Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  Two hundred fifty-seven Manchester United supporters arrived on Wednesday morning, courtesy of Bobby Boss, to travel by air to Turin to a match from which they had been banned. Most of the supporters on the plane knew each other: this was a club outing. Nobody knew where we’d be staying; nobody had a match ticket. But everyone was in a holiday mood; everyone was proud to be a member of tourist trash. There were so many pictures to take. There was the picture of checking in for the flight. The picture of entering the duty-free shop and the one of leaving the duty-free shop. There was the one of opening the bottle bought from the duty-free shop and the one, taken once we had acquired our cruising altitude, of the duty-free shop bottle half-empty. And while I admit it seemed a little peculiar to find so many people half-way through litre bottles of vodka at ten o’clock in the morning, our flight to Turin was largely uneventful—noisy, spirited, but finally no different from what I supposed any other English package holiday must be like. The group seemed harmless on the whole, and fun, and I found that all of it—the strain of my early rising, the discomfort of riding from London to Manchester with a boy who could not afford a handkerchief, the sudden exposure to so many peculiar people—was starting to drop away. Frankly, I was enjoying myself. The fact, however, was this: tourist trash was on its way to devastate the country it was visiting.

  For then it arrived in Turin.

  TURIN

  A mob is a strange phenomenon. It is a gathering of heterogeneous elements, unknown to one another (except on some essential points such as nationality, religion, social class); but as soon as a spark of passion, having flashed out from one of these elements, electrifies this confused mass, there takes place a sort of sudden organization, a spontaneous generation. This incoherence becomes cohesion, this noise becomes a voice, and these thousands of men crowded together soon form but a single animal, a wild beast without a name, which marches to its goal with an irresistible finality. The majority of these men would have assembled out of pure curiosity, but the fever of some of them soon reaches the minds of all, and in all of them there arises a delirium. The very man who came running to oppose the murder of an innocent person is the first to be seized with the homicidal contagion, and moreover, it does not occur to him to be astonished at this.

  Gabriel Tarde

  The Penal Philosophy (1912)

  THE FIRST PERSON to greet the group in Turin, there at the foot of the ramp, was a man named Michael Wicks. Mr Wicks was the Acting British Consul. He was about fifty—a tweed jacket, a Foreign Office accent, educated—and relentlessly friendly. Mr Wicks was almost always smiling, and he continued smiling even when he met the first one off the plane, an extremely fat boy called Clayton.

  Clayton had a number of troubles but his greatest one was his trousers. In all likelihood Clayton will have trouble with his trousers for the rest of his life. His stomach was so soft and large—no adjective seems big enough to describe its girth—that his trousers, of impressive dimensions to begin with, were not quite large enough to be pulled up high enough to prevent them from slipping down again. Clayton emerged from the airplane and waddled down the ramp, clasping his belt buckle, wrestling with it, trying to wiggle it over his considerable bulk. He was singing, ‘We’re so proud to be British.’ His eyes were closed, and his face was red, and he repeated his refrain over and over again, although nobody else was singing with him.

  Mick was not far behind. He had finished his bottle of vodka and was drinking a can of Carlsberg Special Brew that he had snapped up from the drinks trolley as he bumped past it on his way out. On reaching the end of the ramp, Mick was greeted by Mr Wicks. Mick was confused. Mr Wicks did not look Italian. Mick paused, started to utter something, in the puffy, considered way that characterizes the speech of a man who has consumed a litre of spirits in the span of ninety minutes. And then Mick belched. It was a spectacular belch, long and terrible, a brutal, slow bursting of innumerable noxious gastric bubbles. It was a belch that invited speculation: about the beverages, the foods and the possible quantities that had contributed to a spray so powerful that it seemed to rise endlessly from deep within Mick’s tortured torso. But Mr Wicks was unflappable. He was happy to view Mick as no different from any other tourist who had found the excitement of air travel a bit much to contain comfortably. Clearly a diplomat through and through, Mr Wicks was not offended. I don’t think it was possible to offend Mr Wicks. He just smiled.

  The others followed. They were also singing—on their own or arm in arm with friends—and their songs, like Clayton’s, were all about being English and what a fine thing that was. Something had happened to the group shortly after landing; there had been a definitive change. As the plane approached the terminal, someone had spotted the army: it was waiting for them, standing in formation.

  The army!

  This was not going to be an ordinary passage through passport control: the plane was about to be surrounded, not by the police—you could see them clustered near the loading ramp—but by a troop of Italian soldiers. The soldiers were funny-looking, according to Mick, who was sitting next to me. Actually the phrase he used was ‘fuckin’ poofters’. They wore strange uniforms and brightly-coloured berets; the soldiers were not English—that was the point; the soldiers were foreign.

  The effect was immediate: these were no longer supporters of Manchester United; they were now defenders of the English nation. They had ceased to be Mancunians; in an instant, their origins had, blotter-like, spread from one dot on the map of the country to the entire map itself. They were now English: English and, apparently, dangerous. People stood up, while the plane was taxi-ing, amid protests from a stewardess to sit down again, and, as if on cue, began changing their clothes, switching their urban, weekday dress for a costume whose principal design was the Union Jack. All at once, heads and limbs began poking through Union Jack T-shirts and Union Jack swimming suits and one pair (worn unusually around the forehead) of Union Jack boxer shorts. The moment seemed curiously prepared for, as if it had been rehearsed. Meanwhile, everyone had started singing ‘Rule Britannia’—sharp, loud, spontaneous—and they sung it again, louder and louder, until finally, as the terminal grew near, it was not being sung but shouted:

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

  Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

  When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,

  Arose from out the azure main,

  When Britain first arose from out the azure main,

  This was the charter, the charter of the land,

  And heavenly angels sung the strain:

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

  Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

  Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!

  The Italians, too, had changed their identity. They had ceased to be Italians: they were now ‘Eyeties’ and ‘wops’.

  This was what Mr Wicks greeted, a man whose friendly relationship with reality I found to be intriguing. After all, here he was, having decided to meet an airplane full of supporters who, having been banned from the match that they were about to attend, were about to wreak crime and mayhem upon the city of Turin. What could he have done? It is easy to say after the event: he should have informed the civil aviation authorities that this particular charter flight must not be allowed to land and that everyone on it should be returned to Britain. That was what he should have done. But on what pretext could he have done such a thing? Mr Wicks’s alternative—the only one—was to declare his faith in the humanity of what came out of the airplane, even though such a declaration meant overlooking so many things—like Clayton or Mick or the Union Jack boxer shorts worn as a tribal head-dress or the expression of unequivocal terror on the eight flight attendants’ faces or the fact that by eleven-thirty in the morning 257 litres of eighty-proof spirits that had been purchased an hour and a half beforehand had already been consumed. ‘Everybody,’ Mr Wicks sai
d, still smiling, as everybody came zig-zagging down the loading ramp, ‘everybody is here to have a good time.’

  Everybody was here to have a good time, and everybody agreed. But where was the man in charge? Mr Wicks asked after Mr Robert Boss of the Bobby Boss Travel Agency, but no one could help. No one knew his whereabouts. For that matter, no one knew where we’d be staying or where we might find our tickets for the match. In fact, most people, including myself, were so grateful to have found a plane waiting for us at Manchester airport and so surprised that it had conveyed us to Italy that we weren’t in a great rush to ask more questions, fearing that by looking too closely at what we had it might all fall apart. It was better—and, after so much drink drunk so fast, easier—to believe that somehow it would all work out.

  Then from the back of the plane emerged an attractive, chirpy woman with the bouncy cheerfulness of an American cheerleader. She introduced herself—‘Hi, I’m Jackie’—and announced that she was in charge and that everything was going to be fine. Jackie turned out to be a police cadet who had abandoned her training because she decided that she wanted to travel and see the world instead. She had met Bobby Boss at a party. He offered her the world—and this job. This trip to Turin, in the company of 257 football supporters, was her first time abroad. Jackie was twenty-two years old.

  Mr Wicks was concerned.

  What do you do, I wondered, when your instinct is telling you to arrest everyone, and your sense of justice is telling you that you can’t, and your mind, thoroughly confused, is telling you to smile a lot, and then you discover that in place of the person responsible for your predicament you have instead a twenty-two-year-old police drop-out surrounded by 257 drunken boys on her first time abroad?

  What would you do?

  What Mr Wicks did was this: still smiling, he confiscated everyone’s passport (the appearance of an American one, I would learn, raising the momentary fear that the CIA was involved). Mr Wicks appeared to be thinking that he might want to control who was allowed to leave. He wouldn’t—Mr Wicks would simply want everyone to leave—but that was later. At the time, Mr Wicks was trying to limit the consequences of what, in his heart of hearts, he must have known he could not prevent. He had prepared an information sheet of useful phone numbers arranged with an ominous sense of priorities. The number of the British Consulate was first, followed by the numbers of the police, the hospital, the ambulance service and, finally, the airport. Another sheet was filled with a number of damage-limiting phrases in Italian (‘Will you get a doctor quickly, please?’), and it closed with the wishful imperative that, now in a foreign country, each member of the group was to conduct himself as an ambassador for Britain, not something that the Claytons and the Micks or anyone else needed to be encouraged to do: their sense of Britishness, irrevocably intact, was verging on imperial. Mr Wicks led everyone in a schoolmasterly manner through passport control and then gathered them together for an old fashioned locker-room pep talk—they were all to be on their best behaviour—concluding with the disclosure that he had arranged a police escort. It consisted of four motorcycles and two squad cars for each of the four buses that were waiting outside. All this intelligent and careful work revealed a man of great forethought. Yet you could see in Mr Wicks’s eyes—as he stood in the shade of the terminal awning, all that tweed and education waving to us, as one by one each bus pulled out for the noisy drive into the city—that he had failed. Something very terrible was about to happen, and it would somehow be his fault. There was the realization—his face seemed to convey the pain and the regret of it—that he had just granted freedom to a body of unusual beings, beings who should be treated in a humane fashion (fed, viewed, appreciated with affection) but who should never have been allowed to enter the city of Turin. Never. Not even on a leash. Or in a cage. And yet, optimist to the end, Mr Wicks was still smiling.

  A police escort is an exhilarating thing. I felt it to be exhilarating. I didn’t particularly like the idea that I did, but I couldn’t deny that I was sharing something of the experience of those around me, who, their shouting momentarily muted by the deafening sound, now felt themselves to be special people. After all, who is given a police escort? Prime ministers, presidents, the Pope—and English football supporters. By the time the buses reached the city—although there was little traffic, the sirens had been turned on the moment we left the parking lot—the status of their occupants had been enlarged immeasurably. Each intersection we passed was blocked with cars and onlookers. People had gathered on every street, wondering what all the fuss was about, wanting to get a look, and several blocks ahead you could see more people, bigger crowds, more congestion. The sound of twenty sirens is hard to miss. Who in the city of Turin could not have known that the English had arrived?

  The English themselves, moved by the effect they were having, started to sing, which they managed to do more loudly than the brain-penetrating sirens that heralded their entrance into the city. To sing so powerfully was no small achievement, although to describe the noise that emerged from the bus as singing is to misrepresent it. One song was ‘England’. This was repeated over and over again. There were no more words. Another, more sophisticated, was based on the tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. Its words were:

  Glory, glory, Man United

  Glory, glory, Man United

  Glory, glory, Man United

  Yours troops are marching on! on! on!

  Each ‘on’ was grunted a bit more emphatically than the one before, accompanied by a gesture involving the familiar upturned two fingers. There was an especially simple tune, ‘Fuck the Pope’—simple because the words consisted exclusively of the following: Fuck the Pope. ‘Fuck the Pope’ was particularly popular, and, despite the sirens and speed, at least two buses (the one I was in and the one behind us) succeeded in chanting ‘Fuck the Pope’ in some kind of unison.

  I noticed Clayton. He was several rows in front. Somehow Clayton, like an unwieldy lorry, had reversed himself into a position in which the opened window by his seat was filled by his suddenly exposed and very large buttocks—his trousers, this time, deliberately gathered round his knees, the cheeks of his suddenly exposed and very large buttocks clasped firmly in each hand and spread apart. Just behind him was a fellow who was urinating through his window. People were standing on the seats, jerking their fists up and down, while screaming profanities at pedestrians, police, children—any and all Italians.

  Then someone lobbed a bottle.

  It was bound to happen. There were bottles rolling around on the floor or being passed from person to person, and it was inevitable that, having tried everything else—obscene chants, abuse, peeing—someone would go that much further and pick up one of the empty bottles and hurl it at an Italian. Even so, the use of missiles of any kind was a significant escalation, and there was the sense, initially at least, that bottle-throwing was ‘out of order’.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ someone shouted, angry, but not without a sense of humour. ‘What are you, some kind of hooligan?’

  A meaningful threshold had been crossed. Moments later there was the sound of another bottle breaking. And a second, and a third, and then bottles started flying out of most windows—of each of the four buses.

  I wondered: if I had been a citizen of Turin, what would I have made of all this?

  After all, here I’d be, at the foot of the Alps, in one of the most northern regions of Italy, surrounded by an exquisite, historic brick architecture, a city of churches and squares and arcades and cafés, a civilized city, an intellectual city, the heart of the Communist Party, the home of Primo Levi and other writers and painters, and, during my lunch hour, when perhaps I, a Juventus supporter like everyone else, had gone out to pick up my ticket for the match that evening, I heard this powerful sound, the undulating whines of multiple sirens. Were they ambulances? Had there been a disaster? All around me people would have stopped and would be craning their necks, shielding their eyes from the
sun, until finally, in the distance we would have spotted the oscillating blue and white lights of the approaching police. And when they passed—one, two, three, four buses—would my response be nothing more than one of fascination, as in the window of each bus, I would see faces of such terrible aggression—remarkable aggression, intense, inexplicably vicious? Perhaps my face would be splattered by the spray of someone’s urine. Perhaps I would have to jump out of the way of a bottle being hurled at my head. And perhaps, finally, I would have responded in the manner chosen by one Italian lad, who, suddenly the target of an unforeseen missile, simply answered in kind: he hurled a stone back.

  The effect on those inside the buses was immediate. To be, suddenly, the target came as a terrible shock. The incredulity was immense: ‘Those bastards,’ one of the supporters exclaimed, ‘are throwing stones at the windows,’ and the look on his face conveyed such urgent dismay that you could only agree that a stone-throwing Italian was a very bad person indeed. The presumption—after all a window could get broken and someone might get hurt—was deeply offensive, and everyone became very, very angry. Looking around me, I realized that I was no longer surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants; I was now surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalist social deviants in a frenzy. They were wild, and anything that came to hand—bottles, jars of peanuts, fruit, cartons of juice, anything—was summarily hurled through the windows. ‘Those bastards,’ the lad next to me said, teeth clenched, lobbing an unopened beer can at a cluster of elderly men in dark jackets. ‘Those bastards.’