Roger the Boxer: I Am Just Passing Through

About the Author

Roger Canon has lived an amazing life. Like us all, he has some regrets but there are more positives to take from his experiences. To fight through dangerous situations, then only to hit rock bottom and then to climb up through to the summit of life has been an amazing journey.

Dedication

Thank you to my family and friends for sticking with me when most needed.

Copyright Information ©

Roger Canon 2022

The right of Roger Canon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398435612 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398435629 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398435643 (ePub e-book)

ISBN 9781398435636 (Audiobook)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Canary Wharf

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E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the fine work of my first copy-editor, Lindsey Alexander, from Readinglisteditorial.com, and a big thank you to Austin Macauley Publishers.

Foreword

It was whilst being housebound and self-isolated due to the coronavirus, aka COVID-19, pandemic on 18 March 2020 that I started to write this book. It seemed like a good thing to do, when you are stuck in the house with lots of time on your hands. This virus started in China before Christmas and is now spreading throughout the world and taking many lives. The UK went into lockdown on 23 March indefinitely. It has been a very difficult time, and another challenge to our normal way of life. I have every confidence that our human resilience and resolve will pull us through this, and we will go on to much happier times once again.

To write a book about your life, you must adopt the ‘helicopter view’ and come out of yourself, then look down on the big picture. Assessing what went before this present time, with scrutiny and honesty. I have to admit, I found it much harder than I thought it would be. I have nothing but respect for those authors who can produce books on a monthly basis. I hope this book appeals to a wide spectrum of people from all walks of life. I do not like how, quite often, we tend to categorise people into certain levels of a class system. The land we live on was here long before people were, and we must respect and look after it. People came along, and civilisation began, and as it grew over the thousands of years, we developed into a have and have-not type of class system.

I have found as I have gone through my life that whoever I have come across has always got equal treatment from me. I cannot differentiate due to what that person may or may not have. We may all be very different types of people, but if you ask any older person, What’s the one thing you learnt during your life? I bet the majority would answer, That all people are equal to me. The Queen goes to the toilet in the same way as the rest of us do; so does the president of the USA or Russia, and all the world leaders. Famous people and very wealthy people all do the same; illnesses and accidents blight the whole human race – they do not care who you are.

Hopefully this foreword will help you to understand the type of person I am – a very down-to-earth, ordinary run-of-the-mill bloke, or, as my sons once told me, Dad, you are the champion of everyday life. I felt honoured and blessed by that. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoy reading about the ups and downs I have experienced whilst ‘just passing through’.

I have not used real names, and only refer to my parents as Father or Dad and Mother or Mum. For everyone else, I have used false names or no name at all to protect their privacy. I have named a couple of well-known people and boxers, as it’s impossible not to name them, but I have done so just as they are stated in the history books and records, and in a complimentary way.

Chapter One

Early Life

I was born in 1960 in North London N19, equal distance from Archway tube station and the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, and a short walk to the A1 to Scotland, known as the Archway Road. My parents named me Roger, after a brother of my dad who died early in his short life as a child back in Ireland many years before. I was born into a large Catholic family, and my father came from northwest Ireland. My mother was from Scotland. When I was born, I had five brothers and two sisters older than me.

During the war, my mother worked in London in the ATS as a spotter. The spotters would shine large spotlights up into the night sky, to try to illuminate the enemy planes. My mother was stationed on top of a high building in Hanover Square, just off Regent Street in the West End of London. They were very brave, as they were often targeted themselves by the enemy aircraft. My father, who was five years younger than my mother, had a very different war, as he was too young, and he only came over after it was over, to find labouring work in Scotland.

My mother and father met when she went back home to Scotland at the end of the war in 1945. They got married shortly after. They had no money and lived in Scotland until 1954, and then lived in Ireland for a couple of years before settling in London in 1956. Whilst in Scotland they had children born: Dan, Ben, Peter, and two sisters, Molly and Freda. When in Ireland, my mother gave birth to another boy called Raymond, before they moved to live in North London, where they had my brother Stephen and finally me.

In London, my father worked hard in the tunnels below ground. With his Irish and my mother’s Scottish tempers, they sometimes fought like cat and dog. I seemed destined to follow my father’s way in life. I was not great at school, and I was a tough little fellow. When I was born, in 1960, our family lived in a small terraced house in North London. We then moved a short distance to a flat above a shop on the main road. My only real memories of my very early life were playing in the basement below this property. There were lots of old things from the Second World War there, like army overcoats and helmets. I can remember looking out of the front window at all the very busy traffic on the main road; I used to see a dwarf on a small motorbike quite often and I would wave to him. I don’t think he ever noticed me. I can also remember walking with my mother whilst taking the others to school, and we would go up and over the Suicide Bridge that crossed the main road. It was called that because when the movie star Valentino died, several women threw themselves off the bridge to their deaths.

A couple of years later, I went to the local primary school with my brothers. At the weekends I can remember we used to go out to the park to play. It was just a short walk away. I have a very vivid memory of sitting on a roundabout in the park play area, when these big lads came over and jumped on it. I was sitting in the centre on top, holding on to the circular metal ball in the middle of the roundabout. They started to spin the roundabout very fast – you know, with their feet and then jumping onto it. They spun it so fast I let go of the ball and went through the air and straight into a tree, cutting my head open. I remember my two brothers getting a belting from my mother for not looking after me, as I was only about four years old.

I can remember walking with my sister in the dark one night and stopping at a building site in the pouring rain. This was one of the shafts that led down to the new underground train tunnel that my father was working on; it was around 1963. I have a picture in my head of looking over the edge of a barrier to see lots of lights at the bottom of the shaft. It looked very deep and about fifty feet in diameter around the top of the shaft. You could see little men at the bottom walking about. I learnt many years later my sister would be sent by my mother to go to my father’s work to get some money from him on the Friday-payday-for her to get some groceries and such into the house. My sister would also be told to take me with her; maybe my mother wanted some peace and quiet for a while on her own.

The tunnel men who built the new underground tube line were very ‘tough men’. Many of them were from Ireland and known as the ‘Tunnel Tigers’. They used to drink in the large local pub; they called it their ‘office’. They worked in compressed air for many hours and had to decompress in a special chamber after work. How long they were supposed to remain in the chamber depended on how many hours they had worked, but they would bang on the door to be let out early, when the pubs opened, and the man would let them out early. Later that night, anyone who wasn’t properly decompressed would collapse in the pub and be rushed to hospital with the bends (nitrogen bubbles in their blood). This happened to my father more than once.

I remember we had a German shepherd dog that would carry me around the garden on its back. Then one day it bit me on the face and I never saw it again. I think my father gave it to someone. I had one memory of losing teeth; my mother would always say in a nice, soft voice, Let me have a look at your loose tooth. Then she would feel it nice and gently, then wham! She would pull it out, and I’d have a mouth full of blood. I got wise to this, though. When I had a loose tooth and I wouldn’t let her near it, no matter how soft and gentle her voice was, she grabbed me and put her fingers in my mouth and tried to yank the tooth out, but because I was wriggling about so much, it was only half pulled out and hung from a piece of my gums. I ran outside and into the outside toilet. I quite liked the outside toilet, as it was like a small place of solace for me, with its ball on the end of a chain that I couldn’t quite reach, and squares of newspapers on a piece of string nailed to the wall. I managed to get the tooth pulled out, and that night I hid it under my pillow for the tooth fairy. In the morning I had a silver sixpence under my pillow.

I remember my father telling my mother a funny story about his day at work. He drove a little Austin A40 car then, and he had a problem with it starting. If he turned it off, he wasn’t sure if it would start again. He had been driving through Hertfordshire past this large mental hospital when he got a puncture. He stopped and left the engine running whilst he took the wheel off to replace it with the spare from the boot of the car. As he undid each wheel nut, he placed each nut onto the wing of the car. When he got the spare wheel on and in place, he looked up and noticed that with the vibrations of the running engine all the wheel nuts had fallen from the wing and gone down the drain gulley in the road beside him. He stood up, scratching his head, when he noticed an inmate from the mental hospital sitting on the perimeter wall watching him. My father said to him, Where is the nearest garage to here? The inmate said, It’s about three miles that way, but you don’t have to walk there. Why don’t you take one of the wheel nuts off each of your three other wheels, use them to fasten the fourth wheel into place, and then you can drive to the garage with three-wheel nuts holding each wheel in place, to get it fixed properly. My father was amazed at this chap’s clever thinking and said, That’s very helpful, and if you don’t mind me saying, why are you in the mental hospital, as you sound very clever to me. The man replied, They can’t let me out until I get a job. My father said as a thank-you, When I get back to the office, I’ll see if my boss will give you a job and get you out of this place. My father jotted down his name and details and then started to drive off towards the garage. Then there was this almighty smash, and a brick came right through the back window of the car. My dad got out and looked back, and this inmate shouted, You won’t forget, will you?

Chapter Two

The South Coast

I lived in North London until 1966. That summer we moved to the South Coast, as my father had work on a new bypass road scheme. We lived in a council house in not the best of areas that was full of people who didn’t like to obey the law. I have a vivid memory of me and two of my brothers walking over to the field behind our house and road, to play football with some of the local boys who were kicking a ball about.

It didn’t start very well as these kids with their leader, who was probably eleven or twelve, stood right in front of us and went through the usual ritual of ‘you are the new kids around here’. This leader boy moved closer to my brother, so I whacked him in the face, and then it all went mad, but us three were used to far harsher fights in London, and we smashed the tougher ones up and the others ran away. After that we were always welcomed to play football, and the three of us were now part of the local area’s tough boys. We all went through the same experience when we started school. I got in with one good lad who I am still friends with to this day – that’s fifty-four years of friendship. I quite enjoyed school, but trouble always seemed to follow me through the next couple of years. I was always nicking bottles of milk or apples at school, and outside school nicking bottles of fizzy drink from lorries parked outside the factory. We had a nice lady teacher who took me and my mate for a day trip to Arundel Castle with her boyfriend on a Saturday. I don’t know if they would be allowed to do that anymore with today’s restrictions. We had a great time, and it was the first real castle I had ever seen. There was a park behind it with a rowing lake in it. I remember they bought us ice creams and took us out into the lake on a boat. I never knew why she did all that for us; I think she felt sorry for us – what a terrific lady.

At the bottom of our road you had the sea, not the proper sea, but water anyway that must have been an inlet from the sea. The other side of the water was a small island that was a Royal Navy base. It was an adventure park to us and a very secret place that we would see every day from our shores, but it was heavily guarded with barriers and guards on the other side of a large road bridge that went from our mainland to the island. We could walk along the bridge, and if the tide was out, we could look over the edge of the bridge and see a concrete road that was submerged underwater; it ran the whole way under the bridge and beside it to the island. If the tide was out, there would only be about two feet of water covering the road, and hundreds of flat fish, I think they were flounders or skates, would be sitting on the concrete road under the water. They looked amazing from where we were, high up on the bridge. If we turned around and went to the other side of the bridge, we could see a marina with loads of boats, mostly small to medium size, apart from one extremely big boat that was called the Britannia, the Queen’s yacht, and it was always parked in the marina beside the island until she needed to use it. Once a year in the hot summer, we were allowed onto the island for the navy’s open weekend. This was for a military show where they would do all their practising of the ‘Gun Run’ for the royal show at Earl’s Court or Wembley later in the year. This was a great time for us, as we could explore the island as much as allowed to within the security confines.

Once we went right to the back of the island, and on the stones of the beach, there were lots of little rowing boats. We could jump in and out of them playing, and pretend to be Sir Francis Chichester, who had rowed around the world on his own. Where the main Gun Run area was there were large tents for the sailors to change and get ready. They would have several crates of large milk bottles full of milk to drink when they finished the gun run. We would sneak our hands up under the edge of the tent and nick a couple of bottles, then drink the milk out of sight.

There was this large rope hanging from an enormous tree. I think they used it to practice swinging on. When it swung, you could go from the top of one hill across to the top of the other hill. There were about five of us, and we started to swing, and then as the rope came back to one hill, another lad would jump on until all five of us were hanging from this rope, over a twenty-foot drop below us. I let go and fell, and all I remember was waking up on a fold-up bed in a navy tent with a nurse talking to me, and then they gave me a drink of milk and let me out to join up with the other lads, who were all laughing and calling me a plonker.

The actual gun runs were very exciting to watch, and they were real tough sailors, as many times one would fall under the wheels of the cannon they had built as they raced alongside the other navy team, all running to get to the end first and fire their cannon and be declared the winners. Sometimes they would be hanging on to a fast-moving wire, holding a cannon wheel with one arm and the wire with the other. They were always losing a finger or getting their arms or legs broken.

We had to go to the large Catholic church beside our junior school every Sunday with our father. I hated it and found it very boring; it just seemed to go on forever. Sometimes we could sneak out pretending we weren’t feeling well. We could then get a lump of coal from the caretaker’s shed and play football with it in the school playground. When we saw our father coming out at the end of mass, we’d run up behind him and pretend we had been in the church all the time but sitting in a different place.

I remember I was sent away on a short holiday in the summer for two or three days with these people from our church. I think they did it as a charity for children. I don’t know the details as I was very young at the time. We stayed in a large house like a boarding school, as it had a dormitory with lots of beds in it. Whilst there, we visited an American army base, which was very exciting, and I saw this large American car, like the ones I had seen on the TV. In the canteen they gave us a drink of American root beer. I had never tasted anything like it before; it was like scented Coca-Cola. Years later McDonald’s sold it. I had a good trip, even though it was with a load of complete strangers and children I had never met before.

We used to have most things delivered in the sixties, like newspapers, milk, bread, and green groceries. The man who used to deliver green groceries in our area sometimes would pop into a house for a cup of tea and a chat; that was always our chance to nick things from his cart. Sometimes he’d come running out of the house and chase us, but we always got away. One day at home in our house, I was sitting in front of the black-and-white TV on the floor when my sister came in with her new boyfriend to introduce him to our mother and father. Wouldn’t you believe it, but it was the green grocery delivery man. Me and my brothers just turned our backs on him sharpish, before he could recognise us. My other sister, Molly, was married to a man called Kevin from Ireland. Kevin had worked on the tunnels for a bit with my father and was a digger driver at that time, before he became a self-employed general builder.

I enjoyed my time living on the South Coast from 1966 up to 1974. I had done a fair bit of my childhood there. I loved football and had trials with the local main professional football club. The coach was great and had us running on the stones beside the sea. I even got to play on the main pitch in the club stadium. Alas, I didn’t get selected for the elite youngsters, probably because I was quite small then, but I did have broad shoulders. I settled in to playing for my school and then the secondary school.

We often went to watch the football club, who were in the old second division. We got to see an old Dave McKay (great ex-Spurs player) player/manager for Swindon Town FC, and George Best played in a pre-season friendly for Manchester United. I remember