It’s a Saturday afternoon in Bolton. A young mother is screaming in agony, her hospital bed a ceaselessly uncomforting assemblage of cold metal and damp cotton. After hours of struggle, a head emerges. It is a child, a baby boy no less. She takes her husband’s hand in her own and squeezes it with the kind of fervour that’d have a weaker man crumbling. Not this man though, for he is a policeman, a community man, and he is about to become the father of another little boy. That boy, the policeman’s son, was Mark Berry. Bez, to his mates.
Bez – and we have to assume that he’s now just simply “Bez” to everybody, that even his parents write “Dear Bez” in his birthday cards, that vicars, mechanics and accountants call him Bez, that when he finally sashays into the grave his final resting place will be marked with the word BEZ etched into pristine Italian marble – flew the parental nest at the age of 16, swapping his hometown for the bright lights of Wigan.
