Be Good, Love Brian: Growing up with Brian Clough

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On it went. When Craig was 13, Clough invited the boys to stay with his family for a couple of days in Quarndon, a well-to-do village in Derbyshire. Clough realised the boys came from a struggling family, but he didn’t know the half of it. By the time they met him, they had been in and out of care much of their lives. Craig’s first memory of his biological father is him smashing a mirror over his mother, Gillian’s, head. After his parents split up, he had nothing more to do with him. When Aaron’s father, Jerry, moved in with Gillian, they brought Craig home from care and Jerry became his new dad. The family (Gillian had an older son and daughter from her first marriage) was dysfunctional in the extreme. Both parents were lawless and had served prison sentences. Jerry was artistic, troubled and physically abusive. He threw Gillian out of the bedroom window on one occasion, and broke her fingers on another. Jerry had been racially abused all his life, and ended up selling drugs and thieving to make a living. The boys were also racially abused – Aaron because he was mixed race, Craig because he was his white brother. The 2nd reason I wrote it (maybe selfishly because of guilt but also because it's my true charachter) is because I would love to somehow be able to help a kid or two who is in the kind of situation I was as a child, have a better life.

Life with the Cloughs in the Derbyshire village of Quarndon was idyllic with occasional reminders of the fame that once saw Clough called out by Muhammad Ali. "Underneath it all he was normal. He travelled normally, he cooked for us. He treated us like sons."I'm replying to this one to say, no I don'think you are being harsh at all. It was unforgivable, they did handle it with class and perhaps I should have avoided this particular topic.

The boys would be sent out begging, telling strangers they had to walk 12 miles to see their grandmother because they didn’t have the bus fare. At the same time, their parents brought them up to be polite and respectful (partly because it enabled them to manipulate strangers better). Clough knew nothing of this. “I didn’t tell him how bad life was,” Craig says. “I never told him Dad was a drug dealer.” Brian has a rifle for shooting pheasants, although it has yet to be fired at anything. Now, he threatens to use it on those milling around outside. For those few days, he retreated totally into himself. He was as quiet and as alone as I ever saw him. Those days will be the start of his being dragged down by alcohol. We are all ushered into the dressing rooms. Somebody says there has been a death. Later, we are told five people have been killed and that the club gymnasium is being turned into a morgue. Brian was at the front of the Forest bus, slumped in his seat. The deaths had left him distraught

Even now, I struggle with what happened. There are days when it hits me more. Days when I just sit there and wonder who I am. Am I the person I have grown into, who I think is predominantly good, or is that a mask? Underneath it all, am I still that scruffy little kid?"