Product Description

This is the story of a boy called Richard. One October night in 1975, Richard, aged five, was alone in the house with his three sisters. It was 3am and their mother hadn't come home yet. He and his oldest sister pulled on their coats over their pyjamas and set off through the foggy streets hand in hand to find her. But at dawn they returned home alone. Within a few hours the police arrived and took the children away. They gave them mugs of hot chocolate and then said, 'you won't be seeing your mother again.' She was the first victim of the serial killer who to become known as the 'Yorkshire Ripper' and from that moment on Richard and his sisters' childhoods were destroyed. Passed from one violent home to another, subject to physical and mental abuse, the children were forgotten by all except the press. As the killer claimed one victim after the other, and the salacious magazines and headlines multiplied, Richard and his sisters were never able to grieve or recover from the agonising tragedy of their mother's murder. Whilst Richard tried to handle the terror and shame of his violent and deprived upbringing, his sister struggled to deal with memories of the serious sexual abuse she had suffered. Without love or support, they floundered through their teens from drink to drugs to crime. Until one day in the late Nineties when Richard McCann, having reached suicidal rock bottom, decided that no one was going to rescue their lives but him. That no one could solve the past and only he could remedy the future. It was the beginning of an inspirational transformation that saw Richard rebuild his life. Now he is able to tell the story of how the forgotten children of violence suffer, and how they can heal. This is a heartbreaking, up-lifting story of survival and hope.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #307745 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From the Publisher
The paperback of the Sunday Times bestseller which spent seven weeks at No 5 - a heartbreaking but inspirational story of a childhood destroyed

About the Author
Richard McCann was born in Leeds in 1970. He now works as a buyer in the fashion industry. This is his first book. Andrew Crofts is a respected ghost-writer and collaborator. His most recent title, The Kid, written with Kevin Lewis, has been in the Sunday Times Bestseller list for over 10 weeks.

Excerpted from Just a Boy by Richard McCann. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The morning after

Leeds, October 1975

I didn't want to wake up, but my sister Sonia was shaking me urgently.

'Mum's still not home,' she whispered, trying not to disturb the others.

I slept in one bed with Sonia and our younger sister Donna. Angela, the baby, was in a cot next to us, and had cried all night. She always seemed to be crying. Mostly I liked sharing with the girls because it helped us to keep warm. There was no heating of any kind in the house, and when we went to sleep we huddled under two or three blankets and any coats we could find. The only drawback to sharing was that when one of us wet the bed - which happened quite frequently - we all got soaked.

The previous evening Mum had sent us upstairs early. A few minutes after seven we heard her taking a bath then going downstairs. Sonia sneaked down after her. Mum, she told me, was in her white trousers and green jacket, and doing her make-up in a piece of broken mirror, salvaged from one of her many fights with her boyfriend and propped up above the square pot sink in the kitchen.

'Are you going out, Mum?' Sonia had asked.

'No, I'm not. You get back to bed. Go on.'

But Sonia knew she was on her way out and had asked for a kiss.

'Come on then, before I put my lipstick on.'

As she kissed her on the lips, Sonia noticed how nice and clean she smelled, a mixture of soap and perfume.

Hours later, in the middle of the night, when no one came to answer Angela's screams, Sonia ventured downstairs again. The house was silent and empty.

Sonia had taken charge of the situation as she always did. She had turned the bedroom light on and read to Angela to calm her down. I had drifted off to the sound of her voice.

There was never any predicting what time our mother would roll in, or what state she would be in when she got there, but we normally had a babysitter, and Mum was always there by the time we woke up in the morning, even if she could barely drag herself out of bed.

'What time is it?' I asked Sonia now.

'Twenty-five past five.'

'What shall we do?'

'Get up. We'll go and look for her.'

I always did what Sonia said - she was seven and a year older than me - so I pulled myself out of the warm bed. There was ice on the inside of the little bedroom window that looked out over the back garden and the bare floorboards were freezing. We crept downstairs, leaving Donna and Angela asleep upstairs. I put my brown duffel coat on over my green checked pyjamas and pulled my shoes on without socks, which felt strange. Sonia was wearing a coat over her full-length purple nightdress. She was taller than me, with long brown hair and fine features.

The kitchen was still strewn with the remnants of the supper Mum had made before her night out. She always cooked an evening meal for us, no matter how short of money she was. We let ourselves out through the back door, pulling it to behind us. Mum preferred us to go out this way, rather than through the front door, with everyone watching.

My heart was thumping in my chest. It was still dark outside and the normally familiar garden was silent and filled with threatening shadows. I remember the grass was wet on my bare ankles. Usually, if we were out the back we would have been able to hear raised voices from the neighbouring houses, radios and televisions playing through open windows and shouts from the Prince Philip playing fields behind the house. But everyone else was still asleep. We pushed our way through the hole in the hedge that we always used.

The Scott Hall council estate, which had always been my home, was about two miles north of the centre of Leeds, a sprawling mass of streets lined with redbrick houses and connected by a network of ginnels or alleys. It had been built just before the war and every house was pretty much identical. We lived at 65 Scott Hall Avenue, which was the end house in a block of four.

We walked along the path at the back of the house, close to the hedge like Mum had taught us, so that none of the neighbours could see us and gossip about what we were up to. But there wasn't anyone around at that hour anyway. There was a mist covering the ground and in the darkness we couldn't see more than a few feet in front of ourselves.

I kept asking Sonia questions, desperate for her to put my mind at rest. I wanted her to tell me where we were going, where Mum was.

'She's probably just gone to the shops for cigs or milk,' she said, but it seemed a funny time of the day to be shopping, even for Mum.

We soon reached a gateway that led back to our street. We hurried across the street and into the ginnel that ran past the houses opposite and out to the main dual carriageway. I kept expecting to see Mum coming in the other direction. Usually the traffic would be streaming past, but this morning there was only the odd car, headlights reflecting off the wet surface of the road, as people set off early for work, or came back from night shifts. A milk float jangled past.

'We'll wait at the bus stop,' Sonia told me, 'and meet her off the bus. She's bound to be back soon.'