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brave james

My earliest memory is from when I was five, and my dad took me in his blue Vauxhall Cavalier to see Leicester City play Manchester United. I don’t recall anything about the game, apart from the deafening noise and the huge, tightly packed crowd, but I do remember that Gary Lineker was playing for Leicester. And, no doubt, he scored.

I was born at Leicester Royal Infirmary on 11 September 1976. My mother was just twenty-one. She named me James because she had liked the name after watching David Essex play a character called Jim in the filmThat’ll Be the Day. She remembers a nurse opening the windows because it was so hot, so one of the first sounds I probably heard was the chants of Leicester City supporters at Filbert Street.

My dad grew up in Leicester. His father, who had served in the army, moved there from Yorkshire. My dad had two brothers and a sister who had Down Syndrome; she died at the age of thirty.

My mum was born in Market Harborough. Her parents split up when she was young, and her dad moved to Cornwall. When she was thirteen her mum died, so she ended up living with her granny.

My parents met in 1971 at the Palais de Danse in Leicester. After getting married in 1974, they rented a flat in the city before buying a house in Logan Street in Market Harborough. In 1977 they moved less than a mile away to a house on Lubenham Hill.

Market Harborough is a small town about fifteen miles south of Leicester and close to the Northamptonshire border. Locals just call it Harborough. Its most notable features are St Dionysius Church with its tall spire: a seventeenth-century timber-framed building on wooden pillars that was once the grammar school; and the red-brick Symington factory, which made corsets for retailers such as Marks and Spencer. When my parents moved there, it contained the kind of independent shops you found in many small towns, along with a Woolworths, Boots and Burton’s. Champers Café in the Square was a popular place to grab something to eat or have a cup of tea, and my mum often met her friends there. To the north of the town was the basin of the Leicester Line of the Grand Union Canal, lined by a number of old warehouses. If you ever bought a packet of Golden Wonder crisps, you would know from the back of the packet that the company’s head office was in Market Harborough, on Abbey Street.

When I was seven, we moved to a three-bedroom house in Cromwell Crescent, on the south side of the River Welland. By now I had a younger brother called Tom and a sister, Debbie. I shared a bedroom with Tom, and we had lots of fights, as brothers are prone to do, but overall we got on pretty well and played football together most days. Apparently my first words were ‘outside’ and ‘football’.

I went to Fairfield Road Primary School for a year and then to Farndon Fields Primary School. I don’t remember much about my primary school days, but when I was six, I saw a boy called Paul attack one of the teachers, Mrs White, in class one day. Since that memory sticks out, it must have left a lasting impression.

My mum’s dad lived in St Ives in Cornwall. When I was seven and Tom was five, my parents took us to Victoria Coach Station in London and put us on a National Express coach to Cornwall. In those days, a hostess was provided for unaccompanied children. The coach travelled through the night and we were met by my grandad at Penzance, where he was a traffic warden and his wife helped run an ice-cream shop near the pier. One day Tom and I went to the end of the pier and watched some older lads jumping off it into the water, so we did the same. When my grandad discovered what had happened, he wasn’t happy. I think we were a bit of a handful for him. When he took us to a Radio 1 road show, we got lost in the crowds. After he found us, he gave us both a smack for getting lost. We never stayed with