by Amis, Martin
On the way to the match, through the half-industrialised loops of urban Peking, a Tourist paused in his passionate accompaniment to 'My Way' on the coach Muzak system and said, in a tone of grieved bewilderment, 'Look at the state of that excavator. Where is the maintenance? Where is it?' But there were other things to catch the eye. The crowd, as it approached the Workers' Stadium, resembled an entire ecology on the move: squirming busloads, open lorries from the outlying factories carrying their human freight, the furtive touts at the intersections, and 50,000 bicycles soon to be stacked like forks at the stadium gates. (The match would have been a sell-out twenty or thirty times over, and was being televised live to an audience of 350 million.) We disembarked on the trampled concourse and writhed through the crush. It was only when I reached my seat that I realised, with another kind of disquiet, how little menace such massed humanity could generate.
But during the game the anthill buzzed. Despite the squawked chidings from Big Sister on the PA system, there were regular cries of 'Suit! Suit!' (shoot), 'shou-qiu' (handball), even a cautious chant (translated for me as 'More grease! More grease!' — more fuel, more work), as well as the ceaseless groundswell of coughed and spluttered comment: Ay! Tsk! Ayuh! Eehyahah!
The female voice-over sounded scandalised. 'The Department of Public Security asks the audience on Platform 20 to sit down . . . Strive to become a peaceful and civilised audience.' But the applause for the Watford goals, when they came, was immediate, spontaneous, containing a hint of stoic humility. From then on, moments of weird silence punctuated the game, and you could hear Taylor's hoarse ballockings from the bench — 'Hit the goal, Nigel! BE ACCURATE!' — right across the length of the field.
Weakened by the heat, and by the absence of their four key players (still on domestic duty in the Home Internationals), Watford struggled to contain the swift and skilful Chinese — particularly my pal Shen Xiang-fu, who ran them ragged on the right. A sun-helmeted Elton quit his throne in the stands and frolicked on the pitch as Watford plodded off, 3-1 winners. They could have lost 3-4, as Taylor was quick to admit. 'Do not molest or beat up the performers or referees,' cautioned the loudspeaker. As the tame multitude quietly siphoned itself into the night, the advice sounded unnecessary, even sarcastic. It would sound deeply pertinent after the return match, but that was still a week distant, by which time the mood of the crowd would inexplicably worsen.
The easiest way to get to know the players, I reckoned, was to get to know their nicknames - not for my personal use so much as to shine a light into the dark frat-house which all teams erect around themselves. A footballer's nickname takes any of three forms: a handy diminutive of the surname (as in Greavesy, Mooro, Besty, etc); a TV tie-in based on some fancied resemblance to a small-screen star; plus a third alias of a physical, usually offensive tendency. The players showed a cunning readiness to fill me in, and I was especially indebted to David Johnson, the reserve player whose almost ludicrous charm has long established him as the team mascot.
Goalkeeper Steve Sherwood is called Shirley or Concorde ('because of his nose'). His deputy Eric Steele is called Steeley or Hadley (TV tie-in). Captain and senior player Pat Rice goes under the names of Ricey, Stoneface, Anvil Head and Father Time. Wilf Rostron - Wilfy, The Dwarf. Steve Terry - The Big M, Frankenstein. Richard Jobson, or Jobbo, is remorselessly teased about his effeminate good looks: aka Curlers and Boy George. Paul Franklin — Gower (after David Gower). Ian Bolton - Webby ('he's got webbed feet'). Jan Lohman, who is Dutch, is called Herman (the German), Adolf, and Psycho ('because he's barmy. He is. He's mental'). Nigel Callaghan - Cally, Stump ('his hair') and Beaver ('his teeth'). Les Taylor — Little Legs or Rampant. Ian Richardson — Richo or Shaky (non-existent resemblance to Shakin' Stevens). Steve Sims, Simsy, is called Plug. 'No I'm not,' he said. 'They call me Male Model.' 'No we don't. We call him Plug.'
The nicknames of the four internationals I learned later. They are more respectful in timbre, but only marginally so. Kenny Jackett: Jackdaw or Chinaman (because of his sloped eyes — he was guyed about this almost as much as Rice was guyed about rice). Gerry Armstrong: Your Man ('Your what?' I asked. 'Yuhmahn.' 'Your what?' 'Yuhmahn.' 'Sorry. Your what?' 'Jesus Christ. Y,E,R,M,O,N'). Luther Blissett: Luth or Black Flash. John Barnes: Barnesy, Digger (TV tie-in: Dallas's Digger Barnes) and Caramac (a reference to the light-hued chocolate bar). As for David Johnson himself: 'They call me DJ. Or Abdul. Or Gupta - that's G,u,p,t,a. Or Elephant Boy. Anything to do with Africa.'
But were Watford having anything to do with China? The day after the match they tackled the Great Wall. The section open to tourists splays off in two excitingly steep ascents, and the players confronted the challenge as a macho hangover cure. 'Gor. I hope the Boss doesn't use this for pre-season training,' said a player, from beneath the antennae of his Sony Walkman. Elton puffed his way to the top in his Humpty Dumpty suit, his startling pallor unaffected by the heat. It was left to one of the Gang of Four to leave a distinctive calling-card on the only human artefact visible from outer space: he vomited down the parapet, as over a ship's side.
After lunch Watford checked out the Ming Tombs. We paced down a lavatorial stone staircase into the arched tunnels and vaults. A Tourist drew a learned comparison between the featureless rust-coloured casements and the creosote used on truck undercoats. Interest was in danger of flagging entirely until an interpreter weighed in with some salacious accounts of the premature burial of imperial concubines. 'When's the next train to Cockfosters?' cracked a Director, not inappositely. If there had been a train to Cockfosters passing through, the suggestion was that he would have been on it.
'Fpall?' said the elderly lift-operator, and kicked a leg in the air like a chorus-girl: 'PSAIOW!' The scene now briefly shifts to Shanghai, though Watford's points of comparison remain wistfully homebound. The harbourfront Bund 'is like Liverpool'. The near-slums which the Bund conceals 'are like Glasgow'. The dock itself 'is like Tyneside'. The yellow and shoreless Yangtze 'is like the Mersey'. The players settle on the deck of Special Class for the three-hour cruise up the Huang Pu. 'Row, row, row your boat,' says one. 'Slow boat to China,' says another. 'Don't rock the boat . .. Banana boat ... I am sailing . . . Sailing along . . . Riding along in my automobile . ..'
From Peking's Yan Jing I check into Shanghai's Jing Jiang, and for the first time I am on the same menu as the players. Bacon and eggs, chicken and chips, steak and chips. At lunch the four internationals fly in from their stopover in Hong Kong. England's two black strikers, Blissett and Barnes, glisten with youth, power, muscle-tone. They look like racehorses - in shocking contrast to the Gang of Four, toiling through the paste and smog of their daily penance.
That night we went to see the Chinese Acrobats, and witnessed their otherworldly feats of strength, balance and artistic contortion. Not for the first time since my arrival in China, I felt assailed by the evidence of Earthling variety: the players, the Gang, the Chinese, with their abstract humour, their ritual courtesy disguising unknown restlessness — and all this so fully expressed by the controlled tension of the acrobats ... Back at the hotel an American party had just arrived. An exhausted 2O-stoner awaited service from the flogged lifts. Shot to pieces gastrically, he looked as though his own weight was about to drive him into the ground like a tent-peg. 'Come on, Duane,' said his friend, 'it's only one floor up. Let's walk it.' But Duane had few options. 'I, uh, believe not,' he said firmly.
Of the three coaches, Players', Directors' and Tourists', the Players' is by far the most restfully taciturn. The Tourists' coach booms with rugby songs, business talk and hangover boasts. The real nerve-frayer, though, is the Directors' coach, a rumpus-room of almost psychotic good cheer. It was in this charabanc of Laughing Policemen and Jimmy Tarbuck soundalikes that I made the journey to the Shanghai ground, past lean-tos and go-downs, bamboo department stores and buses packed with waving arms and beaming, steel-flecked dentition, through streets latticed by plane-tree fronds, tram cables and wet washing.
&nb
sp; The stadium was an elegant ruin, a shallow bowl of bleached and flaking stonework. The ballboys sat slumped beneath their sleepy coolie hats. 'Shanghai audiences are good audiences and this is a Shanghai audience,' cackled the loudspeaker. This was a Shanghai audience all right, but it wasn't such a good one. When the home team went one up, there were fire-crackers and cherry bombs — practically a counter-revolution. When Watford equalised and then took the lead (both goals created out of nothing by the Shanghai goalkeeper), there was an experimental riot in one bank of the stadium - fomented, it turned out, by the Gang of Four, who were feeding Watford souvenirs through the steel netting. Like the crowd, however, the game soon fizzled out in the impossible humidity. At half-time Taylor marched into the dressing-room. He drew in his breath to denounce his team, then burst out laughing. Several players sat with icepacks on their heads and jets of steam billowing from their ears.
* China now toils through her sixth Five Year Plan, and is rolling up her sleeves for the seventh. There are smiles, handshakes, spurned gratuities; there are the new incentives of the Responsibility System, the crusades of Social Public Morality; there are colour TVs. You also sense a hidden life of impatience and frustration, a resented exclusion from the world of freedom and reward. (Recent attempts at Western marketing show the full gulf of naivety: a lipstick called 'Fang Fang', a type of battery called 'White Elephant', a range of men's underwear called 'Pansy'.) Football is part of this interchange, and China seeks inclusion here as feelingly as she seeks it elsewhere.
China only just missed out on qualification for the 1982 World Cup. They now have a four-year plan on the go, looking to Mexico in 1986. The national side performed well in its first match against Watford, and hopes were high for the second game in Peking. Yet China played a spoiling game, and were thrashed 5-1. Towards the end, the climbing anger of the crowd took a surprising form: Watford's black stars were booed whenever they touched the ball. One tried hard to resist this conclusion, since it attacked everything one wanted to believe about China. 'No, no,' said our suavest interpreter. 'They're just trying to put them off because the black players are so good.' But the aggression was selective and unmistakable, an incensed submission to the worst instincts.
Out on the concourse I searched anxiously for the Tourists' coach, which had taken the precaution of killing its lights as the hoards swirled sullenly round the ground. Cursed, barracked and gestured at, the humble motorcade of the China squad crept abjectly through the gates.
'I wanna go home,' sang the Gang. 'I wanna go home. This is the worst trip, I've ever been on . . .'
The tour now petered out in pleasant anti-climax, with celebrations, sightseeing and some predatory shopping. Elton John spent forty times the local per-caput income in a single spree. His purchases included replicas of the stone lions beneath Mao's portrait, which gaze across the square at the Great Hall of the People. That night, with eyes like two lumps of sweet-and-sour pork, Elton mastered his exhaustion and took to the piano to crown the farewell shindig. When Elton sang (not for a multitude but for his team) you felt the force, and proximity, of his talent; you didn't want it to end. The high point of his tour, he said, had come at the Children's Festival in Zhongshan Park, when a ten-year-old girl prodigy presented him with a painting of a flock of gambolling kittens. Elton was moved — 'well chuffed'. This would give him more pleasure than anything else he intended to bring back from China. Money isn't everything, he pointed out. And China, however reluctantly, would be forced to agree. On the flight home the 747 made its first stop in Hong Kong, arrowing in through the genie-clouds above the bay, past the golden cigarette-lighters of the skyscrapers and sparkling hotels - a Manhattan, a Mammon, a vast duty-free store, perched on the very tip of the East, and destined to be dismantled and flattened out into the Chinese fold. One couldn't escape the impression that most foreign visitors make the trip to China chiefly for the shopping. In hotel lobbies, in airport lounges, one was always hearing elderly and prosperous Americans talking lecherously about the latest Friendship Store they had plundered, or planned to plunder. It was said of one press photographer in our party, on the day before our return, that 'his room looked like a Friendship Store' . . . While the Directors sprawled in First and Business, the players dozed with their manager in Economy, their faces set in scowls of discomfort. But the team roused itself for the transit lounge (where they have cameras and gadgets, as well as silk and jade), and we all trudged out for one more crack at the loot.
Observer, 1983
Postscript: In terms of cultural responsibility the Watford footballers behaved even better than this account admits -especially when you compared them to certain elements in the press corps. I remember encountering Wilf Rostron, the young defender, in the hotel lobby in Shanghai. He was on his way from the ballet to the opera. Accompanied by the Sun's Voice of Sport, John Sadler, I was on my way from the bowling alley to the snooker room . . . The esprit of the players was a tribute to Graham Taylor. Late at night, ensconced in an armchair, with the pressmen gathered piously at his feet, Taylor would talk of the deeper mysteries of the sport, and would air his dream of a management job somewhere in his native North-East - Sunderland? Newcastle? As far as I remember he never mentioned the possibility of managing England. I write these words on the eve of England's World Cup qualifier against Holland at Wembley: Taylor's watershed, or his Waterloo. But it doesn't surprise me that he seems physically undiminished by the job. Bobby Robson, if you recall, was a shot-faced spectre after about six months. Taylor is made of stubborner stuff. As for the 'enigmatic' — i.e. bafflingly ineffective — John Barnes: there probably isn't any upper limit for bodily splendour in a footballer (look at Ruud Gullit), but Barnes struck me as someone close to being overwhelmed by his own attributes. He appeared to spend much of his free time examining various portions of his person (his forearms, his calves), not from any concern about injury but in simple admiration. Often his hand would rest proprietorially on the prow of his skimpy white shorts. When he arrived he made quite a speech about the need to respect Chinese culture. The next day he turned down his only chance to visit the Great Wall (the much more ebullient, Anglicised and squeaky-voiced Luther Blissett went off alone in a taxi). Taylor said: 'How can you pass up the Great Wall, talking like you were talking yesterday?' Barnes didn't answer, but fell to the contemplation of some neglected highpoint of his physique — his collarbone, his elbow.
JOHN UPDIKE
I met up with Updike at Mass. General - that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Center of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9:30 that morning. It was 10:30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. 'You know what I look like,' he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything else, he was the healthiest man there): tall, 'storklike', distinctly avian, with the questing curved nose and the hairstyle like a salt-and-pepper turban.
'How are you?' I said with some urgency.
'They didn't take it out. It's still here!' He raised his hand to the light. It seemed a gratifying intimacy, after ten seconds' acquaintance. John Updike, warts and all. Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual. Updike's is called psoriasis, 'skin disease marked by red scaly patches', as my COD unfeelingly puts it. He has written about the condition himself, rather more feelingly, in the New Yorker. Actually the growth seemed quite inoffensive, like a sizeable and resolute freckle.
'How frustrating. You must be...'
'Yes, I'm very sad,' he said, and looked - as he would continue to look for the next two hours - like a man barely able to contain some vast and mysterious hilarity. This generalised twinkliness has been much remarked. It is almost the demure expression a child has when gratified to the point of outright embarrassment — but with an extra positive charge, flowing from hyperactive senses. 'No
, apparently it's more complicated than I thought. They're going to do it later in the year. The incision will go from there to there. I'll have to wear a support for a while. I won't be able to play golf. I won't be able to type! But listen. How are your This, too, was said with unusual concern. Updike ducked and briefly grappled with the Boston Globe. He pointed to a piece that I had read, with quivering fingers, half an hour earlier. The previous evening I had flown in from Provincetown: fifteen minutes in a Wright-Brothers seven-seater. That same day, according to the Globe, one of these little aeroplanes had lost height and come skimming in over Boston Bay. Sunbath-ers had dived into the sea from their rafts. The article ended with a reassuring review of the airline's safety record: it was grounded, quite recently, after a series of accidents, all of them rich in fatalities.
'You flew! I warned you not to.' 'Yes, and I'm flying back. After I've done you.' And he said to me what I had been planning to say to him: 'You're very brave.'
The hospital cafeteria was bright, airy, oceanic; there was foliage, a sun-trapping terrace, a smoking section: it seemed positively fashionable. The atmosphere differed from its British equivalent in many ways - most crucially in that its patrons were, of necessity, on some kind of spree, pushing the boat out, spending big. We joined the queue with our tray. I had coffee, while Updike bemusedly dithered over the half-dozen kinds of tea on offer.
'The ordeal of choice,' I said, suavely enough - though one should stress that these occasions are not suave at all.
However genial, they are always anxious and exhausting, with the interviewer fielding about 80 per cent of the nerves. 'Have you read Saul Bellow's new novel?' I went on. (The novel was More Die of Heartbreak.) 'He says that in the East the ordeal is one of privation, in the West one of choice.'