‘Stay with me, Rhys,’ I kept saying over and over again. ‘Please stay with me. I love you.’ I was desperate to let him know I was there, but there was no flicker in his face. In hindsight, it was like he’d already gone.
It’s a Wednesday evening in Liverpool in the summer holidays, and Melanie is expecting her Everton-mad eleven-year-old son back from football practice very soon. But instead she receives a frantic knock at the door. Rhys has been shot on his way home.
From that fateful day when Melanie cradled her child as he lay dying, to the day in court when his killers were finally sent down, this is a story of a family in trauma, of a community united behind them and of how a notorious local gang who terrorised the neighbourhood was brought to justice.
Melanie, her husband Steve, and Rhys’s brother Owen have been through unimaginable pain. The grief doesn’t go away, but the strength they’ve found within it is an inspiration.
Melanie Jones was born in Wrexham and grew up in Liverpool. She met Steve at her local Tesco, where they both worked, when she was 17 and they married five years later in 1987. They had their first son, Owen, in 1990 and second son, Rhys, in 1995. Their happy family life was torn apart on 22 August 2007, when eleven-year-old Rhys was shot by a stray bullet fired by gang member Sean Mercer as he walked home from football training. He later died in hospital. After Rhys’s murder and the trial, Mel and Steve continued to work at Tesco and have helped in efforts to raise over £300,000 for a local community centre in Rhys’s name, which opened in 2013. They also collaborated with Jeff Pope on the recent ITV drama Little Boy Blue.
To Owen, who gave me a reason to get up every morning and the strength to carry on
A Mother Holds Her Baby
by Stephen Jones
Quietly she holds him, cradled in her arms
Rocking oh so gently, protecting him from harm
Her tears are flowing freely, off her cheeks they race
Always heading downwards, then dripping from her face
A mother holds her baby, as close as close can be
And as his eyes stare skyward, there’s only her to see
Now fast forward eleven years, the scene is much the same
A mother holds her baby, whispering his name
Ruffling his matted hair, his face covered in blood
Telling him to stay with her and wrapping him in love
But the child will never answer, forever to stay young
Dying on a car park, it’s not where he belongs
A mother holds her baby, her child, her world, her son
His life has been robbed from him, she can’t believe he’s gone
One last hug, one last caress to his cheek – a simple kiss
To thank that little boy for eleven years of bliss
My husband Ste called me out into the front garden where he was lopping bits off a big leylandii. If left to its own devices, the tree went a bit wild, so it needed regular topping and trimming, and that weekend he had decided it needed cutting back.
‘Mel,’ he called. ‘Come outside a minute.’
I opened the front door and stepped out and he said, ‘Look what I just found.’
There, halfway up the trunk of the tree, was a carving that read ‘RJ-07’, which must have been chipped into the bark by my wonderful, cheeky, lovable son Rhys Jones two years before.
‘I never knew he’d done that,’ said Ste.
Tears started in my eyes, as they so often did, but at the same time it made me smile. Rhys would have carved those initials just weeks, or days, before he was taken away from us, the victim of a senseless crime. In August of that same year, as he walked home from football practice, he was hit by a stray bullet fired by a callous teenager caught up in a gangland feud, and he died on the trauma table just two hours later. Our world had been shattered in a split second and our lives would never be complete again.
Now Rhys’s initials, carved into the wood, stood as a constant reminder that he had been there, a normal, mischievous eleven-year-old, making his mark on the world just like he left his mark on my heart. A mark that would never fade.
ON A COLD Sunday afternoon in October 2006, I stood at the side of a football pitch with my husband Ste, huddled up in my thickest winter coat, watching our boy Rhys playing for the local team. It was the same routine every weekend since he’d signed up to play for Fir Tree Football Club, and we never missed a game, but this one turned out to be special.
It was a hard-fought match and the Fir Tree boys were drawing 0–0 when they won a free kick from twenty yards. Rhys stepped up to take it. He ran up to the ball and, with his left foot, which was always the strongest, he skilfully curled it over the wall and into the net. GOAL! It was absolutely fabulous. Ste and I were jumping up and down with excitement. Rhys was running around the pitch in his own jubilant goal celebration and, suddenly, he lifted his shirt to reveal a T-shirt underneath that read, ‘This one is for the troops.’ We had no idea what that was all about and it remains a mystery to this day, as Rhys never really explained it. He was always full of surprises and the reason was lost in the moment as he was mobbed by his fellow players, ecstatic at the spectacular finish to the game. He went on to win Goal of the Season for that stunning display of skill. The trophy he was awarded became his most treasured possession, taking pride of place in his bedroom, among numerous other trophies he had won from his favourite sport.
Rhys was a natural on the football pitch. One of my earliest memories of him is kicking a ball around the living room at nine months, still in his baby walker. By the time he was two, he would spend hours with Ste and his older brother Owen having a kickabout in the garden and when Rhys was five, Ste would take the boys to the park on a Sunday for a game of football. He would give the boys 50p each for every goal they scored and if Ste saved the goal they would give him 10p. Ste always came home skint!
While he was always running around as a lad, Rhys was in no hurry to make his first appearance. He was born on 27 September 1995, three days overdue, and it was a long and traumatic labour.
My waters broke in the early hours of the morning, and I leapt out of bed just in time. I remember thinking, ‘Thank goodness I got out of bed, or I would have had to buy a new mattress.’
Ste was asleep, so I woke him up and told him I was in labour. Owen, our older son, was five at the time so we got him out of bed and bundled him in the car, then we dropped him at my sister Debra’s, and made our way to the labour ward at the hospital in Fazakerley, just a five-minute drive from our home in Liverpool.
My labour pains were not helped by one particular nurse who seemed to be in much more of a hurry than Rhys was. She kept looking at her watch and saying, ‘Come on Mrs Jones. I finish at half past two. Get a move on.’ I was giving Ste a look that, after ten years of marriage, he was easily able to interpret as a sign I was about to explode. Ste was talking to me in a soothing voice and trying to keep me calm, but she just kept on saying, ‘Come on Mrs Jones.’ Honest to God, I could have given her a slap! Childbirth is stressful enough without her putting the pressure on.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one feeling the strain. When another nurse put a monitor on my stomach, to hear the heartbeat, she said, ‘This baby is getting stressed,’ and Little Miss Impatience immediately declared, ‘Right. She’s going to have a Caesar.’ Presumably, that would have meant she could knock off on time.
Eventually, her colleague decided to fetch a doctor and he calmed the situation down, saying the baby would come when he was ready. As soon as everything was calm, Rhys was born naturally, weighing in at a healthy 7lb 12oz. It was 2.25 precisely – so the nurse was all right. She got to clock off on time after all.
Rhys’s birth was the complete opposite to our first son Owen, born in March 1990. Owen was a textbook birth. He was born on the due date: my waters broke, I went into labour and an hour and a half later Owen appeared. It was all fine, no stress and at the time I thought, ‘If this is what it’s about, I’ll have six!’ But with Rhys’s birth, the nurse had me so agitated with her ‘Come on Mrs Jones,’ I was fuming. After that I said, ‘That’s it. I’m not having any more.’
To add insult to injury, I was thirty when I had Rhys and I will always remember that the hospital wrote on my notes ‘Geriatric mother.’ That made me feel terrible. How dare I have a baby at thirty! Nowadays everyone has them after thirty but it wasn’t so common then. Admittedly I was the oldest woman on my ward, but I couldn’t believe that they put ‘geriatric’ on my notes. It made me feel about eighty.
We named our bouncing baby boy Rhys Milford Jones, choosing the middle name as a tribute to my dad, Milford Edwards. At the time of Rhys’s birth, my dad had already been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour and only had a short while left. Although he only knew Rhys for four and a half months, he was so very proud of both the boys and loved them to bits.
Rhys was a happy baby. He fed well and ate well until he was a toddler. Then suddenly, at about the age of eighteen months, he started to have a real problem with food. He would go for days and not eat, or at least it felt like days to me. Every time we sat down to have a meal, there were issues. It wasn’t something I had come across before because Owen would eat anything you put in front of him but Rhys was a really picky eater. He must have eaten along the way but I was really worried he wasn’t getting enough nutrition so, in the end, I took him to the doctor and told him we were having issues with food. The doctor weighed him and measured him and said he was just average for his age.
‘Some days he doesn’t want to eat and other days he doesn’t stop,’ I said. But the doctor assured me there was nothing to worry about.
‘What he’s doing is fine,’ he said. ‘Let him eat what he wants to eat. You’re getting more stressed than he is,’ which was true. His advice was simple.
‘Put the food in front of him and if he doesn’t eat it, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just don’t give him anything else.’ That’s exactly what we did and, within three or four months, he was eating normally.
Owen was really happy when Rhys was born and he was really good with him. We’d told him he was getting a baby brother or sister, but in those days you didn’t find out what you were having beforehand so he was dead chuffed when he found out it was a boy.
Rhys was a joker, always laughing, always wanting to play tricks. He never stopped messing about, but in a good way, never in a malicious way. Although they always got on brilliantly, he and Owen were like chalk and cheese. Owen was quiet and shy, and found it hard to approach people he didn’t know. He would wait for them to come and talk to him. But Rhys was incredibly outgoing. If we were on holiday and he saw other kids playing, he’d say, ‘I’m just going to go and play with them,’ and he’d be off. He would think nothing of approaching them and would be part of their game within seconds. He just got on with everyone.
The house where we lived was on a quiet residential estate near Croxteth Country Park, a 500-acre plot of woodland and greenery that surrounds Croxteth Hall. Rhys was very happy growing up on our estate, and he made plenty of friends. The kids in the street always used to knock on the door and ask for him to come out and play with them, and he didn’t need asking twice. He was usually the first person they knocked for because they knew, if Rhys was out, there would soon be enough of their friends for a game of footie or hide and seek.
If he wasn’t out somewhere with them, they would be kicking a ball around at ours. We had two goalie nets that we put up in the garden and we even swapped the grass for AstroTurf because, even though our garden is tiny, we had every kid in the street playing football whenever they got the chance. Sometimes, usually when I was out and Ste was in charge, they’d put the two wheelie bins by the garage and use those as a goal. Our garage still has big dents in the metal door but Ste won’t knock them out because he says, ‘That’s what Rhys did.’
When Rhys was little, Owen used to love having a bit of a kickabout with him in the garden but, as he got towards the end of primary school, he had a lot of problems with his knees and he had to go for treatment at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. He had had a massive growth spurt and the specialist said he had a common knee problem called Osgood–Schlatter disease, meaning his bones were growing too quickly for his muscles, which were being overstretched.
‘You have two options,’ the doctor said. ‘You either stop playing sport altogether and let the bones and ligaments catch up with each other. Or you carry on and both your legs will be in plaster for six months.’ Owen chose to stop playing sport and became an armchair football pundit instead.
Rhys would never have had that growth spurt, I don’t think, and he wasn’t destined to be as tall as Owen. They were different from day one. Owen was 6lb 10oz at birth but he was always quite stocky, and took after his dad, while Rhys was small and slight and took after me a bit more.
While Owen couldn’t play football for a team, he would still have a kickabout with his little brother in the garden or the park and they still bonded over their passion for the beautiful game. The whole house is a football house and Everton was an obsession for both the boys.
Ste and I took Rhys to his first Everton match at Goodison Park, along with Owen, when he was about three. We all used to go as a family treat as often as we could and Rhys was very excited at the first match. The pitch at Goodison Park is curved, and if you are in the family section you can’t see the white line on the other side and you don’t know if the ball has gone out. That used to frustrate him because he couldn’t see where the ball was, and we had to look at the screen to see if it was out of play. It drove him mad and he used to stand on the seat because he couldn’t see. The first few times we went he didn’t like the loud noises that the crowd made but nothing would have stopped him going back. He was already hooked.
Rhys was a Blue through and through. He looked forward to his Saturday afternoons at the footie every week, and he’d start getting excited about three weeks before the start of the season. But half the time, by October all three of them had lost heart. With every bad match, Rhys would get a real cob on. He would come home and say, ‘They should have brought him on!’ and ‘What did they do that for?’ But what always made me howl with laughter was that they would go to the game and then come home grumbling about how bad it was and then watch it all again, if I’d recorded it, or watch Match of the Day. I never understood that. Why put yourselves through it all over again?
Then again, he was always jubilant when the Blues were winning. On one occasion, when Rhys was eight, the three boys had been to the match and watched Everton beat West Ham, 1–0. They were all pretty elated as they piled into the car to make their way home. As usual, Owen was in the front and Rhys was in the back and, when Ste pulled up next to a West Ham coach full of supporters, Rhys couldn’t resist getting a dig in. He put his hands up to the window, making the one and the nil signs with his fingers, to rub their faces in it. That was Rhys to a tee. He loved a bit of football banter.
The Saturday routine for the three boys was always the same. Ste would park up by Cherry Lane and walk past Walton Lane Police Station, up towards Goodison Park. Before they went in there was a chippy where they would stop and buy something to eat. They always had curry and rice and a sausage because, Ste said, the chips were awful! Then they would stand around outside while they ate before walking to the ground.
Because Ste liked to leave plenty of time, they always got there really, really early. Ste always bought two programmes and the boys would both read them from front to back while the players came out and did their warm-up.
Their seats were on the top balcony, which was less rowdy than other parts of the stadium and I was pleased about that. Ste didn’t enrol in the autocup scheme, which meant that you were likely to get your usual seats for the FA Cup or League Cup matches, so occasionally they had to sit somewhere else. At one cup match they sat in the park end and two little lads were sitting in front of them. Rhys was nine or ten and Ste said they couldn’t have been much older, maybe eleven, but the language out of them was absolutely awful – effing and jeffing all over the place. It was too much for young kids. You don’t want them to be hearing that. I was just glad that they usually sat in the family enclosure or the top balcony.
Ste and the boys always hung on until the end and never left early, even if Everton were getting stuffed.
Even today, Ste and Owen follow roughly the same routine, although they time it better so they don’t get there so early, and the curry and rice is now a beer and a pie at the stadium. Owen still reads the programme from front to back before the match starts.
Rhys took his love of the team very seriously. Every new kit that came out he’d want to go and buy it and, when he got it, he’d wear it until it fell off him. His bedroom was decorated in Everton colours, his duvet set was Everton and his walls were plastered with posters of the players. Up until 2004, Rhys had a poster of Wayne Rooney on his bedroom wall. Rooney had grown up in Croxteth and ended up playing for Everton so, to Rhys, he was a real role model. He dreamed of following in his footsteps and his football coaches had often remarked that he may well have the talent to go far. But when Rooney announced he was leaving Everton to move to Manchester United, Rhys felt his hero had betrayed the team. He was so upset he poked the eyes out of the poster.
Rhys would eat, sleep and breathe football. If he wasn’t playing it outside in the garden, or going to the match, he was playing a football game on Owen’s Xbox. Outside of school, football was his life. He had an all-consuming passion for it. Occasionally he would watch wrestling and play with wrestling figures, and he was obsessed with the Star Wars films, collecting loads of the little figures of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Yoda, which he would play with a lot, but football came before everything else. If it was a choice between anything else and football, football would win.
At the age of seven, Rhys started playing for the local team, Witty’s. In 2005, his third season with the first team, he was playing in a cup game that went to penalties. Rhys was last to take a penalty and the whole match hung on him hitting the back of the net for a win. By the time he lined up, the games on the surrounding pitches had all finished, and players and spectators had all gravitated towards the Witty’s match, so there was quite a crowd. Rhys took the penalty and scored – only to have the goal disallowed because the referee said he had kicked the ball before he had blown the whistle. But, to Rhys’s delight, he allowed him to retake the penalty and we all stood with bated breath on the sidelines, hearts in our mouths, willing him to score again.
Rhys ran up to the ball, struck it hard and it soared past the goalie and into the net. What a celebration! The jubilant team jumped on Rhys and we were all screaming at the side. It was a great day.
Despite his successes at Witty’s, Rhys didn’t really get on with the manager. Even at that young age, he thought he knew more about football than anybody else and he just wanted to get on the pitch and play. After three seasons there with them he went to play for Fir Tree FC, who played close to our house, and he loved it there. Because he was that little bit older, and craving a bit of independence, he wanted to walk there and back on his own and, because the pitch where they played and trained was close to home, we let him. He would sometimes walk on his own and other times he would meet his mates on the corner and they’d walk up together. They’d all grown up with each other and they used to go to training once a week and play football together in between.
He loved playing for Fir Tree, and the coach Steve Geoghegan, who was also the father of Rhys’s friend Sean, loved Rhys too. Although Rhys was always messing about and starting mud fights, Steve said he was a ‘cracking player’ and soon guaranteed him a place in every match. While most of the boys had to take their turn on the bench, Steve told us that he wanted Rhys to start on the pitch in every game because he thought he was a really talented player. ‘He could sign for any team, I reckon,’ he said.
Rhys really threw his all into the team and he never missed a training session no matter what the weather.
Ste and I would go and watch the matches every weekend, rain or shine. In the 2006–2007 season, one game stands out in my mind. I had told Rhys that I would give him £5 if he scored in the match but, with five minutes to go, Fir Tree FC were losing the game, 2–1. Suddenly Rhys booted the ball into the back of the net, levelling the score, and, bubbling with excitement, he ran over to me at the side of the pitch and jumped up into my arms. It was a lovely moment.
Mind you, Rhys didn’t take losing well. On one occasion, Fir Tree were playing in the Colts Cup final and they lost. Rhys was so unhappy about receiving the runners-up trophy that he refused to smile for the team photos.
Rhys was always keen on school. Just before his fifth birthday, in 2000, he would follow his big brother into Broad Square primary and he was really great about going into school for the first day, probably because he’d already been in nursery, so he was used to being around lots of kids, and Owen was already in the school. I think it’s easier for a second child to go into school, if Rhys is anything to go by. They’re used to playing with other children, because they have an older sibling, and in Rhys’s case, he had loved nursery and made lots of friends there, so he was pleased to be moving up with them.
Rhys and Owen both loved school. They never wanted to be off, even when they really were sick, and I had no problems getting them up and getting them off to school. They just wanted to be with their mates and saw it as a social thing.
After a while, Rhys began asking to go to breakfast club at school in the morning. Initially, I said no – mainly because I didn’t want to get up and get ready any earlier than I already did on a normal school morning – but he kept on.
‘You can have your breakfast here. I make you breakfast every morning,’ I told him. That wasn’t good enough.
‘But I want to go to breakfast club, Mum, because then we have time to play football,’ he would say. Naturally, football had to be behind the enthusiasm to get to school early.
Eventually, when he was about seven, I relented and he started to go to breakfast club every morning. Thankfully, the teachers did insist he ate something there and told him, ‘You can’t go out to play until you’ve eaten some breakfast,’ otherwise he probably wouldn’t have bothered. It was purely for the football, not the breakfast, but they wouldn’t let him have breakfast at home and then play, so I ended up dragging myself out of bed earlier to take him every morning.
In 2005, when Rhys was nine and Owen was fourteen, we were due to go on a family holiday to the Greek island of Kos and the kids were really excited. I like to be prepared, so I always get the cases down from the loft two weeks before we go and start putting things into them. I had already started packing when I got a phone call from the travel agent, saying they had double-booked us and they had to cancel the holiday.
After the initial shock, my first thought was, ‘We’ll just book somewhere else,’ but I soon discovered it takes six weeks for them to reimburse the payment, even though it was their fault. We didn’t have the money to just go and book another holiday so Ste and I decided we would have to miss out that year.
Obviously we were furious and, because the boys had been looking forward to going away so much, I felt terrible and Ste felt terrible. We were saying, ‘What are we going to tell the boys?’ But we knew there were two things they wanted more than a holiday, so we came up with a plan.
That evening, we sat them down in our living room and Ste said, ‘The holiday has been cancelled. We’re so sorry.’ Their little faces fell. But they’d tormented us for years about getting a dog, so to soften the blow he said, ‘But we’ve decided to buy a dog.’ He paused as the boys cheered, then added, ‘And we’re going to get you a season ticket for Everton.’
Well, that was the best reaction to the cancellation of a holiday anyone has ever seen. The kids were made up with it. They were happier with that than they’d ever been about any holiday and, to this day, Owen says that cancelled holiday was the best thing that ever happened.
Although I had gone to games with them in the past, I didn’t get a season ticket for me because I said to Ste, ‘That’ll be your time.’ Ste worked as the night manager at Tesco and his hours meant he was out every evening during the week and the boys saw me all the time and very little of him. That made the weekends all the more precious for Ste because he loved spending time with his boys. Because of that, I wanted the matches to be Ste’s time with them, so we bought three season tickets for Goodison Park. Because the kids were juniors, and Rhys was under eleven, they weren’t too expensive. Less than the holiday cost anyway.
Once that was settled, we started looking for a dog. A friend who worked with Ste was mad about boxer dogs and had two beautiful boxers. She had bought them from the same breeder and she recommended him, saying he treated the dogs well. We rang him and, luckily, he said, ‘I’ve got two dogs here. I’ll bring them round.’
The following day he turned up at the house with two puppies, who were brothers, and of course Rhys wanted both of them.
‘We can’t have both,’ I said, and luckily the breeder agreed.
‘I wouldn’t allow you to have two puppies anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s too much.’
One of the puppies had a white blot on his face, which we thought was cute, so we chose him. I wanted to call him Zebedee, but because he was a boxer dog Rhys wanted to call him after heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis, so the latest addition to the family was named Lennox.
Although we never spoiled the boys, Rhys had a way of getting what he wanted out of us. He could always win me over with a cheeky grin and a pleading look – his own puppy dog eyes – and being the baby of the family meant he usually got his own way, within reason. But I was always rewarded with a look of happiness, a hug and a ‘Thank you Mum,’ or even a ‘Love you Mum,’ and that gave me a little jolt of joy, every time. If he was happy, I was happy.
Both the kids doted on that dog. Owen would get up in the middle of the night to let him in the garden for a pee and then, when he got back inside, he would sit with him for ages if he was whining, stroking him to calm him down. Personally, I am a bit wary of dogs as I was bitten by one as a child and Lennox seemed to sense that. When the kids came in through the door he would leap up and jump all over them, kissing their faces. But he could sense he shouldn’t do that with me. When I came in the door, he would just look at me, like he was thinking, ‘She’s not into all that. She’ll feed me and give me a brush but she doesn’t do kisses and hugs.’
Being a boxer, Lennox was a bit of a handful, very boisterous and as he got bigger, he was very strong. When a boxer wants to go somewhere, they’ll go, and he even pulled me over when I walked him round the block once. But boxers are also the jokers in the pack, making you laugh all the time – just like Rhys, in fact.
Rhys loved that dog to bits. He was always rolling around on the floor with him and couldn’t wait to see him when he came home from school. They would chase each other around the house and cause a proper commotion, but their antics would always make me laugh.
Rhys’s favourite treat was a Chinese meal and every September, when his birthday came round, he would choose a trip to a Chinese restaurant as his special treat. We used to say, ‘Let’s go somewhere different for your birthday.’ But we always got the same answer, ‘No. I want Chinese.’
On one holiday in Menorca, when he was still quite small, we found an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet and Rhys was in seventh heaven. He went over to fill his own plate and came back with it piled high with nothing but crispy duck and pancake. Owen couldn’t stop laughing – the meal looked almost as big as Rhys.
In July 2007, Rhys had just left primary school and was preparing to go to the secondary school, Fazakerley High School, when we went on another holiday to Menorca. We went with quite a few friends, and there were about eighteen of us, including kids. One night we were all sitting outside a bar, the kids were all getting mock cocktails and playing about and there was a pub quiz going on, so we decided to join in. We had to pick a name for the team and one of our friends picked a name that was so rude, it’s almost unprintable but we did find it hilarious. It was ‘Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?’
The adults were laughing so much we couldn’t breathe and Rhys started laughing and laughing, even though he really didn’t know what he was laughing at. It’s not the sort of language he would have understood, but I think the sight of us in hysterics set him off and he was screaming with laughter. Everyone in the pub was looking at him, but he couldn’t stop, and that made us laugh even more. We didn’t win a prize for the quiz, but we did win a prize for the best team name!
He loved that last holiday and he had such a great time, especially round the pool. He would jump on everyone and dive-bomb everyone and just mess about all the time, trying to make people laugh. Ever the joker.
While he never stopped joking about, Rhys was always a loving lad who was always hugging and kissing me, and always throwing his arms round me. He had a wonderful smile that made you feel warm and lovely. You couldn’t help but smile back at him.
Although he was growing up fast, he was still my little boy. He wouldn’t have told his mates but he still liked me to come and tuck him in of a night.
Every night, Rhys would have a shower and then go to bed to read or watch a bit of telly before going to sleep. After a little while, I would go up and turn out the light and he’d say, ‘Come and tuck me in,’ and I’d say, ‘You’re nearly twelve!’
So I’d tuck him in and kiss him on the head. And every night we would say the same thing to each other.
‘Love you, see you in the morning,’ I’d say.
‘Love you too Mum,’ Rhys would reply.
What I’d give to hear those words from him one more time.
IT MAY BE etched in my memory for evermore now, but 22 August 2007 started like any other day. The boys had been on their school holidays for a month and Rhys had made the most of his time. Whenever he could, he had been out with a football but the summer of 2007 had seen more than its fair share of wet weather, and Rhys would often get frustrated when heavy rain stopped him from spending the whole day outside. In the few days before the 22nd, the weather had taken a turn for the better and Rhys had spent long hours at the park, or in the garden, happily kicking a football around. While he loved school, and he was excited to be going up to the secondary school, Fazakerley High School, in September, the summer holidays never felt too long for him. As long as he had a ball, he was never bored.
That day was glorious, hot and sunny, and Rhys would normally be heading straight out to knock for his mates after breakfast, but I had a day off from Tesco, where I worked on the checkouts, so I had booked dentist appointments for the boys. I took them for their check-ups and they got the all-clear, then we had to go into town. Rhys needed a smart new uniform for secondary school and I had already kitted him out with most of it, but we still had to get the tie. He had been excited to try on his new shirt, trousers and jumper, and a brand new pair of shiny black shoes, and he looked so smart. But, Rhys being Rhys, he was most excited about his new blue PE kit because it was made by Nike. He was absolutely made up that it was a decent brand and not your everyday kit. It was a proper kit. He was over the moon with that.
The school has a massive big field at the back where they play football but the pupils also do all sorts of other sports, including cricket, athletics and trampolining, as well as having the use of a swimming pool. It is quite a sporty school so Rhys was looking forward to all of the activities.
Moving to secondary school is always difficult so we occasionally had to reassure him that everything would be all right, and he’d soon settle in, but he was quite confident because he had a couple of close friends who had also got in and his big brother was in the sixth form, so it wasn’t as daunting as it might have been. We were happy he was going to Fazakerley too because Ste had been there and had always rated it and Owen had done really well there.
While he loved the PE kit, I loved his spanking new uniform – grey trousers, a navy blue jumper with a badge and a new shirt and tie – when he tried it on. It all looked very smart and it brought a lump to my throat to think my baby boy was off to ‘big school’.