by Alan Davies
As our peer group’s experiment with racism developed so it ran into the inconsistencies all bigots have to face. The real reason that all non-whites have to be shown the way to go home is that, if any remain, there is the clear and present danger of white people accidentally befriending them, thereby undermining the whole philosophy.
There were only a few Asian kids at school and they had previously gone unremarked upon. We’d been sharing classrooms with them for four years but now, it seemed, they had to go home. The odd devil’s advocate would pipe up:
‘Do you want Hussein to go home then?’
‘No, he’s all right, it’s the rest of them I can’t stand.’
‘The ones you haven’t met?’
This inconsistency was a problem. Attitudes would have to harden. These Asian classmates would have to be told to go home too but none of them could be intimidated; they’d known us for ages. Things did eventually come to a head for me though. I was making friends with an Asian boy. It just happened. I don’t know when it started.
His name was Mohammed, or Mo, and I liked him only partly because his dad had a newsagent’s and he used to nick fags from there and share them (the children’s fag machine at Loughton tube station didn’t last for ever). We were becoming friends, sitting together in class, that sort of thing.
I’d never really been an enthusiastic participant in the baiting of ‘The Paki Shop’ and I’d never bought a National Front News. I’d also started to notice that one or two of my peers were being unkind to Mo, who was slight, perennially smiling and vulnerable-looking.
Eventually there came a lunchtime when I had to make a choice between my friends and Mo. It was all unspoken, done with looks and body language. I went with Mo and had a fag. Usually we would go up to the Shell petrol station (known as ‘The Garage’ as in: ‘Are you going up The Garage?’), where we’d smoke round the back of the car wash. The petrol station isn’t there now; I presume it was eventually blown up by a school smoking expedition.
My peer group was becoming hard to stick with. There was a grim incident involving a boy a couple of years below us whose mum had been the art teacher at my primary school. She was nice, even to those of us with no art skills. Her son had apparently been seen kissing a boy at a party. Therefore he had to be found at lunchtime and harangued, abused and made to cry if possible. So off we went, eager young homophobes, in search of our first actual gay person.
We found the boy in the wide corridor that led to steps down to our locker room. Abuse started raining down on him but it wasn’t the hilarious witch hunt that had been hoped for. He had some friends higher up the school including the older brother of one of my classmates. I held back, now in two minds. As the prey and his friends fled, one of them turned suddenly and spat at the cruellest of the tormentors. This was impressive. They were outnumbered and a couple of the chasers were quite hard by our standards but suddenly it was over. This boy had spat like a venomous snake, flinging his head back over his shoulder and releasing a shooting arc of resistance at the enemy.
The defenders were more noble and motivated than the spiteful attackers whose resolve to continue evaporated. It was a chastening moment. The proposed victim had been a nice kid at primary school. I didn’t know if he was gay or not and now I didn’t care.
In December 1980 I put the cover of the NME that commemorated John Lennon on my bedroom wall. Subsequently his music swamped everyone. Prior to his death he’d been recording for the first time in five years and people flocked to hear what he’d been creating, in the knowledge that this was it, there would be nothing more from Lennon.
The tone of his new music was peaceful, as if made by a man who’d found contentment and wanted to share it. It was all so at odds with a Britain increasingly divided economically, with racial problems, unemployment problems and an unpopular government. Perhaps that’s why it sold by the truckfull.
More than twenty years later, I was asked to present a documentary about Lennon, for BBC2’s Great Britons series. The British public had voted him as one of their top ten Britons of all time.
Listening to Beatles albums one after another makes you realize how influential they have been. At first they sound like every other band, until you remember they were first. Every other band sounds like them. Making the film was a moving experience, learning about Lennon losing his mum, his upbringing in a suburban house very similar to the one I was born in, his struggle to adapt to his changing circumstances, the vulnerability he finally seemed to have conquered in his thirties, having changed himself from the drinker, the ‘hitter’ he said he’d been in his first marriage. It seemed sadder still that he’d been inexplicably taken. A cruel slaughter of a husband and father.
We visited the Strawberry Fields children’s home in Liverpool, which stands on the site of the Victorian mansion that served the same purpose in the past. As a boy John used to play in the fields with the kids there. I was shown a photo of the dark, gothic edifice. When I later stood by the shrine to John in New York’s Central Park and looked up at the Dakota building where he’d lived with Yoko Ono, the similarity between the two buildings was startling. He could have lived anywhere in the world and he chose this brooding, similarly gothic, apartment building overlooking the fields of Central Park. His childhood loomed large, the boy who played with orphans, who felt unrelated to the world. His pain is there in his songs, in ‘Help’, and in ‘Julia’, about his mum, and it’s there in his face.
He’s the only pop star on my wall these days.
There are still footballers.
Graham Rix
Escaping to Highbury every other Saturday was the most pleasure I could find at this time. I went by myself and the event was planned for and awaited impatiently all week. Leaving the house I would assume the persona of my cocksure alter ego: .
Upstairs at the back of the 20 to Walthamstow Central I’d look for space on the back of a seat to scrawl:
The date seemed important. I liked to know, were I to board the bus again, when I woz there.
‘Was here’ could have suggested the work of a middle-class public schoolboy. Who wants notoriety as a posh scribbler? ‘Woz ere’ became the mockney appendage to my moniker. I had decided to be AL when I shoplifted some marker pens. What to mark with pen? The smooth shiny interior surfaces of the buses I was travelling on every week were ideal. What to write? Lots of fellow vandals wrote their nickname and their club’s initials, x or y of THFC or WHU, so I copied.
Standing in the wide corridor above the stairs that led down to our locker room one of my classmates said, ‘Why do you write everywhere? No one calls you Al.’
Mind your own business, I’m a loner, a maverick, you don’t know me.
I didn’t reply but approaching from behind us at that moment was my older cousin Richard.
‘All right, Al?’ he said, without breaking stride.
I never had any more trouble with being known as Al.
Richard had a good sense of humour. The way he said ‘All right, Al?’ was an example of his comic timing. Comic because he’d never called me Al before. No one had. That’s what you want from your family. Back-up. I was grateful and impressed.
Over at Highbury, I saw dozens of Graham Rix’s hundreds of games for Arsenal. Two things stick out.
On one occasion a hamburger bun bounced on to the pitch near Rixy. He picked it up and made as if to eat it before tossing it out of play with a grin. Everyone laughed and I had him down as a funny person.
Secondly, from behind the goal, I watched as Rixy, standing by the goalpost, retrieved the ball from the crowd before dropping it to his left foot in order to half-volley it to the corner flag. The ball rolled all along the ground, watched by thousands, and came to rest in the quadrant marked out for corner takers. This came in a brief break in play prior to an Arsenal corner. He’d caught the ball thrown by a fan, turned round and done something nigh on impossible, first time. Everyone who noticed cheered and he smiled at us.
There were also many spectacular Rix goals, including one direct from a corner v Manchester United, plenty of goals made for others, often with Spurs on the wrong end, his match-winning cross in the 1979 Cup Final and his England caps at the 1982 World Cup. He had much going for him as a footballer but his relationship with the crowd showcased his good humour. He was so popular, even his bubble perm worked for him.
Arsenal were in the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1979–80 and made progress before starting their defence of the FA Cup in January. With FA Cup replays (including four semi-final games against Liverpool) and European trips, the players had a lot on and so did the fans.
In April came the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final against Juventus, who included several of the players who would win the 1982 World Cup for Italy. Two days before the first leg of the Juventus tie, Arsenal had to play away to Spurs on Easter Monday. Spurs had refused a postponement.
I made the familiar trip to White Hart Lane for the game, finding the away end for the first time. Arsenal rested several players and included an eighteen-year-old, Paul Davis. They won 2–1. I joined in chants of ‘Arsenal Reserves’.
Away games turned out to be more exciting than home games. Later that year I joined the Arsenal Travel Club and went by train to Liverpool. Sitting alone in a compartment, a fourteen-year-old with Shoot! and Match magazines in hand, waiting for fans to pile in was intimidating at first but they all asked before they read my magazines. Cheese rolls, loose in a bin liner, were brought round and thrown one at a time at the starving travellers.
We passed through places I’d only heard of. At Crewe, train spotters were mocked cruelly but hilariously. Then there was an exchange of abuse with a trainload of Wolves fans heading to some other ground. On the outskirts of Liverpool, the track rises up over the type of red brick back-to-back terraced houses the like of which I’d only previously seen on the opening credits of Coronation Street.
On leaving the train we were herded out for the escorted three-mile walk up to the famous Anfield, home of Liverpool FC, league champions four times in the previous five years.
On the way there, one of our number was slammed into a bus shelter by two policemen. It turned out we were ‘coch-nees’ and weren’t too welcome. The accents everywhere were impenetrable and had I not seen The Liver Birds I’d never have managed to understand the programme seller.
Approaching an away ground involved cunning and subterfuge. Concealing your scarf so you can’t be spotted as enemy personnel, feigning confidence in which way you are going as you walk, avoiding eye contact with anyone in case they ask you the time in order to identify your accent and then belt you. All that and the danger of being chased around unfamiliar streets afterwards gives rise to heightened emotions impossible to generate elsewhere.
It was emphatically worthwhile. Anfield was big, loud and packed, the mass of the crowd constantly shifting, swaying or surging forwards. Souness scored for Liverpool, causing a din, but Alan Sunderland unexpectedly equalized and it finished 1–1.
Returning to the station was slow and cold but the euphoria of our goal shortened the time. Three months later I went back to Liverpool for a cup tie with Everton and their ground was even more impressive, with a top tier suspended high between two steel and glass side walls. Another deafening arena. This time Arsenal’s 2–0 defeat made getting home less threatening.
Leaving Spurs’ ground after Arsenal ‘reserves’ had triumphed meant affecting neutrality, or attempting a defeated expression – even though the adrenaline was still tingling through me – all the way down Tottenham High Road, with the ecstasy of the win straining to get out, betraying itself in the occasional skip when crossing side roads.
There was always trouble at Spurs games. Standing in the corner of the North Bank at Highbury, I was surrounded by Spurs fans at one game, managing to duck away before the fighting started. Trying to ‘take’ the home end was a matter of pride but ultimately pain. Any away intruders were massively outnumbered and relied on the police getting to them before the main body of home fans could.
The police didn’t mess around. During fighting with West Ham fans, which took place in the panic caused by a smoke bomb going off, the police cleared the centre of the North Bank, banging their truncheons on the steel barriers, growling, ‘Come on, you wankers.’ Shoving a mass of fans backwards, one constable told a black fan to go ‘back home’. The fan was incensed but other fans restrained his retaliation.
An Arsenal fan was stabbed to death after that West Ham game and at the next match a wreath was laid on the pitch. The appetite for fighting diminished.
Hundreds spilled on to the pitch that day, the absence of fencing allowing them to reach safety. Arsenal never erected fencing, forfeiting the opportunity to stage cup semi-finals. The FA’s policy was soon to change in response to hooliganism when they decided to hold semi-finals exclusively at neutral grounds with full perimeter fencing. That decision contributed to the deaths of ninety-six Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough in 1989.
After one Spurs game police horses charged up St Thomas’s Road near the ground, one of them barging me in the back. A skip full of rubble became a weapons store and a horse was hit by a brick. As they galloped on a lone constable was left surrounded. Fans encircled him as he kicked out. A brick hit him in the leg. In a rush there were police reinforcements. The lad in front of me and the one behind were targeted as they fled. The sound of a truncheon coming down on a skull was reminiscent of the popping made by kids at school pulling their fingers out of their mouths. Pop, pop, they were both whacked. I vaulted a fence and ran through some flats to the next street where there was no trouble at all, just people walking to Finsbury Park tube.
Nearly twenty years later, I hired a skip when I was having some work done on my house near Highbury and had to apply for a permit from Islington council. One of the conditions of skip hire is an undertaking to keep the skip covered when Arsenal are playing at home.
Arsenal and Juventus drew 1–1 at Highbury, leaving a daunting return leg to play in Turin. Listening to the scratchy commentary on Radio Two in the kitchen I could hardly make out what had happened at the end. Arsenal had scored? Rix crossed for Paul Vaessen to head in. Arsenal had scored! One nil! I was stunned and ecstatic, my dad and brother silent. This Arsenal thing was getting out of hand.
The club had reached two finals. I had enough programme vouchers for a ticket for the FA Cup Final v West Ham and queued round Highbury for two hours to get it.
Arriving at Wembley before they’d opened the ground, I bought a flag and joined the thousands waiting. Briefly, there was a panicked stampede as hundreds fled what they thought was fighting. My flag’s wooden stick snapped in the crush. Not a good omen.
Trevor Brooking scored for West Ham early on. The goal was at our end but Wembley was so big that it was oddly silent momentarily before the roar from their end rushed in to us.
Arsenal couldn’t respond and I had the dual displeasure of defeat and seeing Liam Brady trudging away. He’d agreed to join Juventus in the summer.
Sitting by myself at the tube station afterwards, a group of West Ham fans came and stood over me. A broken flag, a defeat, my last sight of Brady and now, probably, my head kicked in. Perfect. I looked up at them, my eyes shining.
‘’Ere,’ one of them shouted down the platform, without any mockney affectation, ‘this one’s crying!’ They laughed and left. An older Hammer came over. ‘Don’t worry, son,’ he said, ‘you’ll win on Wednesday.’
Wednesday was the Cup Winners’ Cup Final against Valencia. After two hours of goallessness came a penalty shoot-out, in which Brady missed and it fell to the likeable Rixy to save the day.
After the goalkeeper saved his kick, giving Valencia victory, Rixy broke down in tears. And so did I; back upstairs to that old pillow from 1978.
John McEnroe
Thirteen is a difficult bridging age, no longer a boy, not quite a man, often a prat.
Between boyhood an
d manhood, between instinctively liking things and thinking about what things to like, on the verge of a troubling hormonal nightmare for which boys are rarely prepared. They should be taken aside, aged eleven, for a quiet word:
‘This won’t make a lot of sense but in a year or two you will submerge and not listen to anybody for five years other than your peers, your pop stars and your penis. The dark tunnel you are about to enter will end and it need not be terribly difficult. Some people are on your side. You may not listen to good advice; indeed you may not receive good advice. You may listen to bad advice; certainly you will receive bad advice. You will be besotted with girls (or you will discover for certain that you are gay), you will want to paint your bedroom black and you will pretend not to like Abba, Terry & June and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop (you will be wrong about the first two but right about Noel Edmonds). You will be at odds with authority as you try to establish yourself. You will feel powerful and powerless simultaneously. You will behave like a fool and deny it, whilst suspecting you may have behaved like a fool. Older people will roll their eyes and try to ignore you, they may not offer you any encouragement, they may despair of you. This is normal. You are not a bad person because you are a teenager, in fact, you are about to discover the potential within you. Fly, spotty one, soar and be brilliant, follow your dreams, don’t overdo the Oxy10, eat some fruit, please, be who you want to be. Look, there’s Debbie Harry! What more do you want?’
For an idea of how strange it is to be a teenage boy, consider that, to a teenage boy, the behaviour of other teenage boys is in no way odd. They never wonder what on earth they are saying, or why they are doing what they are doing, or will they ever wake up, or will they ever go to bed, or will they ever eat anything, or will they ever stop eating one thing in particular? They don’t notice teenagers’ poor personal hygiene or, alternatively, their obsessive grooming. They understand a capacity to hang around bus shelters for fourteen hours and have no fear of a mosh pit. They never look at other teenage boys and wonder where the little lad who used to play in the sandpit has gone.