager of a football team. We got a little league together. I was 11 or 12 years old when I started managing the team. Eventually we got in the Regents Park Sunday League and a lot of the teams were from the boxing clubs, which was common back then.

I used to have meetings with all the managers of the teams above a pub in Holloway Road. All pubs in those days had those big function rooms upstairs. I’d go up there for the meeting, midweek, when I should have been in bed. They’d all be grown