The Songaminute Man by Simon McDermott

Author:Simon McDermott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Dad and I were very different. Looking back, after leaving Cedar Street and moving up to Sunnybower, I made very few new friends and I became quite shy. I secretly wanted to be as confident as my dad, and if I’m honest, I was desperate to be like he was onstage. But it wasn’t meant to be, mainly as I lacked his ability not to give a damn about what people thought. On top of this, puberty was beginning to kick in, which made everything feel a hundred times worse. I was conscious that I was different from the other boys in the class, but at the time I didn’t know why. Despite being picked for the school football team, I would freeze when we had to play any matches. This wasn’t helped by the fact I ruined my kit before I’d even had the chance to play a single match – I was so excited I decided I wanted to iron it myself, with disastrous results. I remember taking out the iron, plugging it in and plunging it onto the front of the shirt, which immediately melted the polyester into huge strands of plastic. ‘Daaaaaaad!’ I screamed and spent the next hour in tears. Mum sewed up the hole, but it meant that my shirt was lopsided, literally hanging down to my knees on one side, while on the other it was higher than my waist. The team got into the schoolboy finals playing at Ewood Park, but while every other boy in the side was excited about running on the pitch, I was drowning in dread and distracted at the state of my kit, constantly trying to pull it down as I anxiously ran around.

Dad would come and watch me play but never seemed that impressed with my performance – and who could blame him? I remember him standing on the other side of the railings at the back of the field at Roe Lee School, shouting: ‘For Christ sake, Simon, PASS IT!’

Given how good he and his brothers had been on the pitch in their childhoods, how much time and energy they’d all given it and how proud Maurice had been of them, it didn’t take a genius to work out that he wouldn’t be turning cartwheels at my lack of skill. He would try and concentrate on the positives as we walked home (‘You’re bloody fast, Sime – you just need to learn how to kick it…’) but I think we both knew I was a lost cause. Afterwards Dad told my nan and grandad, ‘He runs around like a blue-arsed fly. He chases the ball, gets it, then panics’, which was a very polite description of how I looked on the pitch, but hearing that just reinforced the fact I felt I was letting everyone down.

I knew I was different from the other boys at this time, but I also felt like I wasn’t a son my dad could be proud of. This just

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