by Alexei Sayle
My memory is mostly of me slogging round the running track, alone and in the dark. I refused to shower alongside all the big hairy men, so I went home on the bus smelling like a Victorian urchin. What I remember most is my enjoyment of the hot Ribena cordial you could buy from a little wooden shed after finishing training and the amazing taste of the flavoured crisps which were just then beginning to appear on the market. None of this told me or Molly that I wasn’t destined to be a great athlete.
Having said that the most exotic thing about Anfield was us, there was this one other entity which, while it wasn’t exactly exotic, certainly made the area different from a thousand other northern streetscapes of terraced houses. It was the stadium of Liverpool FC. Indeed, our neighbourhood was like some holy city such as Karbala or Lourdes because there were a number of holy shrines close to each other. Only half a mile away on the other side of our local park was Goodison, the blue and white home of Everton Football Club. Throughout my early childhood Liverpool Football Club had been in the Second Division, overshadowed by Everton, their richer and more successful neighbour. Yet despite playing in the lower division and their ground being a ramshackle mess, the Reds still regularly attracted crowds of forty-five thousand or more.
Liverpool’s stadium was little more than half a mile from our house. As soon as you turned into Oakfield Road you were aware of its bulk, the red roof of the Kemlyn Road Stand rising high above the chimney pots of the surrounding houses. On match days the extra double-decker buses required to take the crowds to and from their homes were parked in our road. The front room would go dark as these enormous things were lined up on the other side of the street, shuddering and jerking forward with diesel smoke coughing from their exhausts. The more enterprising families in our neighbourhood rented out their back yards so men could park their bicycles for a shilling a go, while some of the local children would approach the few drivers who parked their cars in Valley Road to ask, ‘Mind your car, mister?’ in return for a tip of a few pennies. We eschewed such kulak-like behaviour.
During the match the roars from the crowd, jubilant for a goal, anguished for a near miss, angry for a foul, would boom into our kitchen. Then once the game finished thousands of men in fawn raincoats, with slouch hats or flat caps, red and white scarves around their necks, would rush to get on the special buses, squeezing on to the narrow platforms, elbowing and kicking each other while miraculously continuing to smoke.
Somehow for me, supporting one particular football team never took hold. Having both grounds so close meant that there was no particular geographical imperative to choose one club over another — no religious imperative either. Though it never truly resembled sectarian Glasgow, in the 1950s and early 1960s Everton tended to be the Catholic team and Liverpool attracted the Protestants, but neither side tried to reach out to the atheist Communist Jew community I also came to associate going to football matches with a certain kind of disappointment, betrayal even. One Saturday I was walking through Stanley Park alongside Joe — there were a crowd of us, men and boys streaming towards the Kemlyn Road, all going to see Liverpool FC play Stoke City It was a big event that Joe was home and taking me to a game, so I was terribly excited. Stoke’s most famous player, indeed the most famous footballer in England at the time, was Stanley Matthews. In 1961 at the age of forty-six he had rejoined his home town club and carried on playing for them till he was fifty, but because he wasn’t always fit they kept quiet until the last minute whether he was going to take part in the game or not.
‘Will he play, Dad?’ I kept asking. ‘Will he play?’
‘I don’t know, son.
‘I bet he will play.’
‘I’m not sure, son. Maybe he’ll play.’
‘I’m sure he’ll play.’
When we got to the game and were sitting in the stands, it was only after I had asked Joe if every member of the Stoke team, then every member of the Liverpool team, then the referee, the two linesmen and the newspaper photographers behind each goal were Stanley Matthews, that I realised with a sinking feeling that he wasn’t going to show — I wasn’t going to see this famous man. An act of bad faith so early on gave me the idea that football clubs could, at times, be heartless and calculating and weren’t to be relied on, unless you wanted your heart broken.
None the less I continued to go to football matches, hoping to discover what others found in the game. Later on I used to go with some of the other kids from the neighbourhood to stand in the Boys’ Pen, a special section for under-twelves, at Everton. There was a woman there who came round before the game dressed as a seventeenth-century milkmaid and throwing toffees into the crowd, but I never managed to catch one. Another disappointment.
My main problem was that I had great difficulty sinking my personality into that of the crowd, of submerging myself into a mass of people who all felt exactly the same thing, the same joy, the same anguish, the same rage, the same uncritical belief in the rightness of their cause. I, by contrast, couldn’t remain partisan for more than a few minutes. If the opposition team were losing I would begin to feel sorry for them and start wanting Liverpool or Everton to concede a goal, or for one of our players to get injured or sent off. But even at the age of six or seven I had the sense to keep these Corinthian ideals very much to myself. When I was ten Everton won the league championship and the crowd all ran on to the pitch and I ran with them. But once there, on that springy turf where I wasn’t supposed to be, I felt foolish and didn’t know what to do next. All these people were jumping about and shouting and I just thought, ‘Why do you care about this? Why are you so worked up?’ I knew that I was acting, that my feelings and my actions were fake, and I wondered how many others were acting too, how many others’ joy wasn’t real — that it was just something they felt they should do to fit in with the mob.
What I did take to was the theatricality of it all. At Liverpool there was something called ‘three-quarter time’ where they threw back the red-painted gates fifteen minutes before the game ended, presumably so people could leave early But it also meant you could sneak in and watch the last bit of the match for free. Since I didn’t care about the result and wasn’t capable of appreciating the skill and artistry of the players, fifteen minutes was enough for me to take in the extraordinarily pure colours of the teams’ uniforms, the vibrant unnatural green of the pitch and the attention of the crowd fixated to a fanatical degree on those twenty-two tiny men in shorts, scuttling about in the distance.
In my heart, though, I knew that watching a sixth of the game and liking the bright colours wasn’t enough — I urgently required a more profound connection with football if I was going to be a proper Liverpool boy In the end, living so close to Anfield, the notion subtly grew in me that I was involved in some nebulous and unfocused way in the operations of Liverpool FC itself. It was as if we lived backstage at the club, that our street and our house were an extension of the stadium and Bill Shankly might come round at any minute to borrow our front room, so that he could talk tactics with his forward line while serving them drinks from a giant mahogany cabinet. Thus with my help in the 1961—2 season the Reds won the Second Division championship and gained promotion to the top flight, while in 1964, again with me working quietly behind the scenes, they became First Division champions.
In the late summer of 1960 the new season had yet to start and, though it was a Saturday, Valley Road was quiet. I was sitting on the low wall that divided our house from next door, playing with a new Dinky toy I’d got — a Chevrolet Impala. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a young vicar approaching. He had an eager manner and was sweating gently in his heavy black serge suit.
‘Hello, young man,’ he said.
‘Hello,’ I replied. Religious officials were used to deference back then.
‘Can I ask you,’ he enquired, ‘if you are in any sort of youth organisation?’
‘Yes, I am,’ I said, smiling at him, seemingly eager to please. ‘I am in a youth group. Yes, I am.’
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br /> ‘Is it the Scouts?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied. Then there was a pause while we stared at each other.
‘Are you in the Boys’ Brigade?’ he finally queried.
‘No.’ Then another pause.
‘The Sea Scouts?’
‘No.’
‘The Orange Lodge Marching Band?’
‘No.’
‘The Army Cadets?’
‘Err… hang on… no.’
Perhaps noticing my olive skin and my black hair he enquired, ‘The Jewish Lads’ Brigade?’
‘No.’
‘The Catholic Boys’ Brigade?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what is it, then?’ he shouted, peevish at being held up on his recruiting drive by an enigmatic eight-year-old.
‘I am,’ I said, standing and saluting with a clenched right fist held to the side of my temple, ‘a Comrade Cadet, Grade One, Young Pioneers, fourth battalion, based at Locomotive Factory Number One, town of Trutnov, People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia!’
I was, too. I wasn’t lying. Certainly I’d said it to annoy and confuse the vicar, but I hadn’t made it up. Exasperated, he went off in search of less smart-arse young boys.
A few weeks before my encounter with the vicar I had been inducted as an honorary Young Pioneer during our second trip to Czechoslovakia. I never went to another meeting, though I did from to time put on the uniform for a laugh. But if I had wanted to I could have attended any gathering of the Young Pioneers right across eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union and China too, just like Alcoholics Anonymous, an organisation that has branches in every town and city in the Western world. The role of the Young Pioneers in a Communist society was to take part in mass rallies, to be indoctrinated as a good party cadre, to spy on your parents and to undermine religion. In East Germany they used to schedule meetings to overlap with Catholic church services. The uniform, in a perhaps not-so-unconscious act of homage, was very close to that of the Hitler Youth, comprising a white short-sleeved shirt, black short trousers and a small scarf worn round the neck, the only difference between the Nazis and the Communists being that the Communist kerchief was red rather than black. In Hungary the Young Pioneers ran their own narrow-gauge railway, which travelled through the forest of the Buda hills in the western part of Budapest.
In fact there was a socialist youth group in the UK that I could have joined. They were called the Woodcraft Folk, and they formed the paramilitary wing of the Co-operative movement. But even at the age of eight I had an idea of how I wanted other kids to see me, and that didn’t include being in something called the Woodcraft Folk. In Manchester I met a kid who was one of them at a Communist Party ‘social’. A ‘social’ was what left-wingers called a party; everything had to be something else for them — they couldn’t just hold a party, it had to have a higher purpose and a different name. There was also something 1930s’ about the word ‘social’ — it had the whiff of socialist cycling clubs and mass rambles. Anyway, this kid talked about nothing but dolphins for half an hour in a weird voice. I found I much preferred telling people I was the only UK member of the Czechoslovak Young Pioneers to camping in the woods with the children of other lefties, cooking tinned stew over an open fire and singing folk songs.
Between our first and second trips to Czechoslovakia Joe had been extremely busy While me and Molly were off being shown the sights Joe was having discussions with Ladislav and Prukha, who were very keen to be invited to visit Britain. So my father had, in a remarkably short time, organised for the Czechs to come to the UK in the spring of 1960, a few months before our second visit.
In 1960 the cold war between the East and the West was two years away from its most incendiary point, the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in fourteen months construction would begin on the Berlin Wall and in a year US forces in Vietnam would be tripled, dragging them further into that colonial war. Every interaction between the Soviet Bloc and the capitalist sphere of influence seemed fraught with tension, and there were constant attempts at espionage, infiltration and subversion. A pair of Czechs coming to the UK must have had approval from the highest level in Prague, if not Moscow, and yet it’s hard to see what the Czech Security Service, the StB, got out of two of their nationals staying at the Seaforth Ferry Hotel, with a nice view of the River Mersey, as guests of the Merseyside Trades Council. There were no national secrets to be had in them taking trips to the Lake District or visiting the NUR’s social club in Dean Road, Liverpool. Not much advantage for Communism could be gained by them sitting through interminable speeches, dinners and expressions of fraternity between the workers of the East and the West. Somewhat suspiciously, Ladislav did win first prize in the raffle at Dean Road Social Club, but it’s difficult to understand what purpose a bottle of whisky served in this titanic clash of ideologies.
In return for all Joe’s work it was suggested that, if he could get a group of railwaymen and their families together, then the Czech government would pay for hotels and entertainment once they were in the country So Joe placed adverts in the union paper, the Railway Review, asking people if they wanted to take part that summer in something called a ‘delegation’ to the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia. Again, everybody seemed very unselfconscious about all this to-ing and fro-ing to the Soviet Bloc at almost the hottest point of the cold war.
The group for the first delegation comprised two married couples from Scotland and two from Manchester, all more or less my parents’ age, plus two young men from Lancashire, Alf and Reg, who, though both married with children, had left their families behind. And finally there was a slightly older couple — a man called Prendergast and the woman he lived with, named Molly like my mother. I took to Alf right away In the world in which I had lived, up until that point, there had only been kids my own age, grown-ups my parents’ age and Uncle Willy I had known nobody in their early twenties, someone who was an adult yet close enough to childhood to carry a little of that innocence and playfulness with them. Alf was tall, dressed in smart suits of a slimmer, more American cut than the baggy pre-war style of my parents’ generation, and wore his black hair styled in a luxuriant quiff. He seemed funnier and more energetic than anybody I had met before, and I took to following him around and staring at him in mute admiration.
We all came together in London like a gang in a western movie and spent the night there, then the next morning we crossed the Channel and were in Paris by the afternoon. Because all the males in our party were railwaymen the jumping on and off the trains soon reached epidemic proportions — there were occasions on our journey when the train would leave the platform and half the group would still be in the street outside the station, buying melons.
By the time we reached Paris it had become clear that Prendergast was the comedy drunk in our western. He first went missing near the Game du Nord, and by the time he was found we had missed our lunch. With a fractious and hungry group on his hands Joe immediately did what he always did in an emergency, which was to go looking for Communists. It only took a few minutes of searching before we were sitting down to eat a late lunch in the railway workers’ canteen of the very station where we had arrived from the coast. All of us were astonished at the quality of the cooking and the simple stylishness of the surroundings. In British factories and workplaces the canteens were often vile places serving disgusting food, but here there were long wooden tables set with paper tablecloths. On the tables were Duralex glasses, sturdy and elegant, carafes of water and a rough but drinkable yin de table. The food, simple cuisine de terroir — fresh bread, coq au yin, fragrant salad — was of a quality you couldn’t even approach in a top hotel in Liverpool.
From Paris to Prague we were travelling by night train, using a type of sleeping car called a couchette. I have no memory of the many hotel rooms I must have stayed in during those early years, but the couchettes are clear and distinct. If you were rich you slept in a wagon-lit, snug in your own compartment with a jug of water and two glasses on a tray an
d an attached bathroom; and if you were poor you slept upright in your seat jammed against the person next to you. If you were in the middle, like us, you slept in a couchette. ‘Couchette’ was a word like ‘Secatrol’ that seemed to crop up in conversation between me, my mother and father with great frequency and was used by nobody else in Anfield. I would say to some other kid, ‘It’s like a couchette in here!’ and be met with complete incomprehension.
During the daytime the couchette compartment had a normal configuration of six seats facing each other in two rows of three, but some time in the late evening it underwent a transformation into something that resembled a Libyan prison cell. The attendant, who travelled in a cosy little compartment of his own at the end of the carriage, came around with a sheet, a pillow and a rough, scratchy blanket, each with the SNCF or Deutsche Bundesbahn logo on them, one per passenger. Then, wielding a special key, he converted the compartment into its night-time configuration, with three bunks on each side of the compartment. The seat you sat on became the lowest bunk, the back of the seat flipped up and became the middle bunk, and a padded panel above your head turned into the top bunk. You had to stand in the corridor while the attendant transformed the compartment and made up the beds, which always felt a bit like when you stood about all dozy while your mum changed the sheets in your bed because you had had an accident. A ladder also appeared from somewhere. I never knew where it was during the day — it just magically materialised at night so you could use it to climb into the top two bunks.