fake stone bricks on the outside of their council houses, to make it look like they were living in fucking Windsor Castle. All they were missing were the moats and the drawbridges. Most of the houses were terraced, like ours, so the stone cladding on one would end where the pebbledash on the next began. It looked so bad.
I was the fourth kid in my family and the first boy. My three older sisters were Jean, Iris and Gillian. I don’t know when my parents found time to go at it with each other, but before long I also got two younger brothers, Paul and Tony. So there were six kids at 14 Lodge Road. It was pandemonium. Like I said, there was no indoor plumbing in the early days, just a bucket to piss in at the end of the bed. Jean, the eldest, eventually got her own bedroom, in an annexe at the back. The rest of us had to share until Jean grew up and got married, when the next in line took her place.
I tried to stay out of my sisters’ way most of the time. They were always fighting with each other, like girls do, and I didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire. But Jean always made a special effort to look out for me. She was almost like another mum, my big sis. Even to this day, we talk on the phone every Sunday, no matter what.
I don’t know what I would have done without Jean, to be honest with you, because I was a very nervous kid. Fear of impending doom ruled my life. I convinced myself that if I stepped on the cracks in the pavement while I was running home, my mother would die. And when my dad was sleeping through the day, I’d start freaking out that he was dead, and I’d have to poke him in the ribs to make sure he was still breathing. He wasn’t too fucking pleased about that, I can tell you. But all of these spooky things kept swirling through my head.
I was terrified most of the time.
Even my first memory is of being scared. It was June 2, 1953: Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation Day. At that time my father was crazy about Al Jolson, the American vaudeville star. My old man would sing Jolson’s songs around the house, he’d recite Jolson’s comedy routines, he’d even dress up like Al Jolson whenever he got the chance.
Now, Al Jolson was most famous for these blackface numbers—the kind of politically incorrect stuff they’d flog you for today. So my father asked my aunty Violet to make a couple of Black and White Minstrel-type suits for me and him to wear during the Coronation celebrations. They were amazing, these suits. Aunty Violet even got us matching white top hats and matching white bow ties and a couple of red-and-white-striped walking canes. But when my dad came downstairs in blackface, I went fucking nuts. I was screaming and crying and wailing, ‘What have you done to him? Give me back my dad!’ I wouldn’t shut up until someone explained that he was just wearing boot polish. Then they tried to put some of it on me, and I went fucking nuts all over again. I would not have any of that stuff on me. I thought it would stick for ever.
‘No! No! No! Noooooooo!’ I screamed.
‘Don’t be such a scaredy-cat, John,’ snapped my dad.
‘No! No! No! Noooooooo!’
I’ve since learned that craziness runs in the family. My grandmother on my father’s side was borderline certifiable. Really fucking nuts. She’d knock me around all the time for no reason. I have this memory of her slapping my thighs over and over again. Then there was my mum’s younger sister, Aunty Edna, who committed suicide by jumping in a canal. She just walked out of the funny farm one day and decided to throw herself in a canal. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a bit Radio Rental, too. She had my granddad’s initials—A. U. for Arthur Unitt—tattooed on her arm. I think about her every time I see one of those gorgeous chicks on the telly with ink all over her body. It looks all right when you’re footloose and fancy free, but, believe me, it doesn’t look too fucking hot when you’re a grandma, and you’ve got a floppy dagger and two wrinkly snakes on your biceps when you’re rocking your grandkids to sleep. But she didn’t give a fuck, my nan. I liked her a lot. She lived until she was ninety- nine.
When I started to drink too much she’d hit me on the arse with a rolled-up copy of the Mirror and go, ‘You’re getting too fat! Stop drinking! You smell like a bloody beer mat!’
My folks were relatively normal in comparison. My dad was strict but he never beat me up or locked me in the coal house or anything. The worst I’d get was a smack if I did anything bad, like when I tried to kneecap my grandfather with a hot poker while he was asleep. But my dad did have big fights with my mother, and I later learned that he slapped her around.
She even took him to court once, apparently, although I knew nothing of that at the time. I’d hear them shouting, but I never knew what any of it was about—money, I suppose. Mind you, no one who lives in the real world spends the whole time going around saying, ‘Oh yes, darling, I understand, let’s talk about our “feelings”, lah-dee-fucking-dah.’ People who say they’ve never had a cross word are living on another fucking planet. And being married was different in those days. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like, working every night while your missus works every day, and still not having any dough to show for it.
He was a good guy, my old man: simple, old-fashioned. Physically, he was built like a featherweight, and he wore these thick, black Ronnie Barker glasses. He would say to me,
‘You might not have a good education, but good manners don’t cost you anything.’ And he practised what he preached: he’d always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road.
A good man. I really miss him.
But I can now see that he was a bit of a hypochondriac. Maybe that’s where I got it from.
He always had some kind of trouble with his leg. He’d have bandages wrapped around it all the time but he’d never go and see a doctor. He’d rather have dropped dead than go to a doctor. He was terrified of them, like a lot of people his age were. And he’d never take a day off work. If he ever stayed at home feeling ill, it was time to call the undertaker.
One thing I didn’t inherit from the old man was my addictive personality. My dad would have a few beers when he went out, but he wasn’t an excessive drinker. He used to like Mackeson Stout, of all things. He’d go to the working men’s club, have a laugh with the boys from the factory, and come home singing ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’. And that was it. I’d never see him rolling around on the floor or pissing his pants or throwing up in the house.
He’d just get merry. Sometimes I’d go with him to the pub on a Sunday then play in the street outside and listen to him singing his head off through the door. And I’d think, Fucking hell, that lemonade my dad drinks must be amazing… I had an incredible imagination. I spent years wondering what beer must be like, until I finally drank some and thought, What the fuck is this shit? My dad would never drink this! But I soon found out how it could make you feel, and I loved anything that could change the way I felt. By the time I was eighteen I could down a pint in five seconds.
My dad wasn’t the only one in our family who liked to sing when he’d had a few. My mum and my sisters did, too. Jean would come home with these Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley records, and they’d all learn them and organise these little family shows on a Saturday night.
My sisters even had some of those Everly Brothers harmonies down pat. The first time I ever performed was at one of those Osbourne get-togethers. I sang Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’, which I’d heard on the radio. Never in a million years did I think I’d end up making a career out of singing. I didn’t think it was possible. As far as I knew, the only way I could make any dough was to go and work in a factory, like everyone else in Aston. Or rob a fucking bank.
And that wasn’t completely out of the question.
Crime came naturally to me. I even had an accomplice—a kid on my street called Patrick Murphy. The Murphys and the Osbournes were tight, even though the Murphy kids were proper Catholics and went to a different school. We started out scrumping apples, me and Pat. We didn’t sell them or anything—we just used to eat the fuckers because we were hungry. Every so often you’d get a rotten one and you’d shit your guts out for days. Not far from where we lived was a place called Trinity Road, which backed on to a lower street, so you could just lean over a wall, turn your shirt into a kind of sling and fill it with apples from the trees on the other side. Once I was standing on the wall like a pregnant fucking apple smuggler and the owner of the land set these two German shepherds on me. They rushed up at me from behind and I fell head first over the wall, into the orchard. Within seconds, my eye swelled up like a big black balloon. My old man went fucking nuts when I went home. Then I went to hospital, and the doctor gave me another bollocking.
It didn’t stop me and Pat, though.
After the apples we moved on to robbing parking meters. Then we got into some petty shoplifting. My folks had six kids and not much dough, and if you’re in that kind of desperate situation, you’ll do whatever you can for
