Me
Born in Nottingham on the second day of June 1969, living most of my life to present in the Nottinghamshire, growing up first in the Meadows with my Parents, Pamela (nee Inger) and David Whittaker who were married a good two years before I was born, before there tempestuous relationship crumbled and my mother found new happiness with Kenneth Knight. Subsequently David and Pamela devorced and Pamela re-married Kenneth. In 1974, Kenneth adopted me as his own and changed my surname to Knight. I have not spoken to my real father since then. Also the council knocked down the old terraced houses of the Meadows and we where rehoused in St. Anns. However in 1977 things got a bit rough for Kenneth and his health was bad due to a stomach ulcer, which then affected his Pancreas, this hospitalised him for quite some time.
In June 1978, I was the first kid on my street to get a transistor radio and I got to see Star Wars at the Cinema.Kenneth unfortunately slipped into a coma. A week passed and nothing unusual happened I went to school as normal to the Sycamore Infants and Junior School, but Friday Changed all that; After having been swimming that day, I met my Mum outside school for our regular weekly shop at the Co-op on The Robin Hood Chase Precinct. I remember putting my swimming bag, which was one of those string things that we at the heighth of fashion in the 70's, on the little hook you get on shopping trolleys. We did our shop and when I got home, no bag. Hitting myself on the forehead in disbelief, I asked if I could go back and retrieve it, mum said yes as I would walk to school all the time anyway, but not to be too long as dinner was going to be soon. I rushed off to get it back, it only took me about 15 minutes to walk and I asked behind the counter if anyone had handed it in and I can remember a young man taking it down from a hook on the wall where they usually hung items of lost property. Now this is where it all goes blank for me. I woke up in a hospital bed surrounded as you do when you are in hospital, by old people and nurses, comming round I noticed that the making of Star Wars was on the TV, I drifted back to sleep only to be woken up again a few moments later by a nurse who looked happy to see me.
The Accident...
What happened to me on that day still illudes my memory so the story I am about to tell is peiced together from eye witness, mothers and police reports. I got to the Zebra crossing at the bottom of the "Chase" and got 3/4 across when a Nottingham City Council Taxi travelling at 60mph in a built up zone collided with me knocking me 9ft in the air and driving straight on until another motorist stopped him about 500 metres down the road heading towards town. He wouldn't have stopped otherwise. A kind of citizens arrest took place and all the taxi driver, a Mr. Fazal Hussain(I don't think any relation), could say was "Me No Understand. Me No Understand."
Back at ground zero, I was choking on my own blood, I had lost the Tibia and Fibula of my left, my Ulnar and Radius of My Left Arm where shattered and my Mandible was a little broke too, I was I right state, but still able to make noises in the way of screams. Nearby the scene is the Chase Surgery and luckily the nurse was on hand to give me first aid and drained the bllod from my throat before I was carefully put into a St. Johns Ambulance, there were no such thing as trauma control or paramedics in those days.I was rushed to hospital and the first my mum heard about it was not by the police but by a young girl who went to my school and lived quite close to the road. The police arrived and told my mum and she then went to the hospital to hear me screaming and shouting as if I had been in a very bad road accident.
4 Months In Hospital(s)
Way back in the 70's, there where no such thing as waiting lists. I got to stay in hospital for 3 1/2 months, the first fortnight or so in the Nottingham General Hospital, then the Doctors and Specialist Mr. Mulholland decided that a Hospital which is full of old men was probably not the best place for me to be and put me on a childrens ward, the nearest was the City Hospital in Basford, which is a long way from St. Anns when you don't have transport. But the only other alternative was Harlow Wood In Mansfield, which was another country way back then. So off I went to the City Hospital I went. I spent most of my more horrific moments in that Hospital. My left leg was so badly damaged I had to have a new bone made out of plastic and a skin graft to hide the whacking great big hole at the base of my leg where the doctors obviously had to work from, also I was the 16th person in the whole world to have those pins contraptions(looked a bit like a TV aerial) holding it all together, in plaster. Thing is, they took the skin from my right thigh, used the new skin to graft the hole and some who and I will never know how or why, completely forgot about the right thigh, healing underneath and fusing new skin around gauze and bandages. Until one day a student hurse noticed it and asked me what it was. I said that it was my skin graft, I knew no better, I was 9 years old and the only time this kind of thing has happened to me. The next thing I knew I find myself in the bath, my plaster leg with the TV aerial in it suspended on the bath ledge and my other thigh being splashed with warm water and then came the ripping part, they managed to get it off, more screaming from me unfortunately, as if as my mum put it, "Like I was being killed." Anyway pain killers and another skin graft operation later, I now have scars on both thighs that look like I had been pulled on rollerskates through two rows of razorblade hedges at thigh height at about 40 miles per hour by a large truck.This kind of thing, messes with your self-esteem when you are a teenager, but I suppose having a damn good excuse for having them rather than it being a birth defect, make it barable, somewhat. During my stay at the City I got talking to the DJ's from Nottingham Hospitals Radio, a springboard into local radio for some and badgered them for ages to get on their show, and eventually they relented and gave me a guest shot on the kids program which went out every Thursday night, I loved this and so my interests started. My jaw was wired up to help the bone heal, and I used to have a special menu, all the other kids got toast and egg for breakfast, I got the egg yolk. The other kids got fish fingers and all kinds of sumptuousness, I got this kind of gravy with fat floating on top. One morning I woke up and yawned, My wires snapped, I said nothing but craved the egg. I ate the egg like it was the first thing I had ever eaten, white and all. On examition the nurses asked it I had sucked the egg through the gaps in my teeth, I owned up then about the snapping incident, a consultant was called and down to the operating theatre again I went, I came back and no more wire, cool, now for all the fish fingers I could eat. It was about this time when I got the news that my adoptive dad Kenneth had died, double wammy!
Another Excrutiatingly painful moment was when my left arm wasn't setting right, so the took my plaster cast off and broke my arm again without aenasthetic or gas or anything to help the pain, bastards!Then I started walking and with the help of paralell bars and my determination and God-of-course-I-can-do-this attitude and forgotten knowledge that I hadn't actually walked for 2 months, I got 3 steps down the paralell bars and collapsed. I was in stitches, I was told to do it more slowly I did and mastered the Crip Walk within a few weeks. This lasted for about 6 months, until I got the whole plastercast off and then I could try to weight bare on my left leg again. But when I went back to school a bit of a celebrity, the only kid to have crutches, I could move as fast as the rest and didn't ever do the sick kid thing.
I was also the only kid to get a taxi there and back to school too, which helped because the winter of 1978 to 1979 was pretty bad for snow.
School
By 1980 I had been in the Church Choir and it seemed the only option to get me a good education so I was sent to a Church Of England School called The Nottingham Bluecoat School, where all the Kids had something in common, apart from the 2nd generation Asians, from catchment areas. We all went to Church. I lasted at church until the second year, when I got bullied by a fellow church goer and beat up his best mate, so I got told off about fighting not being a very Christian thing to do, but when I counted that bullying isn't either right, they asked me to leave and that's when I became the aethiest I am today. Sorry all God fearing types, but until the church stops being a cliquy club and sorts itself out, I will remain a non-believer.
Our computer at school was a thing on a trolley that resembled something out of a Doctor Who episode and had about 1k of memory, and only the clever kids in high group for Maths where alowed anywhere near it so, during school, I thought computers where too clever for me and concentrated all my efforts on Metalwork and Woodwork, mostly also because I was at that age when the teacher is cool and the assistant teacher was hot!! I learned to use my leg as an excuse for not doing the annual cross country run, so never did it. I started smoking behind the conifer trees that lined the playing field, it was okay, we got tellings off by the Gittanne smoking Head Master Mr. R.F. Smith, but we knew that the worst punishment we could ever get was to go to the Head Masters office and wait, If your lungs weren't black before you entered, they would be when you emerged.
My friends at school, where Bryan Stanton a great lad who still lives in West Bridgford as far as I know and must take him up on the offer of a pint sometime. Mark Wilkins, who when I first met him, was a bit of a geek but interesting with it, thin, glasses, ZX Spectrum the lot. I have stayed in touch with Mark and we meet up periodically for drinks of a Saturday Night in Nottingham. Darren/Beau North/Brdges, the surname changed during school and his christian name he changed after his adoptive parents died when we were about 25. There is more about Beau/Darren later. My other friend was Timothy Thorpe, who I went to Amsterdam and Denmark with at the end of the 3rd form on the European Studies Tour 1983. We had a great time, drinking our first can of beer, getting a bit tiddly and going for a splash in the North Sea in clogs. He will probably hate me for doing this but the picture of me and another guy in Danish fisherman clothing on the pictures page is Tim.
I left school when I was 15 a few weeks before my 16th birthday and as a farwell, the ever-so-nasty, but alas not with us anymore Ma Rea gave us tea and biscuits, how civilised, I have never returned..
Work...And Relationships
I am not gonna bore you rigid telling you about things I have acheived at work, because I haven't really acheived anything at work, I have never been promoted, except in a few instances where I have entered 'deadman's boots', whereby everyone else has left and I have taken on their jobs. No, I haven't had any real success at work and I have no ambition only to become a film maker and boy I have really got to pull my finger out and do something about that soon.
After leaving school I did two YTS's one in office and IT which in those days didn't include PC's or Internet or networking or any stuff we take for granted today. The second was working in electrical retail. I have not worked properly in a shop since, but I have been installing TV and Videos and Hi-Fi's for shop the past few years, I may have actually installed your telly at some point. I must have visited over 1000 households tuning in TV's so chances are.... nah, your right, chances are zero. But I do enjoy Media technology whether it be Televisual or HI-Fi or multi-media such as my lovely apple.I got my compensation from being run over when I has 18 years old, and went on a bit of a spending spree, you know you give an 18 year old virgin lad £20,000 and watch it go. I bought so many things, I paid off my mum and new step-father Stewart loans and even gave them £1000 as a deposit on their new house, but the rest I mainly got drunk on. It wasn't until I had spent all of my money, that I found my first love, Helen, a relationship that would last until I was 21 with a bad ending as they always are. I then had a relationship with a deaf girl, Kathleen, who I was impressed by when I first met her as she was doing Kareoke, singing her little heart out. This lasted about 2 years also, we got engaged and lived with eachother for a bit, then parted on very bad terms indeed. Anyway, I refuse to admit to seeing anyone else from here on in, only to say that I have had about 11 lovers in my life and married the woman I am currently sleeping with, Rachel, she is very good to me and hopefully I am to her. She tells me I am good at most things like DIY projects and even film making, whether she is just being kind or biased is a matter for discussion but I love her and she loves me and evn though my feet stink, she will always be there for me.
In Summary....
Altogether not a bad life, not as sheltered as some. I have no grunges against Asian people, because one had a very expensive lack of judgement on day, infact I embrace all races and to be honest sometimes other people from other places often seem nicer people than the common run of the mill people you would meet on your street. I am an aetheist, but I respect other people's views on religion. I hate war. I hate double standards(If someone gives me a job, with a shovel and says that I have to shovel shit for 40 hours a week, but if they then take the shovel away and give me a trowel and make me wear a suit and tie to do the same job, I get miffed). But he only thing that keeps me awake at the moment is that maybe someday someone will see this site and my work with filmmaking and give me a chance.
