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The moment the gunshots went off Jermaine Pennant made a decision which would affect the rest of his life.

While many of his older friends raced off after a rival gang, Jermaine jumped behind a takeaway counter and hid, in his words, nicking a few chicken wings.

So, when one of the rival gang members was later kicked to death, the future Liverpool and Arsenal football star was questioned by police over the murder but he didn’t stand trial like six others.

This turf warfare took place when Jermaine was just 14 and a group from his notorious Meadows Estate gang in Nottingham were ambushed outside a KFC by rivals from another area, St Ann’s.

In his new autobiography Mental, which will be exclusively serialised in the Mirror this week, he writes: “They had knives, baseball bats and some guns. As they ran past, they stabbed one and hit another with a baseball bat, and a few shots went off. They all ran off. Our gang chased them. I didn’t see it, but one of the St Ann’s gang got caught, they turned on him and he later died in hospital.”

Jermaine, now 35, says: “It was scary, but growing up where I did, it wasn’t the first time I heard gunshots. I automatically jumped for my life.

“I was lucky. If I had been stood outside, it could easily have been me who was stabbed.

“It didn’t matter that I played football and wasn’t interested in that gang culture. If I was hanging around with my friends, I was a target. I still am.

“It all happened so fast. There was a fight, the other gang ran off, and some of our gang chased them. I was left hiding behind the counter nicking chicken wings.”

Two days later police knocked on his door while he was at school. He was hauled down the station and interrogated about the murder.

Jermaine says: “Being question by the police was even more scary than hearing gun shots. I knew if I got charged with murder I could be going to prison for a long time.

“But I could only tell the police what I knew, which wasn’t much.”

Six youths from the Meadows stood trial for murder, but were acquitted as, he claims, there was insufficient evidence to prove who delivered the fatal beating.

Scarcely a year later, Jermaine became football’s most expensive teenage footballer. He was still just 15 when Arsenal paid Notts County £2million for him in 1999.

He scored a hat-trick on his first start for the club against Southampton, but his problems off the pitch soon overshadowed his achievements on it.

In 2005 he was jailed for 30 days for drink driving while disqualified after crashing his friend’s Mercedes into a lamppost. On his release he became the first Premier League star to play wearing an electronic ankle tag.

He still attracts controversy and has even signed up for the next series of Celebrity Big Brother, he says to try to prove he is “not a bad guy”.

Yet Jermaine’s turbulent and deprived upbringing, revealed for the first time in his new book, is even more shocking than the antics which earned him a bad boy reputation as a professional footballer.

His childhood home in the Meadows is a far cry from the large family home in the Shropshire countryside he now shares with glamour model wife Alice Goodwin.

His parents split when he was a baby and his mum Debbie and his drug dealer dad Gary, split when Jermaine was just three years old.

Jermaine says he had no contact with his mother for the next decade, until he was forced to track her down so she could sign his passport application so he could travel to Paris with England Schoolboys.

At one point, he recalls, a relative told Jermaine she had died of throat cancer. Even now a quick Wikipedia search says his mum is dead, but Jermaine now reveals he discovered she IS still alive. He met up with her, but their relationship soon fizzled out again.

He said: “I was sad when I was told she had died, but I didn’t break down in tears like any normal person would. I never had that bond with her. I just felt numb.

“When I found out she was still alive, it was a relief, but I didn’t really know how to feel.”

Dad Gary was a drug dealer who eventually he became a drug addict and spent time in jail.

As boy Jermaine slept on mattresses on the floor of a bedroom without carpets, wallpaper or even curtains. Surrounded by crime, Jermaine had his first run-in with the law at 12 when he was arrested for stealing a boy band CD from HMV.

But for the most part he tried to stay out of trouble to pursue his dream of becoming a footballer.

“I was never going to be an engineer, the only thing at school I was good at was sport,” says Jermaine. “I only had one route out of the Meadows, kicking a football.

“God knows what would have happened to me if I had stayed there.”

But the KFC incident wasn’t his only close call as a teenager in Nottingham.

One night out in the city during his Arsenal career ended in a high-speed car chase. He was a passenger in a friend’s car when two vehicles tried to force them off the road.

Jermaine says: “It was like being trapped in a game of Grand Theft Auto. My friend was swerving left and right as the car behind was bumping into us.

“The two girls in the car with us were screaming. There were dents in the side of the car and the back bumper.

“In the end we managed to trick them by turning right into oncoming traffic at a junction. There was no other way out. As soon as we crossed the bridge into the Meadows we could see the two cars had stopped. They knew they couldn’t follow us there.

“It was the luckiest escape of my life. They clearly weren’t trying to stop us to chat.”

Another of Jermaine’s friends, Benjamin Smith, wasn’t lucky enough to get away when he was attacked by a gang from St Ann’s a few months later for being in the wrong area.

They stabbed him 15 times, carved the initial’s ST - for St Ann’s - into his cheek, and left him for dead. He spent weeks in a coma in hospital. Ben’s mum asked Jermaine to visit him in hospital and talk to him in the hope it would wake his friend.

Jermaine says: “My friends were all dead proud of me, making it from the Meadows to the Premier League, so his mum thought it might help if he heard my voice.

“I didn’t dare tell Arsenal where I was going. It was horrible seeing him like that. I didn’t know what to say, I just told him what I’d been up to. I wasn’t there when he woke up, I was just glad he did.

“He was so badly injured has to take tablets for the rest of his life.

“People say I didn’t fulfil my potential as a player. Maybe they are right, but given where I came from, I think I did pretty well.”

The tattoo on Jermaine’s left leg clearly visible below his knee-length shorts, is a reminder what he has achieved. The giant 16 stretched across his shin recalls the shirt number he wore during his man of the match performance for Liverpool in the Champion’s League final in Athens in 2007 and during Stoke’s FA Cup final appearance four years later. Both times he was on the losing team.

He also missed out on a Premier League winner’s medal despite being part of Arsenal’s team of Invincibles as he did not play enough matches to qualify and was tipped to made his England debut while playing for Liverpool, but was overlooked.

Such are the fine margins between a good career and a great one, but Jermaine is not bitter.

“My off the field antics have probably halted me playing for England, but I didn’t have anyone to guide me,” he says with a shrug.

“I had to make mistakes and learn those lessons myself. I have no regrets. I’m lucky to have been on that journey and I’ve enjoyed it.”

* Mental by Jermaine Pennant out Thursday (August 9) in Hardback (John Blake)