by Bill Buford
Every crowd has a threshold; all crowds are initially held in place by boundaries of some kind. There are rules that say: this much, but no more. A march has a route and a destination. A picket line is precisely itself: an arrangement of points that cannot be crossed. A political rally: there is the politician, the rally’s event, at its centre. A parade, a protest, a procession: there is the police escort, the pavement, the street, the overwhelming fact of the surrounding property. The crowd can be here, but not there. There is form in an experience that tends towards abandon. I have described the relentless physicalness of the terraces and how they concentrate the spectator experience: that of existing so intensely in the present that it is possible for an individual, briefly, to cease being an individual, to disappear into the power of numbers—the strength of them, the emotion of belonging to them. And yet again: it is formlessness in a contrivance of form. Being a spectator is an insistently structured experience: there is a ticket that confers exclusivity; there are gates that govern what is possible here, inside; what is not possible there, outside. The demarcations are reinforced by the architecture itself. The face that a stadium, of uniform concrete or brick, presents to the outside world is blank and unexpressive: nothing is said, nothing admitted. The face that it presents to itself is an enclosure of faces—faces packed as tightly as bodies will allow, design at its most expressive: everything is possible here. Outside, one experience; inside, another; outside again, and the crowd experience, like the match which governs it, is terminated: there is an ending, closure, a point when the crowd can be designated as having ceased to exist. In every crowd, there is something—with form—to contain the inherently formless nature of the crowd itself, to control what is potentially uncontrollable.
And when the threshold is crossed, the form abandoned?
There in the streets of Tottenham I watched the faces, concentrating, as moment by moment everyone tried to build up the confidence or the intensity or simply the strength of feeling that would allow them to step over the high boundary that separated them from where they wanted to be. The idea was, figuratively, literally, historically, an act of transgression: to step (gressare) across (trans) what was forbidden to cross. Everything militated against crossing it. Every act of every day, every law that had been learned, respected and obeyed, enforced and reinforced, every inculcated custom of conduct, was preventing them from finally taking the step.
Again, the photograph in Split. The man with the moustache has been followed up on to the tank by five or six others. These men are not LeBon’s morbidly nervous, half-deranged masses nor are they Gibbon’s urban scum; they are ordinary, ordinarily responsible members of society, except in this one crucial respect: they have now done what is not done and cannot return to the orderly crowd standing round watching them. Having crossed this line, they are now outside the civilization they have left behind. On the face of one, the man pulling at the jacket of the one with the moustache, wanting also to get to the tank commander, is a look of terrible excitement. It is not panic or fear or anger or revenge. It is exhilaration.
There cannot be many moments in a person’s life when what is civilized ceases to be, when the structures of continuity—job, shelter, routine, responsibility, choice, right, wrong, the state of being a citizen—disappear. English, the great mapping language of imperialism, has no verb which is the antithesis of to civilize, no word to describe the act of un-making the rules that citizens have made. Our lives do not admit the prospect, are organized to exclude it. Our day consists of patterns of conduct that hold us intact. My place in a civilized society, my place as a citizen, derives from an arrangement of agreements and routines. My day is heavily patterned: I wake, pee, eat, shit, shower, dress, travel to work, write my letters, make my phone calls, pay my bills, attend to my diary, drink coffee, pee, talk, lunch, run errands, catch my train, arrive home, have dinner, drink, pee, am entertained, fuck, pee, clean teeth, sleep. I have a house, a shelter. I leave it in the morning and return to it in the evening: it is there—a material fact, not simply reassuring but reinforcing in its familiarity. I own it by virtue of an agreement between me, my place of work, the bank and the law of the land. I am a collector, not in a refined sense but a fundamental one—my photographs, my articles of clothing, my pieces of furniture (arranged so), my library of books (arranged so), my friends and loved ones (arranged so), my idea of my life made smooth and comfortable by regular use, my papers, my work, my idea of me. I surround myself with things, prop myself up with property, fill up my space with stuff: I personalize it; I make it intimate, I make it mine.
I have so many images for it—this state of being a citizen, of being civilized. I see it as a net that holds me in place, keeps me from falling. I see it as a fabric—a network of individual threads, intertwined, pulled tight—that keeps me warm, that I can wrap around both me and others. I see it as property, a house, a structure, a made thing, walls to keep out the cold, a door to keep out the unwanted, a roof to protect me from the night and its terrible undifferentiated darkness.
But I see it, too, as a weight. I see it as a barrier, an obstacle between me and something I don’t know or understand. I see it as a mediator, a filter that allows only certain kinds of experience through. And I am attracted to the moments when it disappears, even if briefly, especially if briefly: when the fabric tears, the net breaks, the house burns—the metaphors are arbitrary. This line, again; this boundary: I am compelled, exhilarated, by what I find on the other side. I am excited by it; I know no excitement greater. It is there—on the edge of an experience which is by its nature antisocial, anti-civilized, anti-civilizing—that you find what Susan Sontag describes as our ‘flair’ (the word is so attractively casual) for high temperature visionary obsession: exalted experiences that by their intensity, their risk, their threat of self-immolation exclude the possibility of all other thought except the experience itself, incinerate self-consciousness, transcend (or obliterate?) our sense of the personal, of individuality, of being an individual in any way. What are these experiences? There are so few; they are so intolerable. Religious ecstasy. Sexual excess (insistent, unforgiving). Pain (inflicting it, having it inflicted)—pain so great that it is impossible to experience anything except pain, pain as an absolute of feeling. Arson. Certain drugs. Criminal violence. Being in a crowd. And—greater still—being in a crowd in an act of violence. Nothingness is what you find there. Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.
A FINAL IMAGE: a December match against Chelsea. All morning long, the supporters have been gathering at the Lion and Lamb, a red-brick Irish pub near Euston Station, arriving, once again, according to a calculatedly staggered schedule—by hired coaches arranged during the week, vans and minibuses that have avoided the major motorways, private cars. Both rooms of the pub are crowded—steamy and sweaty and unpleasant—and the floor is covered with a gooey mix of beer and mud and wetness. It is impossible to move. I try briefly to get a drink but never reach the bar. At around one-thirty, the principal figures accounted for, the group sets off, the manner of its leaving by now a ritual known even to me. The pub is evacuated, glass breaking as pints of beer are simply dropped, and a crush of people instantaneously fills up the small street outside, a preposterous number in a preposterous hurry—no one wanting to be left behind—and then turns into the main Euston Road, spreading out, kerb to kerb, blocking the traffic in both directions, everyone organized and united and feeling the high energy and jubilant authority of suddenly being a crowd.
They avoid the Underground at Euston Station (too many police) and march to the next one, Euston Square, entering it as one—placards, posters, stools being picked up and swept along en route, no barricade or turnstile an impediment—everyone chanting now, the group’s euphoria building, no one buying a ticket, no one being stopped or challenged, and board the train that happens to be waiting at the bottom of the escalator, holding open the doors to prevent its leaving until everyone is inside.
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br /> But the train does not move.
The doors close finally, but the train remains at the platform. It is waiting; the driver is waiting—for something; for some sign; in all likelihood, for the police. Every carriage, front to back, is filled with supporters. Every seat is filled; every aisle, entrance or bit of space—for standing, sitting, squatting, holding on—has been taken. This is rush-hour closeness, an intolerable number of people pressed tightly together. The train has become hot and unbearably uncomfortable. Someone pushes the button to open the doors but they don’t open. The supporters start shouting. They pound the windows. They try rocking the carriage from side to side.
And then the train starts and rapidly attains full speed. It passes through the first Underground station, Great Portland Street, without stopping. It passes through Baker Street and through the next one, Edgware Road, and it is apparent that the train is not going to stop, and that, with all other traffic cleared off the line, the train is going straight to Chelsea (if that’s where it is going). I watch the faces of two passengers, a couple in their late fifties, modestly dressed, the man in a duffel coat, shopping bags at their feet, whose Saturday outing was ruined the moment they made the mistake of boarding this particular train. They appear too uncomfortable to make themselves conspicuous by objecting to where they are being taken, and sit anxiously looking side to side. Notting Hill Gate appears and disappears in a blur.
The train finally stops at Fulham Broadway, the station near the ground, and there is, despite the preparation—the elaborate routes into London, the expensive hire vehicle’s, the strategies of evasion—nothing to see but members of the Metropolitan Police. There are rows and rows of them. They are the only people on the platform; they have taken over the station. They appear, once we finally reach the top of the stairs, to be the only people waiting outside as well, but then, amid the police and the horses—a helicopter is noisily overhead—the pushing and the jostling, I hear someone say that he sees ‘their lads’.
In the confusion around the entrance to the ground, the police line momentarily falls apart, and I notice a short, red-haired lad from Chelsea has slipped in among the Manchester supporters. He is following one, walking closely behind him, stride for stride. He taps him on the shoulder and, as the supporter turns round, fells him by an act of decisive violence: a heavy object, an iron bar or a weight that the red-haired follow is holding in both his fists, is raised so suddenly, rammed with such force into the supporter’s Adam’s apple, that he is lifted off his feet, rising several inches into the air, and then falls backwards and collapses. When I look for the Chelsea supporter, he is gone, disappeared into the crowd.
Inside the ground, the policing continues but at a distance: there is a line of police along the bottom of the terraces, on the other side of the perimeter fence; there is another line at the top, along the uppermost row, looking down; and there are clusters on either side, in the stands left empty to provide a buffer between the home and visiting supporters. The police, it would appear, are happy to keep the area surrounded but reluctant to enter it themselves. Inside it, Chelsea supporters have ‘infiltrated’ and, like the little urban terrorist who surprised the United fan from behind, are conducting a discreet campaign of highly targeted violence—most of it unobserved by the police. I suspect, in fact, that the police are happy to ‘unobserve’ the violence: there is the sense that anything that occurs within the perimeters of the net they have formed is tolerable provided it doesn’t slip through and get out into the open; but there is also the sense that anyone who gets hurt probably deserves it—for being there.
The effect is unpleasant. The experience of the whole match is unpleasant—nasty, unsettling. It is cold and windy: there is grit in my eyes, and I can feel it in my hair and underneath my clothes. There is constant movement: too many people have been admitted—a familiar ploy, to get them off the streets—which makes it difficult to do more than try to remain upright and fight for a view of the match. Every now and then, there is another little snap-violent disturbance effected by one of these runt-like infiltrators: everyone cranes his neck to have a look at the thing that has happened; you can never quite see it. Moments later, there is another incident somewhere else, and everyone cranes his neck in that direction. And so it goes on. Someone has taken to throwing spark plugs, and a supporter near me is struck in the head by one, slicing his forehead. It is uneasy and claustrophic. There is mention of a stabbing, but I don’t see it, and it would be in keeping that there would be one, but also that there wouldn’t be one, that it would have simply felt appropriate that someone should have been stabbed by now.
Towards the end of the match I spot the red-haired Chelsea supporter. I had thought that he would be among those who had infiltrated the visitors’ stands. I watch him. His face, even though cheerfully freckled, is hard and unforgiving. He has the familiar crescent cheek, the encrusted scar from being knifed. He is small—he comes about half-way up my chest—but his smallness is not a liability or a weakness: it serves only to make him compact and spring-like and immediately menacing. He is an unhappy thing to look at, a little entrepreneurial machine of small-time violence. When he comes closer, working his way through the terraces, and passes in front of me—he is an arm’s length away—I feel an urge to take him from behind by the neck and squeeze him until his breathing stops. The urge is a real one, I am convinced, and not a violent fantasy, and as he walks out of my reach, I regret I have done nothing.
By the end of the match, everyone is restless and frustrated; the ‘atmosphere’ is charged in some manner, as though by electricity or some kind of pressure in the air. I have grown irritated. I want to be warm. I want to be home. I am tired of standing and of the policing and have got a chill from the cold and damp of the night air, and am unhappy about the prospect of being held back, crushed up against lads smelling of bad food and bad drink and the bad indigestion that is the result, while waiting for the streets to be cleared of rival supporters. I resolve that I will figure out a way of slipping through the police line.
A policeman reaches out for me, looking as though he wants to stop me, but then lets me pass. I am on the other side. I am free to go. I am very relieved.
I recognize the person walking next to me; he is a Manchester supporter. I surmise that he must have done what I just did: he, too, has slipped through the police line, by himself, looking very solemn and very thoughtful—the last person in the world who could cause trouble.
I carry on. I spot Robert. How did Robert, of all people, succeed in getting past the police?
Behind Robert is another lad. This one, also by himself, is also terribly serious in manner: preoccupied, distracted. This is suspicious. Then there is another, until finally it occurs to me that they are all emerging from the ground in the same manner, having separated so that they can sneak through the police line one by one. There is a momentary indecisiveness and then they start down the Fulham Road, not wanting to hang about, not walking too fast, everyone maintaining the I-am-on-my-own-and-not-about-to-start-trouble look. I can’t tell how much of this has been planned; the feeling is of overwhelming spontaneity. A crowd is forming, and the effect is of something coming alive. I can see more people joining up, attracted by the familiar, powerful magnetism of numbers, but they don’t seem like additions: they don’t seem to come from the outside, but from within the crowd itself. You can feel it growing, as though this crowd, this thing, this creature were some kind of biological entity, multiplying in the way cells multiply, expanding from the centre.
I follow, not wanting to miss out. I don’t know why they are going in this particular direction but I am determined to be there—wherever ‘there’ might turn out to be. I have forgotten that a moment ago I was ready to go home. I am no longer tired or irritable or cold, but, like everyone around me, alive to the possibility that something is going to happen.
There are faces I haven’t seen before—older faces, supporters in their mid-thirties and early forties
, veterans of violence, old hands who have turned up because it is a match against Chelsea. The experience is manifestly so familiar to them that they have an eerie ease and knowingness. They are canny and savvy and know not to say a word.
The group—still fairly disparate, unhurried, deliberately casual—strolls silently round the Fulham Broadway, going behind the Underground station by way of a side-street. The police, concentrated near the entrance, have dogs and horses and a small fleet of vans. Everyone knows that, having got this far, he must not be detected. It is a ludicrous effect: as if a thousand people, having just burgled the back of a house, are now leaving on tip-toe through the living-room, while the owner sleeps in front of the television. It would take only one policemen to spot what is going on. But no policeman notices. Each step increases the expectation that they’re going to get away with it. I catch sight of a street name—Vanston Place. I don’t know the area and find that I am looking for reference points. Everyone bears to the right. I follow. And then they turn sharply to the left, a quick left. They have done it: the Fulham Broadway is behind us.
I don’t see any Chelsea supporters. But I understand enough to know that I don’t see any police either. That is what matters: that the police are behind us, receding with each step, mistakenly positioned on every Underground platform between here and Euston Station, waiting for the violent supporters who will never appear. The realization is intoxicating. Nobody says a thing—the silence of the group is uncompromising—but you can see it in the faces.