Teenage Revolution

by Alan Davies

  When the weather was bad, skateboarding was not possible, Kryptonics or not. Weekends, especially when Arsenal were playing away, were dull. I’d go down the road to watch football matches played on pitches by Loughton station. When my dad asked where I’d been, he decided to try and find a football team for me.

  By the beginning of 1980 I was halfway through a season with Loughton Boys under-14s. They trained in a school gym on Wednesday evenings. I’d go to the training sessions but found it difficult to fit in. None of them went to my school and they’d been playing together since they were ten. I knew one kid, who lived in my road, and another who went to a nearby school who I used to see on the bus. He was a big, quite hard kid, called Russell, who I bonded with over cigarettes on the 20a. The rest of them weren’t too friendly, taking their lead from the manager, who was the father of the left back (an odd-looking boy, not ugly but with an almost perfect cube for a head).

  The same eleven played every week and only one substitute was allowed. Each week I asked who was going to be sub but was ignored. I went to watch them one Sunday. They lost 3–0 and didn’t seem bothered. There were thirteen or fourteen boys going to training and I was the only one never given a game or used as sub. Unused as a sub would have been a start. One week, I heard a few of them talking about me behind my back before a game of five-a-side. Nothing like my usual meek self, I was annoyed and aggressive, drawing complaints such as ‘he kicked me’, which was the highlight of my season. The kid from up my road was quick and elusive and we won. After that I didn’t get picked on again but I didn’t get picked either. I may have been rubbish.

  Searching for Loughton Boys on the net reveals that they are now Loughton FC and have a website with photos of their clubhouse. The 1979–80 under-14s are referred to as ‘The Magic Squad’ and feature on a page about their twenty-five-year anniversary reunion. There is a complete record of their many championships and cup finals from 1977 to 1983 (including one from 1980 that I had no idea about). The manager says they all became fine young men.

  I’d been to primary school with one of the squad a few years before, but he knew some of the team and was friendlier with them. They called him Slim, which he wasn’t. His surname was Glasscock, which led my friend Jeremy to comment that you can ‘always see him coming’. That was not an issue at age nine. One time, while I was playing round at the Glasscocks’, Mrs Glasscock said she was popping out and warned us not to play with her replica-gun cigarette lighter. So we did. We lit bits of paper before blowing them out and dropping them in to the fireplace. Unfortunately, I couldn’t blow my bit out and it burned my thumb. This hurt. When she came back I couldn’t let on why I was crying and said I’d cut it on the tap. But there was no cut on my finger and no blood and the tap wasn’t even sharp. Slim said: ‘Fancy crying over something like that’. Well, Slim, just so you know: I WAS COVERING FOR YOU.

  Mr Glasscock was a bookmaker, which I took to mean he made books. When he wasn’t making books he gave us all pennies to bet on the racing on telly. I knew who Lester Piggott and Willie Carson were so would bet on them. This impressed him but I only knew because the telly was never off in our house and Grandstand stayed on all day except when we turned over to watch wrestling on ITV. It was enjoyable at the Glasscocks’ place, when you weren’t ON FIRE.

  When the summer of 1980 came round I’d given up on Loughton Boys but wanted to play football so Dad let me have a week on a Bobby Moore Soccer School run at Forest School in Woodford. There were 120 boys divided into groups by age ranging from fifteen down to ten. I was in the under-15s group, where there were one or two really good players. They had a keepy-uppy competiton and the boy that won reached 500 before all the coaches threw footballs at him.

  The head coach was Harry Redknapp. He’d been a team mate of Bobby Moore’s at West Ham and again in the late ’70s at Seattle Sounders. Bobby was the big name who could attract boys to a school and then he got his mates in to run them.

  Harry was a fantastic head coach. All the boys loved him. He smiled at everyone all the time and was continually encouraging any boy who came into view: ‘Hello, son’, ‘All right?’, ‘Nice pass’, ‘Good effort’, ‘Well done’, ‘Great, brilliant’, ‘That’s the way, eye on the ball’, ‘Good, very good!’

  All day long.

  Being praised by Harry felt fantastic. He made you want to play well to impress him and then he might say: ‘That’s the way, son, eye on the ball, watch him, he’s got it, that one.’ This was inflating, exciting, making you desperate for another touch in case he might praise you again.

  The coaches, even Harry, weren’t unstinting in their praise of boys, like the kid who could do 500 keepy-ups, who could actually play. If they were too cocky and in danger of wasting their talent they received mainly constructive criticism or had the mickey taken.

  Bobby Moore had won the World Cup in 1966 but at three months old, I missed that. He later played for Fulham in the 1975 FA Cup Final, the only time I could remember seeing him play on telly. He was revered and didn’t look like other players. He looked like he was in a washing powder commercial. One day at the soccer school we were told Bobby was coming down to see us.

  He wandered round exuding charisma, one of the most famous footballers in the world back in his native Essex, with 120 boys eager to follow in his footsteps. He came to our group and took a brief volleying session. He would lob the ball to you and you had to volley it back in to his chest. The first time, I mishit it into the ground. He lobbed it again, I mishit it again. ‘Come on,’ he said, unsmiling. I felt tense and was relieved to hit the third one at him. He caught it and moved on with a small sound of acknowledgement. Royalty have a lot of people to see, don’t expect much you-time.

  Two years later I snogged Bobby Moore’s daughter, Roberta, in the toilet at a party and became hopelessly smitten with her. I had been snogging her mate but Roberta appeared and found us a loo to hide in. Her mate was outside the door: ‘Roberta and Alan, I know you’re in there.’

  Roberta was the best-looking girl at the party. She was probably always the best-looking girl at the party. She was blonde and she was beautiful. This didn’t usually happen to me. She gave me her number. When I rang, Bobby Moore answered the phone. I didn’t mention the volleying incident.

  I took the tube from Loughton to Knightsbridge (takes ages) to see Roberta at her Saturday job at the Scotch House. That day her photo was on the front of the Daily Mirror, looking like a model, with some ‘look at Bobby’s girl now’ caption underneath. When I turned up, she was on a break but wouldn’t come out of the staff room. Instead of the penny dropping, that night I went to a party she was going to be at, for further rejection by her Essex girl mates, who delivered the brush off: ‘You’re only interested in her because she’s Bobby Moore’s daughter.’

  No, it was because she was well fit, actually, girls.

  At the end of the soccer school there was a penalty prize competition. They wanted to narrow it down to two from each age group. In order to qualify for the final our group kept taking penalties until everyone had missed. It seemed obvious that the best kids would breeze through but maybe they felt that way too and lost concentration. They missed. Everyone missed. But mine kept going in! All the other kids, including the ones who had trained with West Ham and Colchester United, were going out. In the end it was just me and another kid. I hit my pen straight at the keeper but he let it through his legs. The other kid hit the post and looked gutted. He held his head in his hands. I went over and shook hands with a serious expression on my face. I was in the final!

  We had to take ten penalties with all the other age groups providing goalkeepers. It was really loud, with scores of kids screaming ‘MISS, MISS, MISS!’ at you. There was one boy there called Ewing so, understandably, someone was always doing the theme from Dallas, which was distracting. Despite all these attempts to put me off, I found myself smiling. One of the coaches said I was very cool but this was an act, I wanted to look indifferent wh
en I missed. But I didn’t miss! They all went in. All TEN. I won! The only thing I’ve ever won at football. I was given a Bobby Moore Soccer School plastic ball signed by all the coaches. It was presented to me by Harry. What a fantastic feeling. The highlight of my year. My life up to then. It’s still in my top ten moments now. Joy, bliss, pride.

  I nearly didn’t get the ball home. Returning to the changing rooms I could hear two of the best players muttering that they should have been in the penalty final. When I appeared they stopped talking about it and said well done but keepy-up kid grabbed my prize and started, guess what, keeping it up. It bounced away from him near to some broken glass from a light fitting someone had just smashed for fun and I thought it would burst. The look on my face must have been troubling because they relented. I’ve still got the ball, there’s no air in it and all the signatures have faded away.

  For the 1980–81 season my dad found me a place with Garnon Rangers under-15s in Epping. The same problem arose with kids being frosty because they all went to a different school and I had no de-frosting skills, but I knew one from the soccer school and his dad was the manager so, apart from having to address the fact that a couple of them were refusing to pass to me, it was fine.

  The manager’s selection policy was to give everyone a game, rotating the team and using his subs. He was a nice man but the boys wouldn’t listen to him, as his kindness translated into weakness to them. He kept yelling at me in one game, to get upfield and then back and then up, it was exhausting. I turned and swore at him. The ref said, ‘Watch your language, number 8.’ After the game I went and said sorry. He said:

  ‘Thank you, Alan. It takes a big man to apologize. Brian! Don’t smoke in the changing room.’

  It was fun playing for Garnon even though we only won two games all season. We lost in the cup against Basildon. They laughed when we ran out on to the pitch, our pitch. They were taking it in turns to go up front and try to score. None of them could match our centre half, Mus, who scored three own goals. I had a one on one with their keeper which I tried to curl round him but I hit him with it instead. I’m still disappointed about that. It finished 13–1.

  I can remember all five of the goals I did score, including one into the top corner v Romford Royals, after which the kid who wouldn’t pass to me, and had punched me in the shoulder for bringing it up during a game, was actually friendly.

  The only problem I had after that was when we played a team with black players in it. Most teams in our league were all white. I remember the game for a couple of reasons: we won 4–3 (and I scored) but also because when we went round the field shaking hands with our opponents, as we always did at the end of a game, I found myself alone in their half of the pitch, the only player in our team who bothered to go and shake hands with their black goalie. I was the last one back in to what I expected to be a jubilant changing-room but it was a bit quiet and then someone said: ‘Nigger-lover.’ I didn’t reply. No one did. The ones who weren’t racist hadn’t heard or didn’t want the aggravation. I was new and didn’t know the drill, though I was familiar with the sentiment.

  John Lennon

  John Lennon’s picture wasn’t on my wall at the start of 1980. Although everyone knew the most famous Beatles songs, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and so on, because they were played on the radio throughout the ’70s. The Beatles weren’t discussed by me and my peers. They had, after all, split up when I was four.

  At four the Beatles record I liked most was ‘Yellow Submarine’. There remains nothing about ‘Yellow Submarine’ I dislike. It’s still the only Beatles single in my collection, released in 1966, the year I was born (the Guinness Book of Records says it charted on 11 August, went to number one and was a double A side with ‘Eleanor Rigby’), I heard it in my cot, in my high chair and in my mother’s arms. At least I imagine I did.

  I still have the original 45 appropriated (from the family’s long since unplayed record collection) because it was My Favourite Song from the Year I was Born. As an adolescent I preferred the other side, the B in the double A, ‘Eleanor Rigby’. ‘All the lonely people, where do they all belong?’ Quite. Nowadays, I like ‘Yellow Submarine’ again. Early senility.

  Those pictures that were on my bedroom wall were of footballers; the wallpaper put up years earlier was covered in them, footballers and astronauts. Over those were my own pictures, several Arsenal players of course, surgically removed from Shoot! or the new upstart Match magazine, and pop stars and their lyrics taken from Smash Hits.

  Each week Shoot! featured four or five full-page colour photographs of players that were suitable for sticking on your bedroom wall. These were the only colour pictures of footballers available anywhere. Most weeks your club would not feature so it was exciting when one of their players appeared. When they did he was straight on the wall, naturally.

  Smash Hits was the first magazine to print the lyrics from chart singles. Everything from Abba to the Sex Pistols. Now, with the words stuck up on your wall, you could sing along with incomprehensible vocals, headphones on, sitting on the windowsill, legs dangling out, smoking a fag.

  Through these bedroom wall montages, we teenagers could project an independent identity. No more Mr Men stickers, this is now who I am, forged in collaboration with Top of the Pops, Shoot! and Smash Hits. The reincarnations were swift at this point and someone on the wall one day could be gone that night but it was up there, displayed with a fervent belief that it wasn’t how anyone else was. Not in that house, not in that suburban town, not on earth!

  Absent from my wall, from my life, were any thinkers, writers or artists. My wall portrayed no love of science or astronomy, botany or paleontology, ornithology, or technology of any kind. I was a philatelist for a while but that died down. Seen one first-day cover, seen them all. There was no Oscar Wilde on the shelves, or Dickens or D. H. Lawrence. No map of the solar system or cutaway of some extraordinary design by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There was no classical music, and no Warhol or Hockney prints. In common with everyone I knew there was an appetite only for sport and popular culture.

  We did have a magazine called Look & Learn delivered every Saturday, full of why the Egyptians did this, how the Druids built that and when the Vikings pillaged the other, but it remained unread. If a copy of ITV’s Look-In should turn up, it would be devoured and any picture of Stacey Dorning (who was now playing the grown-up daughter in a sitcom about a cartoonist I watched primarily for scenes involving the grown-up daughter) would be cut out and added to the montage.

  The big ideas in life were absent and in the absence of big ideas, of thoughtfulness and understanding, there is a void in an adolescent and that void may become filled with small ideas, thoughtlessness and wilful misunderstanding. Only a boy in such a state of vacancy could be influenced, as so many were, by a periodical called the National Front News.

  The voice of the NF was sold, among other places, at Brick Lane, where skinhead boys went to get their Dr Marten boots from Blackman’s, right in the heart of an area occupied by immigrants for 400 years, from Huguenots to Eastern Europeans, Jews to Chinese and, in the late twentieth century, by Asian families promised a post-colonial fresh start in a Britain needing them.

  The first copy of the National Front News I saw was at school, proudly exhibited by a classmate I used to go skate-boarding with. Its front page headline said:

  1.5 MILLION UNEMPLOYED

  1.5 MILLION IMMIGRANTS

  ‘It’s true though, isn’t it?’ he said.

  It was a clear idea, clearly expressed. For all we knew those figures were accurate. What connection there was between the two statistics, other than that provocatively drawn by the National Front, is debatable. That wasn’t a debate we wanted to have though. We had the small idea we needed. Within a few years unemployment was running at four million. I don’t know what figures the NF used then, to make their point that, for Britain to attain full employment, people without white sk
in should ‘Go home’. It seemed unlikely that 2.5 million new immigrants had arrived in the meantime.

  ‘Go home’ was what we used to say to the owner of what was commonly referred to as ‘The Paki Shop’ just up the road from school (ironically he lived above the shop, so he was, in a sense, at home). Previously known as ‘The Shop’, as in: ‘Are you going up The Shop?’, this was a popular destination for kids from school at lunchtime and daily expeditions would set out to procure sweets by fair means or foul.

  Now, preoccupied with our new ideas, we renamed it ‘The Paki Shop’ and expeditions would set out, not just for sweets, but to make the Asian proprietor’s life a misery.

  The proprietor could be antagonized. If you banged on his window while he tried to serve people, making faces and shouting, he would eventually begin to move out from behind his counter, giving you time to flee, before he ran out, making threats regarding the school and the police to gales of laughter and shouts of:

  ‘Why don’t you go home?’

  At primary school we used to refer to black kids as Bournvilles or chocolate drops, not to their faces of course, as there weren’t any to say it to, just amongst ourselves as we explored budding attitudes. At Bancroft’s our portly nose-picking history teacher never failed to pass comment on Jewish kids who missed school on Jewish holidays. In a lesson about Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries he asked any Catholics in the room to raise their hands. There were only two and we were already convinced that one of them was gay, or ‘bent’ as we would have it. Poor bloke, now he was bent and a Catholic (what that entailed I was unsure but the teacher would only pick you out to cast some aspersion so it couldn’t be good). The time that teacher really lost his rag was when one kid turned up with dyed green hair and punk gear on. Even though it was ‘own clothes day’ and he was ‘allowed’, he sent him home. The punk was not displeased.