Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored Read Online Free Page A

‘Bloody hell, shot by both sides here.’ I still love that Magazine song – so relevant to me, those
lyrics.
    My brothers and I talked the local lingo, but I’d really forgotten how broad my parents’ accents were. My mother’s in particular was very deep Cork, and very country. After
Malcolm’s passing, we werelooking through Sex Pistols footage, and I found a tape of my mother being interviewed. It was all buried away in warehouses and, when I
heard it back, I was shocked at how broad and hard to understand her accent was. It was almost unintelligible to me.
    Mum and Dad tried to be religious, but obviously that didn’t work too well. The Catholic Church is all about money, and we didn’t have any. On Sundays we’d be dragged to
church, but Mum and Dad were good in that it was never early-morning church when we were very young, it was always the 7 p.m. service, which was great because that meant we missed Jess Yates doing
Stars On Sunday
on the TV.
    At school, I was working all this out for myself. Did I know there was sexual abuse going on there? Oh yeah, abso-fucking-lutely. It’s institutionalized abuse, and covered up and condoned.
Everybody knew to run when the priest came a-visiting, and by no means ever get yourself involved in the choir, or any altar-boy nonsense, because that was direct contact number one, so I learned
how
not
to sing very successfully – deliberately – bum notes, because I knew that would be a really dangerous thing to be waltzing into. So the love of singing was kicked out of
me because of bloody priests. Imagine the joy of eventually joining the Sex Pistols, and making the world a better place – in a very vengeful way.
    But for all that I was a quiet but happy little bunny. There was dirt and poverty and England was just out of rationing, but a nice hot English summer’s day seems to have mattered more to
me. That’s my fondest memories, moments like that. What they call salad days. I never understood what that term meant when I was young, because salad was something I dreaded. My mum’s
idea of a salad was Heinz Salad Cream, and awful pale-looking green leaf things. The only joy in it, of course, was the beetroot, because I love pickled beetroot. I can sit and eat a whole jar at a
time. I love it! And I loved gooseberries too; my mum would buy them in the summer. Now, I can’t bear them. They’re vile. I don’t know how on earth I could tolerate something so
sour. It was punishing to eatthem, but maybe it was scurvy or Vitamin C deficiency that made my body crave them.
    I liked the clothes that my mum would put us in. I adored the tartan waistcoats, and the little checked suits with the jackets, shorts and waistcoats. I liked all of that. She dressed us well,
very matchy-matchy with Jimmy, but that was all right. It was kind of like, our gang wear this, and that’s that. That wasn’t what other kids were wearing, so maybe that somehow crept
into me, as being important to be individual.
    I appreciated it very much over time, because I know how poor we were. I know how much effort it took to dress us at all. It was always there, that we couldn’t afford nothing.
There’s almost a fond memory, too, of near-starvation once – no money at all, so all there was for dinner was one can of Heinz Mulligatawny between all of us. It was Dad’s
homecoming present to us, so there we are, all sitting around the one can of Mulligatawny. I don’t think they make it any longer, and with good reason. It was like a curried soup, and at the
time for us the curry in it was inedible – burny-hot. And so, ‘I’d rather starve.’ ‘Well,
starve
, den!’
    You’d see big houses and things, but you wouldn’t have any relationship to it at all, didn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense to me that people could live in such
large places. I always used to think, ‘What do they do with all them rooms? How do you sleep at night knowing there’s so many windows to