Memoirs of a Karate Fighter by Ralph Robb Read Free Book Online

themselves. At the YMCA every member trained on their own but would nearly always deny doing so: it was part of a psychological contest. It was not unusual to hear someone comment that the only training he did was in the
dojo
– the implication being that any improvement he showed was due to having more natural talent.
    But despite having my own place, my lifestyle was not completely independent: on the way back from the factory, I still called in at home for a meal my mother prepared for me every evening. What I missed most were those Sunday mornings when my father would cook breakfast whilst singing over and over again the few hymns he knew. The smell of fried food, and those sounds, from the comfort of my bed, were some of my happiest memories. The aroma of fried bacon became evocative of the times when I was secure within those four walls of the family home.
    But the sense of security a middle-class area afforded me had gone. As a small child I had lived in a house that did not even have a bathroom but my parents worked hard so we could move out of such squalor and into a more salubrious neighbourhood. Now I was back to living in a far less affluent suburb – and away from my friends and family. And more troubling than that, I was one of only a handful of black tenants in a locality where the racist National Front was active, and in a block of flats where there was a gang of skinheads who had a reputation for what was called ‘Paki-bashing’. I had yet to see any of them, although I had seen ‘NF’ sprayed onto a few walls, but I was told that they lived somewhere in the floors above me. But the first incident I had heard about that had some kind of racist motivation was an argument between two white tenants. Karen was a young single mother who had a flat next door to mine. She had returned to the communal laundry room in the basement to find that an impatient young girl had emptied her freshly washed clothes onto the floor so that she could use the machine. Harsh words were exchanged but when the girl made a derogatory remark about Karen’s mixed-race child a punch to the mouth brought the heatedargument to an abrupt halt. The trouble then escalated when the girl’s boyfriend, parents and, finally, the police intervened – but not before the latter had mistakenly come to my door.
    One of the policemen had asked me if I had encountered any trouble; he did not say what kind, but I had an idea of the type of trouble he was referring to. We regarded each other with mutual suspicion, so much suspicion on my part that, rightly or wrongly, I thought that his enquiry was intended as a kind of threat.
    I did start to wonder if my father’s friend had been totally straight with us about his reasons for leaving the flat, but the menacing atmosphere was also something I used to motivate me to train as hard as I could. In the
dojo
we were often reminded to maintain
zanshin
– an awareness of our opponent – when working in pairs. After the cop had left, I vowed that I would not be caught unawares.
    I had not been in my new home a month when that promise I had made to myself was first tested. I was feeling bloated from the huge bowl of Jamaican soup my mom had cooked for me. As mothers’ do, she had guessed correctly that my flat was still empty of any homely touches and had insisted that I took two boxes of items that I thought were mostly junk. I thought the load was too much for me to climb the stairs, so I awkwardly balanced the boxes on one knee as I pressed the lift call button. The doors groaned as they slowly opened. The man who stepped out took me by surprise: he was about my build; height and age; and his hair was cropped short like mine but the colour of our skins were different. I wore the YMCA’s blue tracksuit; he was dressed in a skinhead’s uniform of a blue denim jacket and jeans that were held up with braces so that the turn-ups barely reached the tops of his