Stan Collymore - Stan - Tackling My Demons

Stan used to get it from his dad, too. Not physical abuse, but he would do really strange things. He bought Stan a toy cat once and then one day when he came round he took the cat upstairs with him and disappeared for ages. When he had gone, I went to look for it and he had cut it up into tiny pieces and left it scattered across the bed.

People always wonder why I didn’t leave him earlier but where was I going to go? My mother lived with us and by that time she had Alzheimer’s disease. There was nowhere to go. They didn’t have refuges for battered wives then. And I felt I had made my choice and I had to live with it. I’d lost a lot of my friends, too, because they were too ashamed to come round and see me any more. I found out afterwards he had been visiting a few of them and they … well, they liked him.

Eventually, though, I just couldn’t put up with it any longer. He started hitting one of my daughters, too, so I got a divorce and got him kicked out. Even after that he would prowl around on the land at the back of the house. He rang me and threatened to cut my throat, and I had to make Stan a ward of court to keep him away. Sometimes, I could just sense his presence outside. I just knew he had come to watch us. They stopped him coming into Cannock but he never disappeared. He kept writing to me, kept saying he knew that I had never married again because I still loved him.

Stan isn’t like him. Just because he has been a womaniser doesn’t mean he is like him. Stan has got friends. Stan tries to do his best for others. I was ashamed of him when he hit Ulrika but that’s the only time I have been ashamed of him. I had always pleaded with him, ‘be kind to ladies’. But that one incident doesn’t make him like his dad. Not by a million miles.

I know wives who have been victims of violent husbands sometimes say this, but in many ways I blame myself. You see, I never loved Stan’s dad. Even my first husband, I never missed him after I left him. I think that’s just my way. Perhaps it’s just that I never met the right fella, but I don’t think I’m capable of loving anybody apart from my kids.

I’ve never tried to find my dad. But just after Christmas last year, he found me. He sent me an e-mail after I’d written a piece in the Daily Mirror touching on some of the abuse he had handed out to my mum. He said that he considered I was lost to the black side of my family and that I had been corrupted by white ways of thinking. He said that if I ever criticised the black race as a whole, I had better keep looking over my shoulder because he would be coming for me.

It made me laugh really. Partly because he hadn’t wasted any time trying to renew my acquaintance ten years or so ago when he suddenly realised I might be earning a decent wedge at Nottingham Forest. Funny that, isn’t it? Him and my Uncle Don, who’d combined to make life so difficult for my mother, united by a love of money that conquered all their hostility towards my mother in a trice. What a pair of sad bastards. Pathetic specimens of humanity.

I laughed, too, because my dad’s threats made me think of the time when I was at Forest and I had my hair dyed blonde. I looked like a right twat, to be honest with you. Frank Clark, the Forest manager, said I should spend more time on the training pitch and less at the hair salon and I might improve myself as a player. Point taken.

A couple of days later, I opened a newspaper to see a picture of my dad staring out at me as large as life. I hadn’t seen him, even a picture of him, for more than 10 years. He had a handsome face and he was wearing smart, elegant, Seventies-style clothes. He wasn’t being very complimentary about me, though. It was the same sort of stuff. How I was trying to turn myself into a white boy. How he had always wanted me to play cricket for the West Indies, not be a common footballer. What struck me most was that I did not feel a thing. No hurt. No hatred. No despair. Why should I after what he had done to us? Why should I after the legacy he had bequeathed to me? If he had a soul left, my dad had just sold it. And I didn’t feel a thing.

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