Today Everything Changes: Quick Read Read online

  About the Book

  Abandoned as a baby, Andy McNab’s start in life was tough. He grew up in South London with foster parents, and poverty around him on all sides.

  Andy attended seven schools in as many years, disillusioned and in remedial classes. It wasn’t long before his life was one of petty crime. By the age of sixteen, he was in juvenile detention.

  Recruited into the Army from there, it soon became clear that he had the reading age of an eleven year old. The next six months in the Army education system changed his life forever. Today Everything Changes is the inspiring story of when life changed for the better for now bestselling author Andy McNab.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  About the Author

  Also by Andy McNab

  Copyright

  Today Everything

  Changes

  Andy McNab

  Chapter One

  February 1968

  The windows and doors of the building were boarded up and barbed wire was pinned to the top of the walls, but that wasn’t going to keep us out.

  A rusty sheet of metal nailed over a small door to the side was loose. I jammed a bit of wood into the gap, pulled hard and the nails gave way. Several hands gripped the metal and it folded back to make a hole that we could crawl through.

  Murky light spilt down from six or seven skylights in the flat roof ten metres above our heads. In the gloom I could see lumps of metal on the bare concrete floor but, apart from that, the massive old Maxwell’s Laundry was empty. There was a dank smell of mould, rotten wood and plaster. It was totally, eerily silent. If we had made any noise it would have echoed around the vast space. Maybe nobody outside would hear it and raise the alarm, but I didn’t want to take that chance.

  I looked at the others and nodded to the stairs at the far end of the building. As I moved forward my foot hit a tin can. It skidded across the floor and clattered into one of the lumps of metal. The four lads behind me jumped. ‘You dickhead, watch it!’

  I could see that the stairs would take us up to the offices, then up again to a hatch that was open to the sky. Once we were on the roof, the fun and games would start.

  It felt colder up there than it had done at ground level. I watched my breath form into a cloud and started to shiver. I walked to the edge of the flat roof and looked down at the lampposts and their pools of light. The street was deserted. There was no one around to see us. Or to hear the sudden crash of breaking glass.

  I spun around and could only see three figures standing near one of the skylights, which now had no glass covering it. I heard a thud from deep inside the building.

  ‘John!’ one of the lads whispered. ‘John!’

  I knew even before I looked through the hole that he would be dead. We all did. We glanced at each other and then ran back towards the stairs.

  John was lying very still. He was face down on the concrete, a dark pool of blood oozing from his mouth and the back of his head. It looked shiny in the dim light.

  ‘Let’s get out of here!’ someone shouted, and we scarpered for the door. I just wanted to get home and get my head under the covers. Then nobody would ever find out what had happened. That’s how you think when you’re just eight years old.

  Chapter Two

  I’d never been so scared. It was the first time I’d ever seen a dead person, but it wasn’t the body that upset me. What would happen if I got nicked? I’d seen enough TV cop shows to know that everyone always gets caught in the end. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life in prison and knew I’d rather die than have that happen.

  The next day there were police swarming everywhere on the estate where I lived. We four lads met up to make sure we had the same story. We had no idea why John had gone up onto the roof. Of course we weren’t there when he fell through the skylight. We hadn’t seen him yesterday at all.

  Until then, I’d had an ordinary childhood. I wasn’t abused and I wasn’t beaten. I was just a normal, run-of-the-mill kid living on a council estate in south-east London. My parents had adopted me because my birth mother had left me in A and E at a hospital in London. They had adopted my older brother too, but he’d left home and was in the army.

  My parents were very busy trying to make a living so it was great having so much freedom. That was normal for my mates and me. Some kids had to go home when it got dark or had to ask their mums if they could leave the estate. They were the strange ones, the wimps.

  Mum and Dad, like all the people on our estate, spent lots of time looking for jobs and never had enough cash to get by. My mum’s latest job was in a chocolate factory during the week, and at weekends she did service washes at the launderette. The old man did any job he could find in the daytime, and at night he used his old Ford as a mini-cab. He mended his own car and other people’s.

  We moved house a lot. I’d lived at a total of nine different addresses and gone to seven schools. When I was little, my mum and dad moved to the seaside in Kent. It didn’t work out so they had to go back to London. When Mum got pregnant and had a baby boy, I went to stay with Aunty Nell. This was no hardship at all. Aunty Nell was great, and the school was just round the corner from her house. Best of all, she used to give me a hot milk drink at night, with biscuits, which were a real luxury for me.

  When Aunty Nell’s husband, George, died, he left my mum a little bit of money. She decided to buy a corner café with it, but my mum and dad were no good at business and everything went wrong. Even the accountant ripped them off. We moved in to private housing in south London, renting half a house. My Uncle Bert lived upstairs. Mum and Dad were paying the rent collector, but it wasn’t going to the landlord, so eventually we got evicted and landed up in emergency council housing.

  We lived on what my mum called Teddy Bears’ Porridge, which was bread, milk and sugar warmed up. Once, the gas was cut off and the only heat in the flat came from a three-bar electric fire. Mum laid it on its back in the front room and told us we were camping. Then she balanced a saucepan on top and heated our supper: Teddy Bears’ Porridge. I thought it was great.

  Chapter Three

  When I was eight, I joined my first gang. The leader looked like the lead singer of the Rubettes, a 1970s ‘big hair and platform shoes’ pop group. Another boy’s dad sold used cars; we thought they were filthy rich because once they went to Spain on holiday. The third gang member had to wear glasses because his eyes had been damaged in an accident so he was good for taking the piss out of. Those three boys were my role models, the three main players on the estate. I wanted to be with them, to be one of the lads.

  We played on what we called ‘bomb sites’, where old buildings had been knocked down to make
way for new housing estates. Sometimes we mucked around in empty buildings, like Maxwell’s Laundry. There were signs everywhere, NO ENTRY, DANGER, but they didn’t put us off. We used to sing the Beatles’ song ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, throw stones at the windows and smash the glass. We used to go onto the roof and dare each other to use the skylights as stepping-stones. It was fun until John fell through one and died.

  After that, I joined a new gang. I had to have a lighted match put to my arm until the skin smoked and there was a burn mark. I was very pleased with myself, but when my mum saw the state of my arm she went beserk. I couldn’t understand why.

  She dragged me off to the house of my new gang leader. The two mums shouted at each other big time while we boys stood there giggling. As far as I was concerned I was in the gang – let them argue as much as they liked.

  As I mixed with the other kids in the gang, I started to notice that I didn’t have as much stuff as they did. It was the skinhead era and everybody had to have green Dockers trousers and Dr Martens cherry-red boots. I told the gang I didn’t have them because I didn’t want them.

  We’d go swimming, and afterwards the lads bought Screwball ice creams or arrowroot biscuits out of a jar from one of the local pubs. I never had the money for either, and had to beg half a biscuit from one of my mates. One day I had scrounged enough money for a Screwball. I’d never tasted one before. When I got to the shop, I discovered that they’d stopped making them. I bought an Aztec bar instead, and felt very grown-up. Sadly, there was nobody to show it off to because I was on my own.

  I tried Cubs once but never got as far as having a uniform. We had to pay subs each week, but I lied my way out of paying the first few times. On Tuesday nights we had to have plimsolls to play five-a-side football. I didn’t have any so I nicked somebody else’s. I got caught because the kid’s name was written inside them in marker pen. The Cub leader gave me a big lecture. ‘Stealing’s bad,’ he said, and told me not to come again.

  I knew that older lads got money by earning it, so I got chatting to the milkman and persuaded him to let me help with his Sunday round on the estate. He’d give me enough money to buy a copy of Whizzer and Chips, a bottle of Coke and a Mars bar. That left me with just sixpence, but the Coke and the Mars bar seemed like grownup stuff so it was worth it, even if it was only one day a week.

  One of the gang wore wet-look leather shoes, which were all the rage. His hair was always clean and shiny too, and he had a hot bath every night. I was very impressed. At our house, we had no bath. In fact, we had no hot water.

  One day I noticed that this lad had some cash in his money-box. As far as I was concerned he was loaded, and wouldn’t miss it. I nicked it, and nothing was ever said.

  I started nicking more and more. It was easy. My mum used to have a lot of stuff on the slate in the Co-op. When she sent me for cigarettes or milk and other bits and pieces, I’d take some extras and put them on tick. I knew she wouldn’t check the bill, she’d just pay up when she had some money.

  Television adverts really got to me. A Johnny 7 toy machine-gun threw a grenade, made a noise and did all sorts of things. When you fired it, you pushed a clip and a pistol came out. I nicked the pistol off a boy on another estate, and told my mates I kept the rest of my Johnny 7 at home.

  By the time I was ten years old the stealing had got out of hand. My gang and I were taking stuff not just for our own use but also for selling. We once walked past a second-hand furniture shop with a few new things on display on the pavement. A small, round table caught my eye. We ran past and picked it up, then went to another second-hand shop and sold it. We spent the money in a café on cheese rolls and frothy coffee.

  At the grand old age of twelve I had finally got myself a pair of plimsolls but now they were all I had to wear on my feet. I came into school late one day and was walking down the corridor. A teacher grabbed me and said, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To my classroom.’

  ‘Where are your shoes?’

  I looked down at my plimsolls. I didn’t understand what he meant. Then it dawned on me. ‘I haven’t got any.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve never had any shoes.’

  I had to get a form for my parents to sign. After that, I got a free bus pass and free school dinners. I had to stand in a special free-dinners queue in the school canteen. It wasn’t just me. A lot of kids were in the same boat, but it was one particular gang I wanted to be out of.

  Chapter Four

  I started to get angry. I hated everyone and everything, mostly because I didn’t have what they had. The TV show Only Fools and Horses made you think that Peckham, where I lived in London, was full of Del Boys, having a laugh on the market and drinking cocktails in the pub. In fact, it was full of unemployment, drugs, guns and mindless vandalism.

  I felt angry with people who had shiny new cars or motorbikes and used to kick dents in them – just because I could. I damaged people’s shops, and messed up their goods, simply because they had stuff and I didn’t.

  I remember being very angry with my teachers. By now I had gone to seven different schools, so I had a lot of teachers to be angry with. I was angry that they put me in remedial classes to help me catch up, but I didn’t exactly do anything to get out of them. In fact, I liked being at the bottom of the class. It gave me yet another reason to be angry. I liked the feeling of being a minority and that everyone was against me. I was part of a select club. It justified my anger, so I was entitled to do things that others couldn’t or shouldn’t do.

  As soon as I started at the local comprehensive school, I got into another gang. We went thieving in areas that had smart houses and cars. We reckoned the owners deserved to be robbed.

  We’d saunter past women sitting on park benches, grab their handbags and do a runner. If anyone left their car for a minute or two to buy their children an ice cream, we’d lean through the window and help ourselves to their belongings. We would do the same at traffic lights if a window was open and there was something to take. If a car was hired or had a foreign number-plate, there was a good chance of finding stuff in the boot. The driver and his family were on holiday so they must be rich, right?

  During our school lunch breaks we took off our blazers and hid them in our bags so that no one could identify us when we stole. We thought we were dead clever. In fact, ours was the only comprehensive school in the area, which didn’t really occur to us. Then we’d go around looking for things to steal. One day we got into a car and found a few letters that were waiting to be posted. They contained cheques. We were sure we’d cracked it. We had no idea that we couldn’t do anything with them.

  One night, three of us broke into a camping shop. We didn’t really know what we wanted. It wasn’t as if we planned to go hiking in the hills. I hadn’t been further than to the seaside at Margate. But in that shop you could get badges that showed you’d passed swimming tests to sew on your trunks. We took a few of those and all became gold-medal swimmers. Then we used a frying-pan in the campsite window display as a toilet. We thought it was really funny, but actually we were showing our anger at the world and how it treated us.

  Chapter Five

  By the time I was fourteen, I was bunking off school most of the time. I got a job loading electrical goods into wagons, then helped deliver them. I made a fortune, mainly because I nicked radios, speakers and anything else I could get my hands on when the driver wasn’t looking.

  I earned more than my old man. My attitude was, ‘School is rubbish. I’ve got a job. I’m earning money’, and that was it.

  In the area we lived, you had a really good job if you were a printer on the newspapers in Fleet Street or working in the docks. At the next level down, you had a good job if you were a tube train driver, or a panel beater. I didn’t know what a panel beater did but the word was he got paid good money.

  One summer I ended up working more or less full time for a haulage firm, delivering Britvic mixers and lemonade dur
ing the summer. I managed to get extra pallets of drinks put on the lorries, sold them to pubs and pocketed the proceeds.

  In the winter, I delivered coal. I thought I was Jack the Lad because I could lift the sacks into the chutes. I couldn’t move for old ladies wanting to make me cups of tea and fill me up with homemade cake. I thought I knew everything I needed to know. I felt sorry for my mates who were still at school.

  By now I was all hormonal and trying to impress girls, so it became very important that I was clean. You could buy five pairs of socks for a quid in Peckham market, in shocking colours like yellow and mauve. I made sure that everybody saw I was wearing a different colour every day. But at home we still didn’t have hot water. It didn’t matter because we didn’t have a bathroom either. We made do with a kettle of hot water in the kitchen sink.

  I had to get the coal dust off so I started to have a shower at Goose Green swimming baths. It cost 5p for the shower and a towel, 2p for soap and 2p for a little sachet of shampoo.

  It was now that the Bruce Lee craze swept the country. People would roll out of the pubs and into the late-night movie, then come out thinking they were the Karate Kid. On Friday nights, outside the cinemas, curry houses and Chinese takeaways of Peckham, the local lads would be characters head-butting lamp-posts and each other to Bruce Lee sound effects.

  I took up karate in a big way and trained three times a week. It was great, but it wasn’t enough.

  Chapter Six

  I was still angry with everyone who had more than me. A group of mates and I started tipping over Portaloos so we could snatch the occupants’ handbags as they tried to stop themselves being covered in shit. After all, they deserved it, I thought.

  The only problem was, not everyone saw things the way I did.

  One day, three of us were about to start wrecking a flat in Dulwich that was full of nice, shiny things that someone else had worked really hard for. However, this time the police were waiting. I made a run for it, but got cornered near the railway station by a policeman and his dog.