by John King
We were in this bar in Paris one trip, making do paying over the odds drinking frog piss water, real shitty drink. Makes you wonder why all the Latin countries have piss for beer. They’re all the same. I’ve been to Italy, Spain, France and all these cunts are the same, serving shit bottled lager. The more you pay the worse it is, and some of the England boys even end up drinking the local wine it’s so bad. There’s always one or two blokes who get stuck into the wine like it’s lager. Drink gallons of the stuff and go mental. But in Paris there was over a hundred English from all over the country packed into this one bar doing their best to force the piss down. Lots of different clubs drinking and having a sing-song, making the most of life because the French were nowhere to be seen. Then out of nothing the bar starts singing SPURS ARE ON THEIR WAY TO AUSCHWITZ. We were cracking up laughing because it shows how everyone hates Spurs. Thing was, there was this big skinhead looking a bit embarrassed and the bloke’s only a fucking yid. Well, not a yid as in Jew, but yid as in Tottenham. Harris was patting him on the head telling him not to worry, and the Stevenage skin was saying you’ve got it wrong, it’s not all yiddos at White Hart Lane, I hate those Star of Davids like the rest of you, I’m an Anglo-Saxon. World turned upside down with nothing in its right place.
We go for a wander and catch up with Billy and Facelift. We spot some of the Pompey boys and have a chat. Old faces from England trips. Original 657 Crew with a few younger lads tagging along. Everything’s mush and Millwall and scummers. Wonder who they hate most, Millwall or Southampton? They’ve got their ensign flag with them and it seems everyone’s plotting the same route through Amsterdam. This is the early arrivals on the ferry, because give it a day or two and the boats will be packed with England. We’re getting the march on the rest of the boys and it’s going to be a good turn out. We head for the bar. At least the Dutch and Germans know how to brew decent lager.
Bill Farrell ordered a pint of bitter and walked over to his usual seat. He lowered himself into the chair and, once he was settled, took a mouthful of beer. He was drinking Directors and savoured the taste. Two or three pints was his limit these days. His legs were a little stiff, but apart from that he was fit for his age. His working life in a local park had served him well. He’d always drunk bitter and The Unity served a decent pint. He’d used the pub for the last three years since moving up the road from Hounslow to be nearer his daughter, and the beer was always good. He’d drunk in The Unity years ago, when visiting his brother who had lived locally. It was strange to think they’d drunk in this same pub as young men. He’d been coming in The Unity, on and off, for more than half a century. The secret of a good pint of bitter was clean pipes, and successive landlords had maintained standards.
He put the jug down, opened his paper and began reading. He was soon lost in one of the main features, only raising his head when Bob West entered the pub. The younger man nodded, checked Mr Farrell’s glass, and went to the bar, ordering a pint of Tennent’s from Denise. She smiled as she poured and asked Bob whether he wanted his usual plain crisps, or perhaps he fancied cheese and onion today. It was a joke they shared and Bob said he’d wait. He asked Denise if she’d like a drink and she said thanks, but it was okay. She knew he wasn’t flush and appreciated the offer. She didn’t normally drink when she was working anyway. Bob paid and went over to Farrell, asking if he could share the table.
– Of course you can, Farrell smiled. There’s plenty of room.
Bill Farrell didn’t mind the company one way or the other. He’d only become friendly with Bob West over the last few months. He’d known who Bob was, of course, and that the younger man had served as a pilot in the Gulf, but until recently they’d never spoken. He’d assumed Bob was keeping himself to himself, but the younger man had turned out to be a friendly enough character. He wasn’t well, and it was only recently the Government had admitted there could possibly be something called Gulf War Syndrome. Bob had problems with his breathing and suffered from mood swings. He’d be down in the dumps and told Farrell he felt he was falling into a hole, where his part in the conflict no longer seemed real. His memory was becoming distorted and sometimes he imagined he was nothing more than one of the graphic air-force rangers flashing on the games machine in the corner of the pub. He had fought and most certainly killed, yet felt removed from the experience. He was imagining all sorts of things these days. His brain was running wild and he didn’t enjoy the faces it was conjuring up. There was an initial excitement and blazing colour, but this soon vanished and was replaced by a prolonged, numbing horror. The faces were black and charred, the skulls clearly visible.
Coming back to London and signing on had been a huge culture shock for West. He’d dedicated his life to the RAF, thereby fulfilling his childhood dream and following in the footsteps of the Spitfire pilots who’d saved the country during the Battle of Britain. These men were his heroes and he’d tried to match their achievements. He passed the tests, trained hard and travelled the world. It had been a good life, disciplined and exciting, but now he’d come full circle and was back in London living three streets from where he was born. Every morning on his way to the cornershop for a carton of milk he passed the school he went to as a kid. He had been one of the elite and now he was a dole queue number. From the steak dinners and post-raid comradeship of Saudi to beans on toast and life in a lonely flat. He’d experienced the glory of the Gulf and come down with a thud. It seemed so unreal, part of someone else’s life. His mood sank and then rushed back as he tried to recall the thrill he felt soaring over an Arab desert with his finger on the trigger and millions of pounds of precision technology at his command. He could wipe out entire streets with the press of a button and had felt like a god riding through the sky, dealing out death and destruction as he saw fit. Now he was powerless. His moods were up and down. One minute he was a silver-screen hero with an orchestra roaring him on, the next he was sucked along with the missiles and forced to witness the aftermath.
Farrell had quickly become used to Bob West and let the younger man do the talking. If he was silent, Farrell concentrated on his paper or the street outside. Bob was sitting quietly now, so Farrell went with the bitter. He had time on his hands, drifting through the window to a wartime London of blackouts and air-raid shelters, where incendiaries set the streets burning and kids watched doodlebugs splutter to a halt, then fall silently to earth. Everyone waited for the explosion. It was high-tech warfare. The ranks of Nazi bombers, the V-1 buzzbombs and V-2 ballistic missiles. After the bombs and rockets, men and women scraped through charred rubble searching for survivors, full of hatred for the men in the clouds who killed and maimed while hiding in the darkness. Farrell remembered the bombing and thought of the time he’d spent billeted in camps waiting for the Allied invasion of Europe to begin, training and retraining. When the time came, they were ready and willing. There were a lot of debts to repay.
Farrell had played his part and was intensely proud of what he’d done. He’d gone across the Channel with the invasion force and helped defeat Hitler and the Nazis. Now he was back in the same old pubs. He didn’t mind at all. He was happy to sit in The Unity. Very happy indeed. He liked the pub and he liked London. Many men never made it back. He was lucky to go full circle. He had survived and was proud to have got through the slaughter. Young people didn’t appreciate just how precious continuity and community were. They wanted excitement and adventure, but you had to put things in perspective. He was thankful to drink a pint of Directors and enjoy the moment. Of course he had his memories, but the strongest memories were often the ones you never shared. The history of the English working class was buried in coffins and burnt in incinerators. From cradle to grave the details were often kept private, and if you did share the knowledge it was verbally, and this in turn meant that eventually it was lost. Nothing was written down. It was the English way. It some ways it gave you a dignity no-one could steal, but in another it was a cop out, letting the rich claim history along with everything els
e.
For a while after the war Farrell was withdrawn. Once demobbed, everything seemed trivial, and it was only the presence of his wife that stopped him becoming bitter. His wife had seen and experienced something far worse in the camp, and this in turn taught him humility. But he didn’t like to remember those things. Before the war, he’d been a bit of a tearaway. It was part of growing up. After the war it had taken him time to adjust as he ran the pictures through and tried to make some sense of everything that had happened. Maybe that’s what Bob was doing now, but he didn’t think it was exactly the same. Farrell had seen the unimaginable, while from what Bob said it seemed he’d seen very little from the cockpit of his plane. Farrell didn’t like to go back and remember the horror, but it was there and he’d kept the lid on things for over half a century. Bob had troubles Farrell didn’t understand. Maybe it was weakness, because the younger man was from a different generation. There seemed to be more and more weak people around these days.
Perhaps it was the way West had fought or maybe it was this Gulf War Syndrome the papers were talking about. Perhaps – and this was just his own theory – perhaps it was the nature of the war itself. Maybe it was the justification for war that mattered more than anything else. War was a blend of excitement at what was to come and sickness when it arrived. The end had to justify the means. Farrell had thought about this a lot when he was younger. War was sold on glory and colour, while the fighting itself was repetitive and vicious. Farrell knew he was right fighting the Nazis, but wasn’t so sure about Bob fighting Iraq on behalf of Kuwait and the oil industry. You had to feel justified in your actions, because there came a time when you had to think about these things. Bob was struggling with the reality. In the old days people put this off, and many managed to ignore such questions for the rest of their lives, but the younger generation was different. Farrell had done a good job keeping his memories in line. Most people didn’t have the mental discipline and self-control. Bob West was back home on the dole with time to waste so his mind was bound to wander. Whatever the reason for his moods, the man was sick. His skin was patchy and his eyes glazed. There was sweat on West’s forehead and the man didn’t look well. Farrell sipped his drink. He didn’t look well at all.
Harry leant over the railings and let the sickness go, his gut exploding as a full cooked breakfast roared back up at a hundred miles an hour, straight through his mouth in a hurricane twister. Gulls picked up the scent and turned their heads, rolling their eyes at the coming feast. There was a moment of calm, a freeze-frame second or so when the rolling green waves were solid rock and the motion of the ferry stuck, rudder jammed tight, a magic moment when Harry could blink and watch the sickness hover in front of him, a chance to understand the power of the sea. Then wallop. The video rushed away as he lost control, leaning over the railings and looking down. Bull’s-eye.
He couldn’t help laughing as the Spice Girl schoolkids on the deck below stopped their shrieking and realised the truth. There was another second of silence before the storm, when the waves rolled again and the ferry rocked, ducking and diving through the Channel, pushing against the elements dipping its bow into the wind. There was a second’s pause on the video nasty and the thirteen-year-old girls looked at each other and understood what had happened. They understood that they’d just been soaked in a bacon-and-eggs English-breakfast £2.99 special, home delivered by the big fat bastard bent over the railings above looking down on them, laughing his head off. The head was square and shaved, and the man didn’t care about their clothes and hair, everything ruined. There were bits in the sick as well. Pieces of what seemed liked bacon. It was horrible. The vomit and the man above who was laughing like something off The X Files. The mechanism clicked and the kids started howling.
Harry heard their screams rising through the thrashing of the wind, the flapping throb in his ears chopped away by teenage hysteria. A vicious cocktail of greasy cafe cooking and too much ketchup had ruined expensive haircuts and girl-power fashion. A mob of kids ran off crying their eyes out, all flashing lycra and long blonde curls trailing in the wind.
– Fucking slags, was all Harry could mumble, acid in his throat and tears in his eyes.
Harry pushed himself up on the rail, thinking of England and trying to keep his guts in. You had to see the funny side of things, though, because there was the future down below coated in the sick of the last two decades. The pretty young things that would shape the England to come soaked in the bile of the nutters who’d rampaged through the past. Well, not really the past, but someone twenty years older who should’ve known better. Together they represented the present, but the consumer kids were feeling the effects. No amount of ecstasy could save you when England mobbed up. Mind you, like the rest of the country he wouldn’t have said no to a proper Spice Girl knocking on his door with a takeaway at three in the morning. It didn’t have to be a Spice mind. He’d make do with some old slapper on her way home from Blues who fancied ten solid inches of BSE up her arse. But he couldn’t be bothered with that sort of thinking right now because the wind was getting stronger and he had to sit down, moving away from the crime scene before Cracker appeared to go through his reasons, finding an empty bench where he could put his back to the wall and watch the English coastline disappear in the haze. Gulls followed the ferry the whole way, tracking the trawler from Grimsby with the press-ganged Harry on board, panicking fish thrashing on the deck, hungry gulls following Eric Cantona all the way back to Europe.
– You were sick all over those young girls, a voice said, appearing from nowhere.
Harry looked to his right and noticed the mini-skirt and mac sitting next to him. He hadn’t seen the woman come over. She had to be a Scandinavian. A Danish beauty queen maybe. Someone to take along to the storage room and knob in the racks. No, she was Swedish. He was certain this bird was a Swede. A fucking lovely bit of skirt.
– It was not a nice thing to do, the woman said, laughing.
Harry felt awkward. It wasn’t the ideal way to a bird’s heart, puking on a bunch of school kids. He wasn’t sure how to answer that one. What was he supposed to say? That it didn’t matter?
– Can you understand me? You are English, aren’t you?
– Yes, I’m English.
– Only an Englishman would do that to such young girls and then laugh. It is the English sense of humour I guess.
Harry was struggling now. Was she taking the piss? He didn’t think so. Yes, the English sense of humour was alive and well and doing the business on the high seas. He wondered what Terry Thomas would do in this situation. Give it the sophisticated approach and use the old English gentleman routine, though Harry didn’t think he could pull that off. But he was missing the point, because this bird had just seen him in action and she was still coming over for a chat. He was in, no fucking problem. They loved it, the Scandinavians, because their blokes were so fucking serious the girls flocked to any English cock going spare. The English knew how to enjoy themselves. That’s what it was. They wanted a bit of that olde English magic. The blood, sweat and spunk of an English hooligan. Forget the wankers tucking into their health food and sipping low-alcohol lager, not wanting to lose control. The Swedish birds wanted some excitement. This girl was crying out for a night on the town, moving through the pubs of West London and filling up on a cheap Indian, then back to Harry’s unmade bed for a quick shag, those ten pints of lager making sure his performance was up to the usual standard. It was the hooligan element making its mark, putting England on the map.
– My name is Ingrid, from Berlin, said the Swede.
– Harry. From London.
– Nice to meet you Harry.
– Likewise Ingrid.
The wind picked up and they were silent for half a minute or so. Harry was gagging for it and so was this bird. But he still had the taste of sick in his mouth and had to get his breath back. He needed a shag and was going to ask Ingrid what the chances were of climbing into that luggage rack when Carter had
finished servicing the Dane. They fucking loved it, the old frauleins. Dirty slag had probably been shagging her way through all the London clubs, taking her pick of the ICF boys in Mile End and the Bushwhackers down in South London, the Gooners in North London, but missing out on the full experience. Shame he hadn’t met her down Blues and given her the usual patter, shown her the local sites, but there again, reasoning the things through, she’d probably never got out of the West End, spending her time getting chased by trendy wankers and long queues of greasy Italians. What a waste.
– I have just spent two weeks in London. I enjoyed it very much. I am on holiday with my boyfriend.
Harry nodded.
Just his fucking luck. Nice-looking bird like that, with a mini-skirt and a plastic mac, sitting on deck flashing it about, and she’s only travelling with some goose-stepping cunt who probably didn’t realise what he was getting. Fucking gorgeous she was. Mind you, Ingrid was flirting and you never knew. Maybe the cunt she was knobbing worked part-time for the Gestapo and was bringing his work home. Handcuffing her to the bedposts and pulling out her fingernails. Ingrid had long, red nails that would pop out of her fingers easy enough. Poor old Ingrid shagging some Aryan superman in a full-length leather coat and jackboots. Pliers under the pillow and industrial voltage pulsing through the electric blanket. What she needed was a change of scene. She needed Harry to show her the way forward. Forget the Germans and kneel down for the England boys.
– I work in a bar called Bang in East Berlin, Ingrid said, handing Harry a card. You should visit me and bring your friends along.
Harry saw the boyfriend approach and Ingrid was up and running to some scruffy anarchist-communist cunt with one of those haircuts that stuck up like a bog brush on top of his head, small eyes shut away behind the regulation round glasses. Harry watched them go. First thing he was going to do in Amsterdam was get himself a bird. Ingrid was fucking lovely. He needed something like that and put the card in his pocket. You never knew. Stranger things happened.