your next meal. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not one of those guys who’ll go, ‘Oh, I’m fine now, I’ve got plenty of dough, I’ll just forget about my past.’
It’s what made me who I am.
Another scam we came up with was standing outside Aston Villa’s ground on match days and charging the fans a halfshilling each to ‘mind’ their cars. Everyone would leave their car unlocked in those days, so during the game we’d get inside them and just fuck around. Sometimes we’d try to make extra dough by washing them. That was a brilliant plan until we decided to wash one poor fucker’s car with a wire brush. Half the paint was gone by the time we’d finished. The guy went fucking insane.
I wasn’t really a bad guy, even though I wanted to be. I was just a kid trying to be accepted by the local gangs. We used to have great games, I remember. One street would fight the other by throwing stones down the road and using dustbin lids as shields, like it was the Greeks versus the Romans or something. It was fun until someone got hit in the face with a rock and had to go to the emergency room with blood gushing out of his eye socket. We played war games, too, and made our own bombs: you’d get a load of penny bangers, empty the gunpowder out, flatten one end of a copper tube, drill a hole in the middle, pack it with the gunpowder, fold the other end over, then take the fuse out of one of the bangers and put it in the hole. Then all you had to do was put a match to the fuse and fuck off out of the way, quick.
Bang!
Heh-heh-heh.
Not everything we did was as dodgy as bomb-making, but most of it was just as dangerous.
Me and Pat built this underground den one time, carved out of a hard clay embankment.
We put an old bed frame in there and bits of wood, and there was this hole in the roof for a chimney. Next to it were these rusty oil drums, and we’d jump off the drums onto this piece of old corrugated metal that served as a perfect springboard—Boing!—then we’d land on the roof of the den. We did that for weeks until one day I crashed through the fucking chimney hole and almost broke my neck.
Pat thought I was a goner for a few seconds.
The bomb building sites were the best, though. We’d fuck around on them for hours, building stuff out of the rubble, smashing things, lighting fires. And we were always looking for treasure… our imaginations went crazy. There were also a lot of derelict Victorian houses to play in, because they were doing up Aston at the time. They were magnificent, those old houses—three or four storeys—and you could do all kinds of shit in them. We’d buy a couple cigarettes and lounge around in bombed-out drawing rooms or whatever, having a smoke.
Woodbine or Park Drive, they were our fags of choice. You’d be sitting there in all this dirt and dust, smoking a cigarette and breathing in all this thick, yellow Birmingham smog at the same time.
Ah, them were the days.
I hated school. Hated it.
I can still remember my first day at Prince Albert Juniors in Aston: they had to drag me in there by the scruff of my neck, because I was kicking and screaming so much.
The only thing I ever looked forward to at school was the bell ringing at four o’clock. I couldn’t read properly so I couldn’t get good marks. Nothing would stick in my head, and I couldn’t understand why my brain was such a useless piece of fucking jelly. I’d look at a page in a book and it might as well have been written in Chinese. I felt like I was no good, like I was a born loser. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I found out about my dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. No one knew anything about any of that shit back then. I was in a class of forty kids, and if you didn’t understand, the teachers didn’t try to help—they just let you fuck around. So that’s what I did. And whenever anyone gave me shit for being stupid—like when I had to read out loud—I’d try to entertain the class. I’d think up all sorts of insane things to do to make the other kids laugh.
The only good thing about having dyslexia is that dyslexics are usually very creative people, or so I’ve been told. We think in unusual ways. But it’s a very bad stigma to have, not being able to read like normal people can. To this day I wish I’d had a proper education. I think books are great, I do. To be able to lose yourself in a book is fucking phenomenal.
Everyone should be able to do it. But I’ve been able to get through an entire book only a few times in my life. Every blue moon this thing in my head will release, and I’ll try to read as many books as I can, because when it closes up it goes straight back to the way it was, and I end up just sitting there, staring at Chinese.
For as long as I can remember people called me ‘Ozzy’ at school. I haven’t got a clue who first came up with it, or when, or why. It was just a nickname for Osbourne, I suppose, but it fitted my clownish personality. As soon as it stuck, only my immediate family kept calling me John. I don’t even recognise my birth name now. If someone says, ‘Oi, John! Over ’ere!’ I don’t even look up.
After Prince Albert Juniors, I went to Birchfield Road Secondary Modern in Perry Barr.
They had a uniform there. It wasn’t mandatory, but most of the kids wore it, including my goody two-shoes little brother Paul. He’d turn up every day in the blazer and the grey flannels and the tie and shirt. Me, I’d walk around in fucking welly-boots and jeans and smelly old sweats. The headmaster, Mr Oldham, would give me a bollocking every time he set eyes on me. ‘John Osbourne, tidy yourself up, you’re a disgrace!’ he’d shout down the hallway. ‘Why can’t you be more like your brother?’
The only time Mr Oldham ever said a good word about me was when I told him that one of the older kids had tried to kill the school fish by putting Fairy Liquid in the aquarium. He even praised me in assembly. ‘Because of John Osbourne,’ he said, ‘we were able to apprehend the villain responsible for this dastardly deed.’ What Mr Oldham didn’t know was that it was me who’d tried to kill the school fish by putting dish soap in the aquarium—but I’d chickened out halfway through. I knew everyone would blame me for all the bubbles in the tank, ’cos they blamed me for everything, so I thought if I blamed someone else first, I could get away with it. And it worked.
There was one teacher I liked: Mr Cherrington. He was a local-history buff and he once took us to this place called Pimple Hill, the site of an old castle in Birmingham. It was fucking great. He talked about forts and burial grounds and medieval torture devices. It was the best lesson I ever had, but I still didn’t get good marks because I couldn’t write any of it down. Funnily enough, the only thing I got gold stars for at Birchfield Road was ‘heavy metalwork’. I suppose that was ’cos my dad was a toolmaker and it came naturally to me. I even won first prize in a class competition for a metal window catch. It didn’t stop me fucking around, though. The teacher, Mr Lane, would end up slapping me on the arse with this big piece of wood. He would hit me so hard I thought my arse was going to fall off. He was actually a nice guy, Mr Lane. Terrible racist, though. Fucking hell, the things he’d say… you’d get put in jail for it today.
My favourite prank in heavy metalwork was to get a penny and spend three or four minutes making it really hot with a blowtorch, and then leave it on Mr Lane’s desk, so that he’d see it and pick it up out of curiosity.
First you’d hear: ‘Waaaaahhhhhh!’
Then: ‘Osbourne, you little bastard!’
Heh-heh-heh.
The old hot-penny trick. Priceless, man.
I got bullied for a while when I was younger. Some older kids used to wait for me on the way home from school and pull my trousers down and fuck around with me. I was maybe eleven or twelve at the time. It was a bad scene. They didn’t fuck me or wank me off or any of that stuff—it was just boys playing boys’ games—but it made me feel ashamed, and it freaked me out because I couldn’t tell my parents. There was a lot of teasing in my family—which is normal when you’ve got six kids in one little terraced house—but it meant I didn’t feel I could ask anyone for help. I felt like it was all my fault.
At least it made me determined that when I grew up and had my own kids, I’d tell them,
‘Don’t ever be afraid to come to your mum and dad with any problems. You know what’s right and you know what’s wrong, and if somebody ever messes with parts of your body that you don’t think are cool, just tell us.’ And believe me, if I ever found out that anything dodgy was happening to one of my own, there’d be fucking blood.
Eventually I worked out a way to get around the bullies. I found the biggest kid in the playground and clowned around until I made him laugh. By doing that he became my friend. He was built like a cross between a brick shithouse and Mount fucking Snowdon. If you fucked around with him you’d be drinking your school dinners through a straw for the next month and a half. But deep down he was a gentle giant. The bullies left me well alone once we became pals, which was a relief because I was as crap at fighting as I was at reading.
One kid at school who never beat me up was Tony Iommi. He was in the year above me, and everyone knew him ’cos he could play the guitar. He might not have beaten me up, but I still felt intimidated by him: he was a big
