Matt Goss - More Than You Know

Dedicated to my grandad, Samuel Matthew Read – aka Harry – I love you

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication Dedicated to my grandad, Samuel Matthew Read – aka Harry – I love you

1 Innocent As Snow

2 This Lonely River

3 Some Roses In My Cheeks

4 Redirected

5 The More I See The More I Want It

6 If I Was A Wishful Thinker . . .

7 A Righteous Way Of Getting Paid

8 A Pocket Full Of Green

9 Dreams Cannot Rescue Me

10 Even Angels Have A Past

11 This Crazy Life

12 Regret Ain’t Meant To Last

13 When You’re Not Here

14 When I Wake I Must Do More Than Exist

15 The Best Part Of Me

16 Chasing Demons

17 All Those Who Don’t Believe

18 I Can’t Hold My Breath That Long

19 So Many Miles From Here

20 Freefall

21 My Heart Has Had Enough

22 Life Is A Slow Dance

23 My Solitude Will Fade Away

24 Waiting For The Light

25 Where You Are, Can You See The Moon?

26 Just Me And My Thoughts

27 I Think I’m Gonna Fly

28 Gangster Or Spiritual Leader

29 It’s Good To See You Again Postscript

Picture Section

Postscript

Index

Acknowledgements

Picture Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Innocent As Snow

When I was a little boy and had toothache, my grandad would lay his hand on my cheek and the pain would go away. I can still feel the roughness of his builder’s hands on my young face. His home, a flat in Crawford Road, Camberwell, south-east London was an emotional anchor for my childhood, one of the few constants in my early life, along with my twin brother Luke and my mum. We moved house so often, nine times in all. That flat was the only place that stayed the same. At that tender age, I knew so little of what lay ahead. No one could have possibly predicted I would lead a life as exciting, traumatic, extreme, painful, loving and rewarding as I have. There would be so many moments of such exhilaration that I felt as if I’d been blessed. There would also be several times when I would wish that Grandad could have laid his hands on me and made the pain go away. Back then, as long as the toothache subsided, I was happy.

For the first five years of my life, everything seemed normal. Mum and Dad had fallen for each other in, of all places, a hospital, when my mum and her sister Ann were visiting their gran. My parents were both very stylish, shared a passion for music and quickly fell madly in love with each other. My dad, Alan Goss, was a bit of a Mod and my mum, Carol Read, liked the way the Mods dressed. They were both barely into their twenties but the relationship was immediately very intense – so much so that less than a year after they first met, Mum accepted Dad’s proposal of marriage, at Christmas 1967.

Mum was the middle of three kids and, unusually, was exactly twelve years older than her younger sister, my Aunt Sally. There must be something in the family genes about babies arriving on the same day! Reading between the lines, I think Mum sometimes felt a little bit of a piggy-in-the-middle, with Ann being the first-born and Sally being the apple of her parents’ eye, the baby. But Mum never complained, ever. It’s just not her way. Besides, she was very close to both her parents. When her mum died, on Bonfire Night, 1971, my mum was devastated.

Grandad was bereft. His wife Win was everything to him. She was a very spiritual lady and their hearts were seamlessly dovetailed. Grandad’s full name is Samuel Matthew Read (which is where I get my Christian name) but most people know him as Harry. He was a gunner in the Second World War and his trade throughout most of his life was as a builder’s foreman. He’d planned on studying to become a surveyor but the army interrupted that; on his return from war, he found work in a trade desperate for labour to help rebuild the capital. Consequently, he worked on the construction of some of London’s many important buildings.

When he lost his wife, rather than disown his faith, Grandad leaned towards it. Although he was a bit of a ruffian, Grandad found that he had a gift and subsequently became a faith healer. Obviously, many people are sceptical of this whole subject, but I have seen what he is capable of with my own eyes. I could choose from scores of incidents to illustrate this. For example, many years ago, a man who’d heard about Grandad’s gift came to Crawford Road, explained that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer and given only three months to live. He asked only that Grandad help him to prepare for what was coming. Along with a friend, Grandad gave this man intense healing. One month passed, then two, then three and still there were no signs of this man’s physical or mental deterioration. Then the cancer started to regress. Eventually, the disease was just a single, small tumour which surgeons were able to remove successfully. That man is still alive to this day.

You can call that the power of the mind enhanced by positive energy if you like, but in essence that is what healing is. The fact is, this actually happened. It is also true that my toothache would miraculously dissipate when Grandad placed his hand on my cheek. But I don’t know how he brought my goldfish back to life one day! This fish was as dead as can be, completely still and I was crying my eyes out. Grandad went upstairs and gave it a little rub and next thing I knew, it was alive again. My cynical side might think he replaced it with a new one, the sleight-of-hand approach to faith healing! But it meant the world to me regardless.

Grandad can also do psychometry, whereby you give him an item – a necklace, ring, or a coin for example – and he will give you a reading from it. I believe that both my twin brother Luke and I have inherited some of these abilities. We can both do healing to a degree, and I definitely have psychic tendencies. Yet, if I had foreseen the life I was about to lead, I would not have believed it.

My father’s family situation was altogether different to my mother’s. His own father left the family home when Dad was just a little boy and his mum later remarried. His family lived in a council house in Dulwich but he never knew his father growing up (although he eventually went looking for him, more of which later). Unfortunately, once I reached the age of five, there were certain parallels in my own childhood with what my father went through.

Luke and I arrived on 29 September 1968 at Lewisham Hospital. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy for my mum – at twelve weeks there was a concern about a possible miscarriage which required her to be hospitalized. We were born eight weeks prematurely and even after Luke was delivered from my mother’s womb, no one knew that she was carrying twins. In fact, they cut the umbilical cord after Luke was born, thinking that was that, but that meant I was inside my mum being starved of oxygen. Doctors later said that Luke and I had been curled up back-to-back and thus our heartbeats had been exactly synchronized. As my lungs did not inflate properly, I was a ‘blue baby’ so along with my brother I was rushed straight into an incubator and fed intravenously. The early arrival meant that we had no eyelashes or nails and were both worryingly underweight, coming in at just over four pounds each I was slightly heavier than Luke even though I was born eleven minutes later. Mum spent only ten days in hospital, despite it being a distressing birth, but she and Dad had to visit us in our little plastic hospital cocoons for some time – Luke for a month, myself for six weeks – before they could take us home.