Prize winner

My name is Brighton

Green – I didn’t know what the word meant. Grass – a wonderful word.

Put them together and they make one of the most wonderful expressions in the English language. Green grass. By now you must be thinking I’m mad. Well, I’m not.

My name is Brighton. What a stupid name for a boy. Is that what you’re thinking? I agree with you. But my poor teenage mother wanted something for her baby that all the stars and the rich people had for their babies. The only thing she could afford was a place name for her baby, like Paris. You know, Paris as in Paris Hilton the millionairess from the famous hotels.

Mam didn’t want a French name for her baby but she always wanted to go to Brighton – it’s a smart seaside place a long way from the cold wet north of England where we lived.

So that’s what she called me – Brighton. Ever since I started school I’ve called myself Bri and people used to think my name was Brian.

I don’t know who my Dad was. It doesn’t matter. He didn’t want to know me. Mam said he dropped her like a hot cake as soon as he found out she was pregnant.

You notice I talk about my Mam in the past tense. Yes, well she’s dead, that’s why; too much hard work, too much bad luck, not enough fun. On our estate that’s nothing new. People don’t get old where I grew up. Nobody I know that went to our class at primary school had a dad that went to work. Not any people had a dad, actually.

I told you we didn’t have much money, so sometimes to help my Mam pay the bills I stole from the supermarket (I became more than good at shoplifting) and sold the things at school.

When my Mam asked where the money had come from I told her I had been lucky. She wanted to believe me, she was desperate.

‘Brighton,’ she said to me ‘you’re going to be just like your name – bright and shiny. You’re going to have your name in lights.’ I laughed then. I was fourteen and a half when I came home and knew she was never going to look at me that way again. Too much hard work, too much bad luck, not enough fun. Her heart couldn’t stand it.

But that was a few years ago now. Social Services came. They said they were going to put me in a children’s home. I didn’t want to grow up in a home but I was under age. I had no relatives, so what could they do? I decided to run away. I have always been fast and I have always liked taking a risk. They never found me. I lived on the streets.

Prize winner

I suppose thinking about my Mam, she wouldn’t have liked me living on the streets, running and hiding and everything. I shouldn’t have done it but, I don’t know, I never really thought about it. Like my Mam, I was desperate.

Sometimes I got a job delivering papers or cleaning up in a garage. I had to live somehow and who was going to give me a proper job – no family, no qualifications, nothing really. So sometimes I stole. There was a man in our town who paid boys like me to steal and sell things. If you didn’t do what he wanted he could be very dangerous. I knew he also had boys who sold drugs for him, and he wanted me to be involved too, but I always managed to be somewhere else when he came to ask. I never ever wanted to be involved in that kind of game.

I had to be clever and cunning not to get involved. For the next two and a half years I lived like a rat. Sometimes I looked into the mirror just to make sure I didn’t look like a rat. Sometimes I did. A sharp nose, bright black eyes, thin, tough, fast and fearless.

I didn’t have any real friends, just some mates I used to know at secondary school. I used to meet them for a drink in a pub down by the river. None of us looked as old as eighteen but nobody cared.

Anyway, one evening at the end of March, just as I was coming up to my seventeenth birthday (I was born on April Fool’s Day, there’s a laugh) there was a darts competition in the pub. ‘Come on, Bri,’ one of my mates said. ‘First prize is a day trip to London for two. You’re good at darts. We could win two tickets to go to London.’

‘Well, OK,’ I said. So I went up to the bar and said I wanted to play. To cut a long story short, I won … second prize. The first prize went to a woman, and she must have been over forty. We never even thought she’d be able to hit the dart board.

We hadn’t looked at the other prizes – we had concentrated on London. When they called me up to give me my prize it said a ticket to the Aintree Experience and a place on the stands to watch the race.

‘Aintree Experience – what’s that?’ I asked.The bar keeper looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘Come on, lad. You’ve heard about the Grand National, haven’t you? The most exciting horse race in the world! And this prize you’ve won takes you on a tour of all the buildings and things at the racecourse where they hold the Grand National.’

‘Normally the public never gets to see behind the scenes,’ said the bar keeper. ‘Oh, great! Just what I’ve always wanted,’ I replied. ‘If you don’t want it, give it back,’ the bar keeper said. ‘There are lots of people here who would like this prize.’ I looked at the prize again. It also said free train ticket to Liverpool and free lunch. At least if I went to Aintree I would eat well. And I didn’t have to stay for the race in the afternoon. If I took the prize I could go out on the town. Liverpool wasn’t London, but it was a big city, not like the boring little town where I lived. I’d never been away, even for a day. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ And I put the prize in my pocket.

‘Ungrateful young man, aren’t you?’ the bar keeper said to my back as I walked out of the pub. I didn’t care. I had been called a lot worse.

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