guy, and good-looking, and all the girls fancied him.
And no one could beat Tony Iommi in a fight. You could not put the guy down. As he was older than me he might have kicked me in the bollocks a few times and given me some shit, but nothing more than that. What I remember most about him from school is the day when we were allowed to bring our Christmas presents to class. Tony showed up with this bright red electric guitar. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I’d always wanted to play an instrument myself, but my folks didn’t have the dough to buy me one, and I didn’t have the patience to learn anyway. My attention span was five seconds. But Tony could really play. He was incredible, just one of those naturally talented guys: you could have given him some Mongolian bagpipes and he’d have learned how to do a blues riff on them in a couple of hours. At school I always wondered what would happen to Tony Iommi.
But it would be a few more years before our paths would cross again.
As I got older, I started to spend less time in class and more in the boys’ toilets, smoking. I smoked so much I was always turning up late for morning registration, which was taken by the school rugby teacher, Mr Jones. He hated me. He was always putting me in detention and picking on me in front of the other kids. His favourite thing in the whole world was to beat me with a shoe. He’d tell me to go to the tennis-shoe rack at the back of the classroom and pick out the biggest one and bring it to him. Then he’d go and inspect the rack, and if he found a bigger shoe I’d get whacked on the arse twice as many times. He was the worst bully in the whole place.
Another thing Mr Jones would do is, he’d get all the kids to stand in a row every morning in the classroom, and then he’d walk up and down behind us, looking at our necks to make sure we were washing ourselves in the morning. If he thought you had a dirty neck, he’d rub a white towel over it—and if it came up soiled, he’d drag you by the collar over to the sink in the corner and scrub you down like an animal.
He was the worst bully in the whole school, Mr Jones was.
It didn’t take me long to realise that my folks had less dough than most other families. We certainly weren’t having holidays in Majorca every summer—not with six little Osbournes to clothe and feed. I never even saw the sea until I was fourteen. That was thanks to my aunty Ada, who lived in Sunderland. And I didn’t see an ocean— with the kind of water that doesn’t have Geordie turds floating in it and won’t give you hypothermia in three fucking seconds—until I was well into my twenties.
There were other ways I could tell we were broke. Like the squares of newspaper we had to use instead of toilet roll. And the welly-boots I had to wear in the summer ’cos I had no shoes. And the fact that my mum never bought me underwear. There was also this dodgy bloke who’d come round to the house all the time, asking for money. We called him the ‘knock-knock’ man. He was a door-to-door salesman, basically, and he’d sell my mum all this stuff out of his catalogue using some dodgy loan shark scheme, then come around every week to collect the payments. But my mum never had the cash, so she’d send me to the door to tell him she wasn’t at home. I got sick of it eventually. ‘Mum says she ain’t in,’ I’d say.
Years later, I made up for it by opening the door to the knock-knock man and settling my mum’s bill in full. Then I told him to fuck off and never come back again. But it didn’t do any good. Two weeks later I came home to find my mum getting a brand new three-piece suite delivered. It didn’t take much imagination to work out where she’d got it from.
Money was so tight when I was a kid; one of the worst days of my entire childhood was when my mum gave me ten shillings on my birthday to go and buy myself a flashlight—it was the kind that could light up in different colours—and on the way home I lost the change. I must have spent at least four or five hours searching every last ditch and drain hole in Aston for those few coins. The funny thing is, I can’t even remember now what my mum said when I got home. All I can remember is being fucking terrified.
It’s not that life at 14 Lodge Road was bad. But it was hardly fucking domestic bliss, either.
My mother was no Julia Child, for a start.
Every Sunday she’d be sweating in the kitchen, making lunch, and we’d all be dreading the final result. But you couldn’t complain. One time, I’m eating this cabbage and it tastes like soap. Jean sees the look on my face, so she jabs me in the ribs and goes, ‘Don’t say a word.’
But I’m sick to my guts and I don’t want to die from fucking cabbage poisoning. I’m just about to say something when my dad gets back from the pub, hangs up his coat, and sits down in front of his dinner. He picks up his fork, stabs it down into the cabbage, and when he lifts it up to his mouth there’s this lump of tangled wire on the end of it! God bless my old mum, she’d boiled a Brillo pad!
We all ran to the bog to make ourselves throw up.
Another time my mum made me some boiled-egg sandwiches for a packed lunch. I opened up the bread and there was cigarette ash and bits of shell in it.
Cheers, Mum.
All I can say is, school dinners saved my life. That was one small part of my shitty fucking education that I liked. They were magic, school dinners were. You got a main course and a pudding. It was incredible. Nowadays, you pick up something and you automatically go, ‘Oh, that’s got two hundred calories,’ or, ‘Oh, that’s got eight grams of saturated fat.’ But there was no such thing as a fucking calorie back then. There was only food on yer plate. And there was never enough of it, as far as I was concerned.
Every morning I’d try to think of an excuse to skive off school. So no one believed me when my excuses were real.
Like the time I heard a ghost.
I’m in the kitchen, about to leave the house. It’s winter and freezing cold, and we don’t have hot water on tap, so I’m boiling the kettle and getting ready to fill the sink to do the dishes. Then I hear this voice going, ‘Osbourne, Osbourne, Osbourne.’
Because my father worked nights in those days, he would get us ready for school in the morning, before he went to bed. So I turned to my old man and said, ‘Dad! Dad! I can hear someone shouting our name! I think it’s a ghost! I think our house is haunted!’
He looked up from his paper.
‘Nice try, son,’ he said. ‘You’re going to school, ghost or no ghost. Hurry up with the dishes.’
But the voice wouldn’t go away.
‘Osbourne, Osbourne, Osbourne.’
‘But, Dad!’ I shouted. ‘There’s a voice! There is, there is. Listen!’
Finally my dad heard it, too.
‘Osbourne, Osbourne, Osbourne.’
It seemed to be coming from the garden. So we both legged it outside—me without any shoes—but the garden was empty. Then we heard the voice again, louder this time.
‘Osbourne, Osbourne, Osbourne.’ It was coming from the other side of the fence. So we peer over into the garden next door and there’s our neighbour, an old lady who lived alone, lying on the ground on a patch of ice. She must have slipped and fallen, and didn’t have any way of getting help. If it hadn’t been for us, she would have frozen to death. So me and my dad climb over the fence and lift her into her living room, which we’d never been in before, even though we’d lived next door to this woman for as long as anyone could remember. It was just the saddest thing. The old lady had been married with kids during the war but her husband had been sent off to France and had been shot by the Nazis. On top of that, her kids had died in a bomb shelter. But she lived as though they were all still alive. There were photographs everywhere and clothes laid out and children’s toys and everything. The entire house was frozen in time. It was the most heartbreaking thing I’d ever seen. I remember my mum bawling her eyes out after she came out of that place later in the day.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? You can live a few inches away from your next-door neighbour and never know a thing about them.
I was late for school that day, but Mr Jones didn’t care why, because I was late for school every day. It was just another excuse for him to make my life hell. One morning—it might have been the day we found the old lady on the ice, but I can’t be sure—I was so late for registration that it had ended, and there was already a new class filing in.
It was a special day for me at school, because my dad had given me a bunch of metal rods from the GEC factory so I could make some screwdrivers in Mr Lane’s heavy metalwork class. The rods were in my satchel, and I couldn’t wait to get them out and show them to my mates.
But the day was ruined almost before it had begun. I remember standing there in front of Mr Jones’s desk as
