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of grass just around the back of the house and that’s where we played all the time. I would go in goal, sit on the floor and use my callipers to try and block the ball. I became quite a good keeper although the imaginary crossbar between the two jumpers was set a bit lower for me because the other kids knew that I couldn’t stand or jump around. They used to smash the ball at meas if I was just like the rest of the kids. I liked that. I just wanted to get on with things. Deep down, though, I envied that they were able to run around and kick the ball, dribble and score goals. That was all I dreamed of and I used to spend a lot of time watching my team, Arsenal, on the TV, imagining myself doing the things all the top players could do.
    We didn’t go on many holidays as a family when I was a kid. Maybe it was because my parents didn’t have loads of money or perhaps it was just too much hassle transporting a disabled kid everywhere. But the one that sticks in my mind was a trip to Cornwall when I was about seven. We must have stayed at a holiday camp because there were all these redcoats around. The car journey in our white Mini Metro seemed to go on for ages; it was the furthest I had ever been. I think my mum was worried her car would burn out. Once we were there I had a fantastic time, especially when I went swimming with my dad. He was a good swimmer and he could do the butterfly, which I was so impressed by. I could already swim a bit but it was so magical being taught to swim by my dad properly, being shown how to do the front crawl. I can still feel the chlorine from that pool stinging my eyes. We spent so much time in there. In fact, my parents had to buy me some eyewash to help my eyes – they were so red. The weather was scorching hot and we went to the beach a lot. My dad bought me a tiny dinghy. He would pull me out on the string and I would float around. It was such a fantastic holiday – maybe allthe more memorable because we didn’t do it very often. We never went abroad because my mum hates flying. A lot of my summer holidays were spent on Roundshaw.
    I didn’t mind that too much. It was a great place to play around and explore and every day seemed to bring a different adventure. I was also lucky to have such a tight group of friends, and two brothers who were handy in the boxing ring. Without that it might have been different but whenever I got into fights they stepped in to sort it out. It was only when I ventured off the estate that I encountered problems.
    Most of the time, I just ignored the abuse. Kids can be cruel and my parents always told me to be strong and that other people would try and wind me up and make me feel bad. But occasionally the abuse would hurt. It would hit home.
    When I was about fifteen I started seeing a girl in Croydon. She went to a school a couple of miles away and moved in totally different circles. For reasons I will never understand, her friends obviously saw me as a threat. One day I got a call from her number. But it wasn’t her. A few of her schoolmates had got hold of her phone and rung my number. I answered.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Is that Dave?’
    ‘Yeah, what do you want?’
    ‘If you keep hanging around, we are going to take you out to the desert and leave you there without your crutches or your chair.’
    Then they just hung up. How vicious is that? What sort of nasty person would dream of saying that sort of thing?
    I cried a lot after that. But as time went on and I grew older I realised it was exactly that sort of cruelty that made me even more determined to prove that I wasn’t going to be held back. That I couldn’t just be equal to other people. I could be even better.

CHAPTER 3
I DON’T FEEL DISABLED
    S chool should have felt like home. After all, every kid at Bedelsford, a special school for children with disabilities in Kingston upon Thames, had one kind of problem or another. Whether it was mental or physical, we were all lumped together, the