Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  Orwell’s prophecies were always unstable, and, although there is no socialist utopia, we don’t have to look two hundred years hence to find an image that matches what he describes. The image exists now. The man with the rough hands has disappeared along with the heavy industry that required them: the mine workers and steel workers and automobile workers who have retired or been made redundant or anticipate redundancy in the future are not being replaced by their sons: they will not be found in a factory. They, like the majority of the employed population, are working in what we’ve learned to call the ‘service’ sector. If still engaged in a labour that requires their hands, they are self-employed, working as painters and decorators, plumbers or electricians. They might be couriers or drivers of delivery vans. But most will be found in offices—in businesses being run by bankers, accountants, stockbrokers, insurance salesmen and computer programmers or the ‘private enterprise’ equivalent of the civil service: the giant corporations of British Telecom or British Gas.

  They do not live where their fathers lived. The coal fire grate has, as Orwell predicted, disappeared along with the kind of house that would have had one. The tight, dark working-man’s terrace, with the corner shop and the local across the street and the lavatory in the back, has been replaced by a cheerful, sunny Brookside suburban home, with a driveway, a garage, a back garden for a summer barbecue and central ‘invisible’ heating. Inside there are stereos, colour televisions, CDs, tape cassettes, video players, computer games, portable telephones and electronic kitchens—simple box homes filled, as Orwell also predicted, with rubber, steel and glass, or some other comparably mass-produced, although usually synthetic, material purchased at one of the new modern super-stores located just outside the ‘community’, with easy access and plenty of parking. The racing news, it should be pointed out, has not disappeared entirely—Orwell did not get that quite right either—although its place has been effectively taken by another publication. It is not a socialist broadsheet—Orwell got that wrong, too: it is the Sun.

  I am in a tricky area. I have lived in England since 1977, and one of the things I’ve learned is that you don’t talk about the working class, at least in any detail, unless you are working class yourself. You don’t criticize the working class or make generalizations about being a member of it. You would never point out its traits in someone. It is not done; even today, you leave it alone. It is understood that non-working-class people don’t have the right to do so.

  As a consequence, however, few people have come out and observed that the working class doesn’t exist any more. In itself, this wouldn’t be particularly significant—after all England is not the first technologically advanced country to see its working class disappear; it could be argued that it is one of the last—except that no one is admitting that the thing is no longer around. The reverse seems to be the case, at least among the members of the first non-working-class working-class generation, my ‘mates’: working-class habits, like those manifested by Tom Melody’s East London lads, have simply become more exaggerated, ornate versions of an ancient style, more extreme because now without substance. But it is only a style. Nothing substantive is there; there is nothing to belong to, although it is still possible, I suppose, to belong to a phrase—the working class—a piece of language that serves to reinforce certain social customs and a way of talking and that obscures the fact that the only thing hiding behind it is a highly mannered suburban society stripped of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits. This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell.

  SARDINIA

  The need of human beings to transcend ‘the personal’ is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly.

  Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’ (1967)

  I KNEW I would not be going to the 1990 World Cup. My story was finished. My characters were no longer around.

  Sammy was no longer around. He had been arrested for arson, having gone through a bad phase of setting buildings alight. His sentence was commuted to treatment and he had been committed to institutional care. When I met him, it was evident that he had been through a great deal. He had grown heavy and bloated and appeared to be suffering from the effects of tranquillizing drugs. He was slow to recognize me; his speech was slurred.

  Roy was no longer around. Roy had not been around for some time. He was said to be in Morocco. Someone else mentioned Algeria. Then Egypt, Turkey, locations further east. His business interests had shifted, and he was having to travel—some trips lasting several months. Then there was a new development: I heard that he had been arrested for drugs; that he got three years.

  Robert was no longer around; he was claiming to have settled into a real job—‘complete with a business card’—and was thinking about paying his taxes, but he didn’t know how. He had an apartment in New York, where he now lived; a green card (he was ‘writing’ a book, a lad’s tour through the States); and love: Robert had at last found love. It had always been his complaint that no relationship ever lasted because no woman was prepared to be number two; Manchester United would always be number one. Things, evidently, had changed. My last communication was a postcard—the picture, taken at sunset, depicted a man with a cowboy hat, drinking a bottle of beer, sitting in a canvas chair on a Barbados beach. ‘Sunbathing,’ Robert wrote, ‘good food and great sex is so much better than being a thug.’ It was signed, ‘One of the boys of the old brigade.’

  Actually I did see the boys one last time—in May 1990: Manchester United was in the FA Cup Final, and on the Friday before the game just about everyone had come to London: Steve, Ricky, Micky, Robert from America, Sammy from wherever he had been. Gurney was there: he had bathed and—such were the times—had made a number of highly improving and, no doubt, very expensive visits to a dentist: his mouth looked normal. In fact, the only people not there—five pubs around Leicester Square were packed with members of the ‘firm’—were those in prison. It was a family reunion, and no one had an excuse for missing it. For many, this would be the first match they had attended in some time. People had still been going to matches, of course—the ‘family’ was fundamentally intact—but not in the numbers of the past. You got the sense that being a thug was slowly being abandoned for being something else. People did not talk about violence. They talked about drugs, or acid house parties, or the Manchester music scene.

  And so, in my heart of hearts, I knew that I wouldn’t be going to the World Cup. There was no need. My weekends had been reclaimed. Even I, with my insatiable anxieties—that I didn’t know enough, hadn’t seen enough, hadn’t understood enough—could see that there was nothing more to do.

  I remained curious, of course, and it was natural that I would be. There was bound to be violence at the World Cup, and I was interested, in an intellectual sort of way, to see where the trouble might come from.

  I had my first clue during the opening ceremony of Italia ’90, many months before the first match: a highly Italian affair, done in a made-for-television Academy-Awards style. Luciano Pavarotti sang ‘Nessun Donna’, and Sophia Loren drew the lots that determined the schedule of matches. The occasion was momentarily but visibly marred—you could see it on the faces of the officials from the International Football Federation—when, by the bad fortune of the draw, England was once again picked to play Holland in its second match: and everyone knew about the supporters from Holland.

  Or everyone claimed to. But I wondered: did anyone know what the supporters from Holland were like—really? I didn’t, although I had once tried to find out. I had tried to find a violent Dutchman during the interminably long evening that I spent with
Grimsby. Grimsby was convinced that he would find a violent Dutchman and we entered every bar in Düsseldorf looking for him. We did not find him. The violent Dutchmen, Grimsby concluded, were in hiding.

  There were no violent Dutchmen in London the year before. That was when I first became properly aware of the violent Dutchmen’s existence. The occasion had been a friendly between England and Holland at Wembley, and in the days leading up to the match terrible street battles had been predicted. Journalists were dispatched to Amsterdam to accompany the violent Dutchmen on the ferry over. They were also sent to the main railway stations to follow the violent Dutchmen to the ground after they arrived. I, too, sallied out into a blustery, cold night, visiting the appropriate pubs, filling myself with lager, afraid that I might otherwise miss an incident that would reveal new things about violence and nationalism and the Dutch character. In the end, there was trouble, but it was between the English supporters who, having read the papers, had come out to meet the violent Dutchmen, and, failing to find any, fought among themselves.

  In fact, I had seen nothing, ever, to suggest that once the Dutch and the English were put in the same place they would then want to beat each other up. Even so, evidence or not, it was accepted that this time would be different: this time there would be trouble.

  It was reported on the television news that there would be trouble: that England had been picked to play Holland was the lead item that night and the front-page story in every English paper the next day. By the next evening—the story was still a news item—the match was no longer being described as the one between England and Holland; it had already become the ‘feared’ England-Holland match.

  The match would be played in Cagliari on the island of Sardinia—as would all the matches played by England during the two-week first round. This was unusual, and I had heard that the venue had been fixed beforehand—that while the authorities couldn’t do much about the schedule of matches, they could at least keep the England supporters in one spot, on an island, to make the policing easier. And to help out, the island was then visited by a succession of British law enforcement advisers: key members of the Metropolitan Police, of Scotland Yard’s football unit and of the Transport Police. Finally the British sports minister himself appeared and, after some difficulty, persuaded a nation that drinks more wine per person than any other country in the world not to sell alcohol on match days. A considerable achievement, but many Sardinians were made anxious by the minister’s appearance—not by the ban particularly but by the fact that he had come. It was without precedent; another country’s cabinet minister does not visit a nation about to hold a sporting event, with this kind of message. If you invite a friend and his family over for lunch, and then, after accepting your invitation, he mentions in passing that his children will probably destroy parts of your house (they’ll rip up your lawn, pull out your shrubs, urinate on your bathroom walls, get sick on your carpets, break most of your windows and then grind fish’n’chips into your new sofa . . . ), you would be inclined to withdraw the invitation or, at the least, suggest that perhaps the kids could be left behind this time. The Sardinians were in a similar position: if they knew that it was likely that their city would be damaged by the English being in it—if a minister had then come over to confirm that their city would be damaged—why was the British government allowing the supporters to leave? Why were the Sardinians being so foolish as to accept them?

  There was another important detail, although at first it was not mentioned in any news report, English or Italian: the World Cup would mark the first time that English supporters had set foot upon Italian soil since thirty-nine Italians had been killed at Heysel Stadium in Brussels five years before. In fact, the last time that the English supporters had been in Italy I had been with them: it had been Manchester United’s Red Brigade.

  I ended up following events in the Guardian: although every paper had reporters on the spot, the Guardian seemed to have the best coverage. It had a journalist based in Rome and two more in Sardinia, plus a photographer—all there to write about the supporters. Two weeks before the England-Holland match, the Guardian ran two stories—one about ‘Operation Umpire’, set up by Scotland Yard and the Transport Police to monitor the progress of the English fans on their way to the continent; and another one about alcohol: it had been banned on all British trains, again at the insistence of the sports minister.

  On Monday, there was more news. The sports minister had, according to the Guardian, convinced the charter airlines to withhold alcohol on all Italian flights as well. The article also noted the first arrest in Sardinia: three English supporters had been jailed for stealing their hotel sheets. This seemed to me to be an insignificant event, but I was wrong. By Tuesday, the arrest was the big story: stealing sheets was a serious crime, and the culprits were fined £300 and sentenced to twenty days in prison—a punishment that would serve, according to the sports minister, as a ‘warning to everyone going to Sardinia.’ You can only wonder what would have happened had they taken the towels as well.

  The Guardian had more to report that day: another victory for the sports minister. You had a sense that he was working his way through a list. Having got alcohol banned on match days, charter flights and British Rail trains, he had now persuaded the airport duty-free shops not to sell drink. This cut right to the heart of the tourist industry and was certain to discourage people from making the journey: buying duty-free drink is often the principal attraction of going abroad. I imagined hundreds of dismayed supporters who, not having heard about the ban, then emerged from the airport shops dismayed and confused, having impetuously bought vast quantities of tax-exempt perfume in a spirit of displaced compensation.

  At the end of the week, I noticed a brief paragraph about Paul Scarrott—a supporter said to have forty convictions for disorderly conduct—who had been spotted in Rome, travelling on a false passport to slip through the security operations that had been set up to stop anyone with a criminal record from entering the country. The next day the fuller story duly appeared: Paul Scarrott had been arrested. He had no money, no change of clothing and was very drunk; after having driven a stolen motorbike into a food shop, entering by one aisle and leaving by another, picking up bottles of drink en route, he spent the rest of the afternoon racing up and down the railway platforms of the main station in Rome. He was not travelling inconspicuously; it could be argued that he wanted to be arrested—perhaps for the attention he knew he would receive from a media so ready to report trouble from the English supporters. And so it was. For two days, Paul Scarrott was a celebrity: the lead item on every news programme that evening, with a picture of his scrawny, skinny, pinched little face on the front page of every tabloid newspaper the next morning. The Guardian had four articles—being a quality newspaper it published Paul Scarrott’s photograph on the back page—although it also made him the subject of its mid-week profile, ‘Wednesday People’, a column usually given over to politicians and businessmen.

  Seven days before the feared England-Holland match, and the media’s scrutiny of the English football supporters actually increased. This would have seemed impossible except that more journalists had arrived on the island and more stories followed. When the World Cup began—the first match was between England and Ireland—there were only two thousand England supporters in Sardinia; by the end of the first week, there were more than two thousand journalists: so many that the British Consulate had set up a press office, with briefings twice a day, to keep everyone abreast of what the supporters were up to. There was a regular television news report every evening in every country that had sent a team to the competition. To keep order, there was a combined force of seven thousand law enforcement officers: the police, the carabinieri, the national guard, the army and a special crack amphibious team that I had seen on the back page of my Guardian the week before: they were called the ‘anti-yob mob’, a division of the Italian anti-terrorism police who had been photographed, having just jumped out of a helicopter
, in various positions of readiness; two of them, their legs apart, were aiming sub-machine guns at the photographer. All in all, for every one supporter there were at least three people interested in him—to write about his habits of drinking and dress and behaviour, to photograph these habits, to film them being enacted, and—most difficult of all—to contain their excesses.

  With only a few days before the England-Holland match, the Guardian was now devoting its daily stories—two of them, plus photographs—to a new, uncovered subject: the living conditions. I would have thought that journalistic potential in the supporters’ living conditions was limited, but, once again, I was proved wrong. There was a story about where the supporters spent the night when they arrived (with so much attention given to security, no one had thought about accommodation), and another about the campsites where they were then put: thirty miles from Cagliari—too far to get to after England’s first match, when, it turned out, there were no buses anyway. There was then a story about the fact that were no buses. Without buses, many supporters spent the night at the airport. There was a story about that: the airport story. Finally, the sports minister—an obvious Guardian reader—stepped in and asked the authorities to provide buses for the supporters at the end of England’s next match. And there was a story about that: the-now-there-are-buses story.