Phil Vickery - Raging Bull - My Autobiography

When I think back, I can’t believe that we were allowed to spend so much time on the beach on our own, but it was a great place to grow up, close to the sea and close to nature. I tell my kids, Megan and Harrison, the stories of when I was a little boy, and it sounds so idyllic. There was something so lovely and adventurous about the freedom we had - life in the fresh air, enjoying long days and warm nights outside.

I’m proud of being a Cornishman … it’s in my blood. So it’s slightly odd that one of the first things I have to tell you about myself is that I was born in Devon! Before you think that makes me any less Cornish, I’d better explain. I was born in Barnstaple, in Devon, because my family is from Bude which is a great little seaside town in North Cornwall, and the nearest hospital was just over the county line in Devon. But besides that, I am Cornish through and through.

I was born into a family of big, bulky dairy farmers, with Mum and Dad working on Killock, a 350-acre farm just outside Bude. The farm had originally belonged to my grandparents. Both sets of grandparents are farmers, so dairy farming really is in my blood, and there’s no doubt that farming is what I’d have ended up doing if rugby hadn’t come along and cocked everything up!

My grandma and grandpa Vickery originally started off life in a place called Bagbury Farm, not far from us in Bude. Then they bought Killock Farm and split the cows between the two farms, making successes of both of them. I do look back and think: Bloody hell, how did they do that? Farming’s a difficult business to make a success of with just one farm to look after, but managing to create two farms out of one like that takes some doing. They did it so that my dad, Barry, could be given Killock when he married my mum, Elaine, and his sister, my aunty Carol, could farm Bagbury.

So I lived on Killock Farm with Mum, Dad, my grandparents and my brother Mark who was two years old when I was born. I was surrounded by animals, milking machines and tractors from an early age. It’s all I ever knew as a kid. It was a perfect place for an adventurous child to live, and you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I was a bloody adventurous child, always exploring, climbing, clambering over everything and generally getting up to mischief on the farm with Mark. I can see now, looking back at the way we were back then, that we must have been a hell of a handful for poor Mum; I don’t know how she coped with us rampaging around the place, doing more damage than if a couple of rhinos had been let loose on the farm. She probably spent as long clearing up after us as she did clearing up after the animals.

Mum never had an easy time of it with me because I started causing problems straight away - from the moment I came into the world at Barnstaple Hospital on 14 March 1976, weighing a sprightly 7lb 13½oz. I was heavier than my brother Mark who’d come before me, and heavier than Helen who came along later, but not the super heavyweight you might expect if you look at the size of me now. I was rushed into an incubator straight after I was born having turned a rather unattractive blue colour (the next time I turned that colour was after one of John Mitchell’s training sessions, but we’ll come onto those later). The doctors were worried about whether I was getting enough oxygen into my body, so decided to keep an eye on me. It meant Mum had to stay in hospital with me for an extra two days before she could take me home.

I’m sure that when Mum eventually got me back to the farm, and realised just what an active and lively child I was going to become, she might have wished I was still in that incubator! She says I was a real handful from the minute she got me back, and with a large dairy farm full of machinery, animals and wide open spaces to mess about in, I had plenty to play with. I didn’t waste any time causing mischief and there are all sorts of stories about me gently petting the animals and half killing them. I’m sure they’re not true … especially not the tales about me squashing the little ducklings half to death. Not me, surely.

I was such a bundle of non-stop energy, even when I was tiny, that Mum decided the only way to cope and keep me relatively safe was to shove me into a wooden playpen and tie it to the kitchen table while she was doing chores around the house. (I’m sure that would be illegal now!) If she didn’t do that, she said I’d push the pen all around the kitchen until I found something interesting (i.e. breakable) to play with. When she was out on the farm doing jobs, she couldn’t leave me for a minute either, so she put me in the hay rack where I couldn’t cause much trouble and she could get on with things without worrying where the next big crash was going to come from.

As we grew up and learnt to toddle around the farm, the smacks, bangs, smashes and collisions that Mark and I got into grew too. Mum remembers me coming in one day with a huge gash on my arm after playing outside all day. I wasn’t bothered about it at all, in fact I hadn’t noticed, but she was so concerned that she rushed me off to hospital to get it checked out. She’s still amazed today that I didn’t realise there was blood dripping from my arm. All I wanted to do was to keep playing. I guess, looking back, I was always a prop forward in the making.

In this idyllic childhood there was always so much going on in and around the farm. It was all outdoors in the fresh air and I was always surrounded by family. My sister Helen was born three years after me, which didn’t please me a lot, apparently. Mum says she can remember coming home from hospital and announcing that we had a new sister and Mark and I looked at one another and frowned in disappointment. We didn’t really see the point in having a sister. What were sisters for? They weren’t interested in climbing things and causing the mayhem that Mark and I enjoyed, so the two of us pretty much carried on as we had done and tried to forget about the small female who had just joined the family.

I think I spent most of my childhood completely covered in mud. I remember sitting in the sink absolutely filthy after a morning outside, and being cleaned from head to toe by my grandma (with a big lump of old-fashioned soap and some sort of scrubbing brush - I imagine that’s the only way they could get the mud off me). When I was clean, I was dressed and then sent back out into the fields where I’d get muddy all over again.

One side of the farm house was rented out when I was growing up, and we lived in the other half. We weren’t supposed to mess about around the rented half of the farm. I can remember the sound of Mum’s voice as she told us to keep away from there but of course that didn’t stop us at all, and if there were no adults there, that’s where Mark and I could be found - with a football.

Belting footballs through the windows of the house was something that Mark and I did quite frequently. We’d be kicking the ball backwards and forwards to one another, and trying to kick it over the house and round the house, but our kicking skills weren’t as refined as we’d hoped, so invariably there would come a point where we kicked the ball through the house (via the window). There’d be that horrible sound of smashing glass and a split second of silence in which we looked at one another and realised that we were in big trouble.

We knew that Mum would go nuts when she found out we’d smashed a window, so every time the ball crashed through the glass we’d stand there and look at one another for a minute, then run away from the scene as fast as we could. It makes me laugh to look back now. What did we think would happen? Surely we must have realised that Mum would take one look at the broken window, the football lying on the kitchen floor and the glass all around and realise straight away what had happened. It seems odd that we ran away, thinking that we might just get away with it. We never did.