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And they loved him. He knew how to win them over and make me look a pitiful fool at the same time. The applause was for him. The crowd came to see him. So I guess it was only fair that he should get top billing ... 'Happy and his sad stooge'.

There was no stopping him. Theatre, radio, television. Everyone wanted him. He even made a Royal Command Performance Show and the Press got pictures of him shaking hands with royalty while my face was blanked out in the background. When the reporters wanted an interview it was Happy who answered their questions. When we appeared on a T.V. Chat Show it was Happy who was interviewed, not me. I kept quiet, said nothing ... just like a dummy!

"If it goes on like this," Happy said to me, " you'll soon be redundant. Better start looking for another career, Teddy Boy. I can always find another knee to sit on but, without me, you've got nothing. You're dead, man! Dead!"

And he'd give that cynical laugh. Just like my old man, when I fell over and cut my knee. I tried not to cry but he could see the tears starting in my eyes. The stinging of the iodine as he forced it into the wound, and the stinging of his eyes as they forced their way into my mind.

They were more than I could stand and my father knew he'd won once more. Then I'd run to my mother and hide my face in her skirt ... a skirt smelling of warm toast, baking bread, rice pudding.

All the safe, loving smells that still remind me of a woman who devoted her whole life to me; a woman who died before I had a chance to repay her for all her sacrifices. After she died, things got worse with my father. He tried to make me feel guilty for her death but I knew it was really his fault, and I never forgave him.

"You ain't got your mum to run to now," he'd say. "Maybe now, we'll teach you to be a real man and not a mummy's boy."

But I knew what his 'real men' were like. Dirty, crude, beer-swilling friends who came rolling home with him on a Saturday night, usually with a couple of women in tow.

Sleeping in my mother's bed, using my mother's sheets and towels ... all the things she took pride in being abused, and adulterated, by that scum! When I told them to stop, they took no notice; just like Happy takes no notice when I beg him to leave me alone. And the audience takes no notice when I tell them to stop laughing at me. And my father took no notice when I tried to stop him hitting my mum. Somehow all those grinning faces blend into one set of features with dark, bushy eyebrows spread across a wooden brow and a black gash of a mouth open in a malicious grin.

It's a face I'll always recognise. The face of the man I killed!

The face that haunts me almost twenty years later; the face that stared up at me, cold yet victorious, with the knife still sticking in his chest. My lawyer advised me to plead guilty but with diminished responsibility. In other words pretend I didn't know what I was doing ... that I was mentally disturbed, crazy! So I did ... and the jury believed me!

For twelve years I stayed in their prison.