The memoir · Paul Tunstead
Made With
Conviction.Survival Instinct.
A boy from Runcorn. Children’s homes, prison and addiction. A lifetime of thinking on his feet — and finding a way through.
Back-cover blurb for my upcoming memoir.
MADE WITH CONVICTION: SURVIVAL INSTINCT
by Paul Tunstead
“I wasn’t dim—I was just tuned to a frequency they didn’t have the tools to measure.”
The state labelled Paul Tunstead before it understood him.
Bikes. Cars. Music. Care homes. Police cells. Courtrooms. Detention centres. Prison wings. Violence. Escape. Sport. Addiction. Death-defying madness. Laughter. Defiance.
Thirty-two convictions covering 139 offences—enough, you might think, to bury a man beneath the weight of his own history. But Paul kept rebuilding.
From an eleven-year-old in care for five years, to the roof of Strangeways, to a man shaped by nineteen years behind bars over a twenty-two-year period. Made With Conviction isn’t about pretending the scars never happened.
It embraces them.
The fear. The love. The tears. The danger. The early beatings. The mistakes. The risks. The humour. The people who helped him, the people who hurt him, and the institutions that tried to define him.
Along the way, prison became a gym, a sports hall, a library, a classroom, an anvil—and, at times, something close to a monastery. A restless, wiry kid learned to turn movement into discipline, boredom into education and instinct into survival.
This is a story of breaking.
It’s a story of rebuilding.
It’s a story of taking a label handed unwittingly to him by the state—and redefining it.
The ‘Urchin’ wasn’t the problem.
The Urchin was the engine.
Cinematic. Bold. Raw. Funny. Visceral. Brutal. Vulnerable.
Unapologetically human.
Strap in.
About the book
The life behind
the name.
Made With Conviction: Survival Instinct follows Paul Tunstead from his childhood in Runcorn through children’s homes, nineteen years in prison over a twenty-two-year span, and the long struggle with addiction.
Along the way are friendships, escapes, split-second decisions and consequences that lasted much longer. There is humour too: the nicknames, conversations and unlikely situations that stay with you.
Books, sport and gym discipline run through the story. So does the restless, resourceful character known as the Urchin — always observing, always learning, always looking for a way forward.
Where the book opens
Strangeways.
1 April 1990.
The prologue takes the reader into Strangeways on the day of the riot, and onto the roof where Paul spent three days.
From there, the story goes back to the beginning: the boy, the homes and the years that brought him there.
Inside the chapters
A few of
the turning points.
These are glimpses of the stories within the memoir. The places and people change; the Urchin’s voice carries through.
Runcorn · 1987
Smashing Times
A dive through a plate-glass window. The moments that followed return in fragments: a hedge, a road, a wall and a back garden.
Stoke Heath · 1989
A Bully’s Bully
A deliberate cell move brings Paul face to face with a bully. A direct question changes the balance between them.
Hindley
Focus On The Fulcrum
A deep-red Suzuki X7 and the mechanical instinct that gives the chapter its name.
The last conviction · 2004
Two Pints Of Lager and a Packet Of Mogadon
The events behind Paul’s final conviction, and another prison sentence before his release in 2007.
Why tell it?
For the next Urchin.
“Show future Urchins there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
The memoir follows a life beyond its prison sentences. It leaves room for what came afterwards: recovery, purpose and the determination to put hard-earned experience to use.
A story told in Paul’s own North-West voice, with the music, memories and people that marked the years.
Follow the book
The next
chapter.
Follow Made With Conviction for excerpts, writing updates and news about the book.
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