1894...

Saturday 14th April, 1894: Arsenal 0, Burton Swifts 2 (scorers unknown)



"I've always been a coward": a soldier of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment takes the Hounds of Love for a brisk constitutional...

An interesting year, 1894. W.K. Dickson received a patent for motion picture film on January 7th. In February, French anarchist Martial Bourdin was foiled in his attempt to blow up the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The following month, fires destroyed over a thousand buildings in Shanghai. 71 years years before I'd be born, Nikita Sergeevich Khruschev laid prior claim to my birthday on 17th April. Mayday saw riots in, of all places, Cleveland Ohio. French President Sadi Carnot was assassinated on June 24th. In September 12,000 tailors went on strike over the sweat shop conditions in which they were expected to work. The inventor of the saxophone, Adolphe Sax, died. Bessie Smith was born. And on a spring Saturday, Woolwich Arsenal ended their first season in the Football League (Division 2) with a home defeat to Burton Swifts. They finished 9th, 22 points behind 2nd Division Champions Liverpool, who'd beaten "the Reds", as they were then known, 5-0 at the Manor Ground and 2-0 at Anfield. Quite a year, but the most momentous thing that happened in that year, at least as far as my family history is concerned, isn't to be found in the Football League Handbook or entered on Wikipedia.

My great Grandfather, Charles William Knight, was born in Woolwich. I like to think that at some point he might have joined the steadily growing swell of spectators who would watch the forefathers of the current side then called Royal, later Woolwich, Arsenal play on Plumstead Common or at the Manor Ground, close to the Royal Arsenal itself from which the football club grew. A Scotsman, David Dankin, was the prime force behind the establishment of the first Arsenal side. Little more than a works' team, this group of players had named themselves Dial Square after one of the Royal Arsenal's workshops, situated between Woolwich and Plumstead. Bouyed, no doubt, by a 6-0 demolition of Eastern Wanderers in their first ever game on 11th December 1886, two weeks later, on Christmas Day, they changed the name to the far grander Royal Arsenal. I wonder, did he ever see them play?



"Would you mind, awfully...erm, falling in chaps?": the badge of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment - as seen on a member of Dad's Army near you (source: wikipedia) The motto - "Quo fas et Gloria Ducunt - Invicta" isn't as rude as it sounds...

By my reckoning, there would have been 8 years between the formation of the club and the earliest time my great-Grandfather might have made the move from Woolwich. At some point, Charles joined the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment and that step would lead him to Ulster where the fortunes of his family and that of the Crawfords would meet. At some time in 1894, the 1st Battalion of the Royal West Kents was sent to Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in pre-partition Ireland. I can't say for sure that Charles William Knight was sent on that initial despatch, but even if he wasn't, that's certainly where he ended up. That's where my grandfather Robert George was born, at New Row in Enniskillen on 27th June 1908. Charles had obviously liked Enniskillen enough to stay, or had had no option to leave.

I have a feeling it was the former. Another Charles - his grandson, my uncle - told me recently that Charles William Knight had joined the "Enniskillen Rifles" as my uncle described them, when he retired as a regular with the West Kents. Perhaps he'd found it hard to give up the life of a soldier; I believe he'd made it to (at least) the rank of Captain, sometime around the period of the Great War. I can't be sure it's my Great Grandfather Charles, but a C.W.R. Knight was awarded the Military Cross between 1914-18 and held that rank at the time of the award. It's just that rogue 'R' that makes me doubt it - it doesn't show up anywhere else, but everything else fits. Whether those Enniskillen rifles are the same as the famous Fusiliers, who fought in the Boer and Great Wars, I'm not sure. It looks that the first Battalion spent World War I stationed in Dublin. I'm pretty sure that was the Battalion with which Charles would have gone over to Ireland in or after 1894. It's a gut feeling, but I think the averages also suggest that you had a better chance of living to a pensionable age and seeing your son get married (as he did) serving in Dublin than on the Western Front.

My hunch is that if he carried on soldiering after retirement, it would have been with the emergent Ulster Volunteer Force or one of the quasi-militia that appear to have been quite legal providing you could find a judge sympathetic (or, more honestly, Unionist) enough to enable you and your mates to parade and drill your arms; publicly, provocatively. Or, possibly, he just kept a rifle handy in case of emergencies. Whatever the case and regardless of whether he ever got to see the team that grew up in his home town just as he was leaving it, great grand da Charlie was, I'm sure, a gunner all his life.

But then, maybe it wasn't the guns and the authority and the adventure. Perhaps it was the lure of Enniskillen itself? I've never been there, but I've seen enough of Ulster to know how entrancing that combination of glistening lough and dark, smouldering land can be; the light lasering through the trees and blazing onto those vast steel sheets of water. Enniskillen is Inis Ceithleann in the original Irish. It means Kathleen's Island. And it is an island, of sorts, situated as it is between the two lakes that make up Lough Erne. Enniskillen or Inis Ceithleann? I prefer both of those to the grimly appropriate Inniskilling. I imagine that if Charles Knight had indeed set off there in 1894, it would have been a tense garrison town he'd have been confronted with. The previous year had seen the collapse of the Second Home Rule Bill, Horace Curzon Plunkett's Irish Agricultural Organisation Society had been formed the same year that the West Kents arrived, the non-violent pressure for some redress for the historical debt accruing to the inequities begun with Cromwell's plantations appearing increasingly unanswerable...

And yet, remaining unanswered. It would have been a strange time, a sort of cold war-style prelude to the Easter Rising and the Civil War. And all the time, the country's natural beauty standing there before the participants as a rebuke to the divisions and suspicions and mistrust that carried on patiently brewing; mounting daily, biding their time, waiting to explode.

So maybe that's why this London boy stayed; the country - Kathleen's Island - had its talons in him. Or perhaps it's even simpler than that. Not a Kathleen, but a Catherine. I can't be certain of the particulars beyond the facts in my hand; Charles and Catherine Knight had a son, Robert George, my grandfather, on 27th June, 1908. Word would have been sent back to the Knights in England, no doubt. Perhaps a few pints were downed in celebration at the Royal Oak, the pub where on that Christmas Day in 1886, Royal Arsenal was toasted by the players from Dial Square? A toast or two, perhaps, raised to their own, the Queen's Own West Kent, the loyal gunner all those miles away over the water. They'd say God Bless the protector, keep the faith as they clinked their glasses. Keep the faith, defender of the faith.

But then, maybe they'd all have met up already? For the wedding. I think I have a year. Sometime in 1904, did they ever make the trip to Enniskillen, those crusading Knights? It's hard to pin it down, because several Catherine Rooneys who show up on the 1901 census as residing in Fermanagh could have been his Catherine, my great-grandmother. But I think I've narrowed it done to one who was 25 in 1901, of perfect marrying age in 1904 (28) and ripe to bear a son in another four. She lived and was married in Lisnaskea, in the parish of Aghalurcher, and that's also a place with our family's ties. So I'm pretty sure that I've seen my great-grandmother on that list and that she was a lass from Lisnaskea and I feel I know her a bit better despite knowing nothing, really, about her at all.

But even if I'm wrong, and she came from somewhere else - Ardmoney, Crummer, Derrygannon, Derryneese - she shares one thing with all those other Catherine Rooneys. Something else that doesn't quite fit. Because whatever else she may have been, the woman that this defender-of-the-faith ancestor of mine married and settled down with was not a protestant. Scrolling down the third column in the list of results, two letters bind all these disparate Catherine Rooneys - whether from Greaghnafine, Drumcully or Ederdacurragh - into a sororial regiment of their own; RC...RC...RC...RC...RC. If Charles Knight stayed in Ulster for the love of a woman, it must have been of the powerful and overwhelming kind. Because unless she evaded the census or came out of the sky like a bolt from the blue, one thing is for sure; my great-grandmother was almost certainly a Catholic.



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

497 Archway Road...

497 Archway Road: no, there was no piano and it wasn't playing hot behind the green door.

This is the old family home as it is today. My grandparents brought the family over from Belfast sometime around 1952/1953. My Aunt, Alison, thinks she was about 6 months old. This is her with her mother, Sarah (Sadie) Knight and an uncle (Alec) outside 497:






....that's Roderick David Stewart in his own words. Born in Highgate, North London, on 10th January 1945. Rod's father Robert Joseph Stewart came from King's Port in Edinburgh, Scotland. Rod's mother, Elsie, came from Upper Holloway, North London. The Cockney girl fell for the Scot and the couple married in 1928. The Stewart clan began to appear afterwards. Rod's brothers Don and Bob and his sisters Mary and Peggy were all born in Scotland. However the family moved to London to 507 Archway Road, Highgate where after a gap of eight years, young Roddy was born. This means that Rod is the only member of the family to have been born in England, a misfortune which Rod has tended to overlook....

Rod Stewart's childhood was conventional. He lived above the newsagent's shop in Archway Road in North London. The newsagent's shop was owned by the Stewarts themselves. As already mentionned, Roderick was the youngest of five so he was spoilt by his family but of course he was taught to respect his elders, especially his parents. He was mainly interested in football and model railways. He's never lost that passion over the years. He still enjoys to play with the model railway and football is still as important (or even more) to him than it was way back in the fifties. He was very much interested in the singer Al Jolson, an American Jewish baritone, who was very popular in the thirties. Rod's father and the two brothers were football fans. They even started a local team called the 'Highgate Redwings'.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article713738.ece

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~donegalstrongs/estates.htm#Colebrook

Agalun Corralough/Corlongford Killartry Aghacramphill Cornakessagh Kilcarry Aghavea Cornamucklagh Killybarne Aghavoory Cornarooslan Killycloghy Agheeghter Cran Killykeeran Aghnacloy Cranbrooke Knockmacmanus Aghnagrane Creagh Largy Altagoaghan Crocknagowan Lisboy Altawark Crocknagrally Lismalore Altnaponer Curraghanall Lisnabane Ardmoney Deerpark Lisolvan Ardmore Derrinton Longfield Arduncheon Derrycrum Lurganbane Arlish Derrychree Magonragh Ashbrooke Derrychulla Mullaghafad Aughnagrawne Derrycullion Mongibbaghan Ballymacaffry Derryheely Monmurry [?Bannafily] Derryloman Nutfield Bohattan Derrynalester Owenskerry Bonnerloghy [Bunlougher] Derrynavogy Rafintan Boyhill Dooederny Ramult Breandrum Doogary Ranafely Brobrohan Dressoge Raw Brookeborough Drombrughas Sheebeg Broughderg Drumgorran Skeoge Bunlougher Drummorris Stripe Cappanagh Edengilhorn Tattenaheglish Carrickapolin Erdinagh Tattenalee Cavanagarvan Ervey Tattenbuddagh Cavanaleck Eshacorran Tattendillur Cavans Eshnasillog Tattinfree Claraghy Eskeragh Tattykeeran Cleen Foglish Tattynuckle Cleffany Foydragh Tattyreagh Cloghtogle Gorteen Tireeghan Coolcoghill Greagh Tirkenny Coolrakelly Grogey Todragh Cooltrane Guderagh Trasna Cooneen Grogey Tullreagh Corcreeny Killabran Tullykenneye Corlacky Killabreagy Tullynagowan Corlough White Hill

http://www.ulsterancestry.com/ua-BrookeDeeds.html

http://www.regiments.org/regiments/uk/depot/1873.htm



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

September 11th ...

Tuesday 11th September, 2007: Japan 2 (Miyama 2), England 2 (Smith 2)

A young kid, blond - 7? 8? 9? 10? - shapes to take a corner. He's wearing this season's home kit, redcurrant and white hooped socks, redcurrant shorts and the sleeves of his spanking new white shirt combine with the plain red bib he has been given to form a makeshift, old-style Arsenal home shirt. The crowded box awaits his delivery, but instead of hoofing it in he plays it short and square to his team mate, gratefully receives the return pass and jinks past one, two defenders before one of the dads nicks the ball off his foot for another corner just as he'd been about to shoot. This time he puts the ball straight into the mixer, a perfect cross that's dying out to be volleyed into the corner of the miniature goals they've set up. But the young recipient of this golden opportunity realises too late the chance of glory he has been presented on a plate. Before he can react, the moment has gone. The ball connects dully with his instep, gets stuck under his stationary, clodhopping foot, time is slow no longer and the play descends once more into a frantic, meaningless scrum.

There's always a game going on somewhere, always someone between the sticks. There's always someone watching. Someone recording the particulars.



Smith's reference: "... how dearly I would love to kick with the fray"...


There's a game in Shanghai too; Japan versus England in the FIFA Women's World Cup. Watching the match, you could be forgiven for wondering if British scientists have somehow succeeded in keeping quiet about the most astonishing discovery of the newborn century. Without any hue whatsoever and with a similar absence of cry, the FA boffins have managed to jigger about with all those X/Y chromosomes in such a way as to eradicate all of those traditionally recognised differences of gender and sex. Bar a few more pony tails than you'd normally expect to see post-David Seaman, and a greater ability to find similarly shirted colleagues with their passes, the pride of English lionesses so resembles their male three lion shirted counterparts that you wonder how the FA have managed to pull it off without setting off all manner of drug scandals, not to mention getting Trinny and Susannah involved.

Obviously, this similarity has its cons as well as its pros. The England ladies play with admirable verve and vigour, passing firmly and crisply among themselves creating the more promising openings as well as giving it plenty of stick and putting it about a bit whenever necessary, and to generally good effect. Easily the classier of the two sides, it's just a matter of time, you think to yourself, before all the patient passing and steady pressure leads to a goal. And sure enough, eventually it does. Japan's handful of a number 9, Arakawa (Moira Stewart on a *very*, *very* bad hair day) is on the receiving end of a bit of stick, the result of a degree of putting it about a bit too much by the England defence. The American Referee, Kari Seitz (Sigourney Weaver playing a lesbian refereee) blows for a foul. Up steps Miyama to blast the ball through the wall and score. One-nil to Japan. England coach Hope Powell (Don Letts) looks on aghast, presumably reminded by England's dismal wall of all that rapping she used to do with Big Audio Dynamite, wondering like the rest of us why she didn't just stick to making documentaries about the early days of the Clash.



Stewart: "...sport, and in football, England's Women were cruelly denied a deserved victory in their first match of the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup when I was pulled down on the edge of the penalty area for a last minute free kick from which Japan scored a last gasp equaliser..."

But this is no ordinary England ladies side. They are, to all intents and purposes, the Arsenal ladies side who went undefeated in four competitions last season - at least seven of their number are. With that Magnificent Seven in their midst, these ladies don't know how to lose. And so with patience and increasing power and pace, they somehow turn the game around. Or rather, girl gooner Kelly Smith does. The player the BBC have been describing as the best player in the Women's game looks to have fallen understandably short of such portentous billing until, within the space of two minutes as the game looks just to have slipped beyond England, she produces two moments of individual brilliance that make you think she might just be the best player in the game, period. For the first she shimmers just inside the box, somehow keeping the ball within her body's sphere of influence, remaining calm enough in the gyroscope of disorder she's generated in the Japanese defence to slot the ball home with steely grace. Her scoring boot is off and at her lips in celebration almost before the ball has hit the net.

Then, with the game still reeling from her grabbing of it by the scruff of the neck, she's powering into the box from the left. Closing in on the Japanese goal from a tight angle, time once again stands still for her as, directing her first shot straight at the keeper, she's still composed and alert enough to steer the parried rebound home. Both boots are off this time as the England team surround her in grateful celebration. All that's required to make these Arsenal and England ladies total replicants of their male models is the completely unwarranted equaliser against the run of play. This duly arrives in the fourth minute of stoppage time, Miyama showing us all the full repertoire of her free kick heartbreakers, this time placing the ball over the England wall inside the right hand post of Rachel Brown's goal. It's the last kick of the game and you don't know whether to laugh or cry. You're laughing because you know its a classic game that's not over until the very last second; you want to cry because you hadn't been enjoying watching England play so much for as long as you can remember.



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

Laika...

This is Nick.



"We'll keep the blue flag flying here": Comrade Abadzis inspects the newly renovated Stamford Bridge.

We've known each other since about 1979. He delights in reminding me that my first words to him were "I hate you, Nick Abadzis". I'm fairly sure he's making it up, although I always was a contrary thing, even way back then, so maybe a I did say something along those lines. But regardless of that, sometime in 1980 or 1981, I stopped hating him for long enough (if I ever had in the first place) to realise that I actually liked him rather a lot. Sitting in a tree in Richmond Park whilst on a Biology field trip, we became friends and we've pretty much stayed like that for what will soon be thirty years - friends, that is, we're not still sitting up a tree in Richmond Park.

So that, before we go any further, is my declaration of interest. Nick's just had another book published and on Sunday I had the great pleasure of finally getting to read it. Laika is the story of the second Soviet space flight. The brainchild of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, Sputnik I had been launched on October 4th, 1957, beep-beeping to the consternation and bemusement of the non-Communist world below its orbit. Sputnik II's preparation was cruelly cut short, scheduled as it was to be launched to coincide with the fortieth anniverary of the October Revolution. This project was to go one step further than Sputnik I. This time Korolev's team would send not just a beep generator but a living creature into orbit. The catch was, they only had a month to build the thing from scratch. Now *that's* a deadline.

Laika was the heroic Husky-Samoyed crossbreed chosen to pioneer the mammalian (and Soviet) conquest of the universe stretched out enticingly beyond the earth's atmosphere. Only her name wasn't really Laika. Everyone called Kudryavka - "Little Curly" - until Korolev changed her name; Laika, 'Barker'. Sergei Pavlovich's life had been saved by a dog as he wandered the streets of Magadan, starving from his ordeal in the gulag, alerted by its barking to a discarded loaf of bread. This meeting with another, curly-tailed dog was, he believed, like his survival a proof of his destiny; at least it was if you believe Nick's story. Oh, I know telling stories is telling lies, but sometimes we need a white lie or two to get behind the even bigger lies. The lies we're told by history.

You've had my declaration of interest, but interest seems barely to do the bias involved here sufficient justice. You see, no matter how much you might not want to, when you hold in your hands a book by one of your friends, you are discreetly cordoned off from the huddled masses of the general readership. "Come this way", say the voices of the genuflecting flunkies as they lead you on your red carpetted way. Far from the harrassed and cramped readers hanging from their handrails in economy they take you; for this one rare journey you will be travelling in first class. You may indeed be holding the same 208 pages as any other reader in your eager, trembling hands, but this is one privilege you are unable to renounce. For you belong to The Party now, you are no longer a mere prole, and with that elevation there comes danger. You are no ordinary reader because you know. You know as they do not that what you are holding in your hands are not mere pages; they are years.

So how can you trust a Party man? I wouldn't trust myself. But you will just have to trust me, as little Kudryavka has no choice but to trust her handler, Yelana Dubrovsky, even though she is ultimately powerless to reward her charge's faith. Trust me, even though this will read, I know, like propaganda - how can it not? But try to see it from the propagandist's p.o.v. Imagine that you too have seen him - on the rare occasions he could be separated from the work to come and meet you and his other friends - carrying this as yet unrealised book around with him everywhere, his shoulders buckling beneath it as it grew. Imagine that you know about the deadline - not quite Korolev's for Sputnik II, but a tight one all the same - and the workload it entailed; the cramming and the topsy turvy schedule of avoiding working in the hottest parts of that heat wave two summers back. Think of him as if he was your friend working through the nightimes, asleep in the shimmering heat of the day. You too, let's pretend, have been told, that it took some special power, the interjection of some ghoulish muse to see the project through; one intense and frazzled nocturne when that spectral lady spoke through him; our friend.

So now I recline in the comfy berth of my Dacha, filled with pride and party loyalty as my delicate, unscathed fingers turn over a week or two of someone else's work. The story I've waited so long to hear finally can unfold. And this is why I can't be trusted. Because my faith was always infinite. Because I knew from the very first moment that the idea was put to me, from the simple, nailed up manifesto of the outline of the plot, that the compassion and the talent of my friend had this time found the perfect vehicle in Laika's moving tale. No, that's wrong; it is the other way around. The tale had found the man with the humanity to tell it. And even though I know I can't be trusted, that my testimony won't stand up, I will say it anyway. The tale has found the talent and the compassion to be told. Trust me, even though there's no way on earth that I could not like this book. Trust me, even if I'm drunk with pride at having had the good luck to have such a friend; Trust me, it is good. Very, very good indeed.

Of course, you can't believe me; not until you've read it for yourself. You can only trust the hairs on the back of your own neck, as I had to mine, feel them as they respectfully stand up for the eloquence of the frames and the text, a politburo of filaments rising in awe at the powerful arsenal that proceeds before them. You may or may not feel, as I did, the reassuring thrill that comes when official history is met by such a calm, interrogative conscience as Nick's; a punk cartoonist's two-fingered rejoinder to their "mad parade". You see, history may record that a dog named Laika became the first living being to reach outer space in the early hours of 2nd November, 1957, but that's only a fragment of the story that Nick tells here.

Even now, having read the book and knowing what we do of the Soviet regime, it's hard not to be impressed by the force of Korolev's will. A driven "man of destiny", he'd survived the hell of the gulag to pioneer the exploration of space. In the month between the outrageous coup of the first Sputnik and Laika's flight, he'd made the quantum leap between hurtling an object and a being into space, a development that would pave the way for all that followed in space race. But that miracle of a month was to be the little dog's tragedy; they simply hadn't time to plot a way to bring her back to earth. Korolev is plausibly humane in Nick's hands; this is no witch hunt after all, just a wise reckoning of motives a balancing of the scales. In other hands this could be sad but sloppy propaganda. But Nick is far too wise for that.

We see Korolev and the other humans in this story (and the canines they are masters of) as vital, living beings who have been made stooges by history. They are liberated from their role as muppets here. Characters like Yelana Dubrovsky, the dog-handler who bonds with her charges and Oleg Gazenko (whose unrequited passion for the same Yelana Alexandrovna is so beautifully, subtly, delicately suggested here) can't be seen as villains. They're victims, as we all are, of the propagandists' vice. The insistence of the regime that the launch of this boastful orbit be made to coincide with the anniversary of the Revolution meant that no plans were ever made to return poor Laika to that despairing, undeserving soil; one more shoddy tragedy to add to the millions more suffered under that regime. The poor pup's passion unfolds with terrible certainty. The author's vision remains clear-eyed throughout, remaining so even as your own blurs with tears as you read on. You can't believe it's just a colour-filled line that's died up there in the heavens, in torment, not put to sleep humanely as the Soviet's pretended. Another dead line. But it isn't a line, it is a dog that's died. A dog and a lie; sometimes it takes a white lie to tell the bigger truth.

But don't trust me, you can't I am too close to the story. Rather, trust the text and, if you have them, show it to your kids. It will stand them in good stead. Because they will need, and their kids will need, as we once needed, perhaps still do, to guard against the propaganda. It hasn't gone away, just becomes ever harder to pick up on. But Laika and Kudryavka, the little curly-tailed stray dog remembered in its pages, show us how it's done.




"Laika" By Nick Abadzis is published by First Second. You can order a copy here.









L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

1977/78...

Sunday 11th June, 1978: Scotland 3 (Dalglish, Gemmill 2 [1 pen]), Holland 2 (Rensenbrink [pen.], Rep)



"Neal and Jack and Me": Caspar (front) and Rufus in their granny's MG outside the house in Westbank Terrace, Hampton Hill; Swipe, as ever, is propping up the rear.

My memory is telling me that I watched this game with Bill Sewell on a Friday night, sometime in June, 1978. I scream out in joy when Archie Gemmill scores to put the Scots 3-1 up, giving them one foot in the second group stage and Bill looks up from what he's doing and says something laconic like, "someone's scored, then, I take it?" That's what my memory, my mind, my brain is telling me about that day in June just under thirty years ago. But it can't have happened like that. It was played on a Sunday, for a start. And now, I find an article saying that Bill died in 1977. Which would have made it very hard indeed for us to have watched the game together. How did people write biographies of the long dead before Google? I can't even manage to keep track of my own life and I'm still alive and have the added benefit of being able to search the net. But even with those supposed advantages, I've still very nearly started out on a completely fabricated jaunt down a non-existent Memory Lane; telling stories is telling lies, it seems even when you're convinced that you are telling the truth. So where did that memory come from? And where did I actually watch the game?

I'm lost in time, now. Bill's death was the first that really intruded on the innocence of youth. I saw Rufus when he'd just been told about the death of his father. It's a cliche, I know, but the only thing I can liken his face to is thunder; or rather the dark, brooding clouds that accompany a storm. The news came with all the disruptive force of a rotten tree trunk thrown violently into a pond by a bored child, a peaceful idyll shattered on a capricious, idle whim. I thought I knew where I was with it, but that day has floated free of its moorings now, belonging to another year, another me entirely; one that I now find I'm in the process of forgetting.

We'd visit Bill at his studio-cum-home which was in a mews just off Wardour Street in Soho. The three of us; Caspar, Rufus and me. Bill was a very laid-back figure, quite unlike the other Dads you'd come across. This I do remember; I was very struck by the fact that he was wearing Kickers, the hyper cool French boots with those creamy corrugated soles. They must have been a fairly recent style back then in what I'd thought was 1978 but must have been a year, at least, before. A handsome man in his fifties, luxuriously paunching out and with a whitening 50s beatnik beard, Bill had hit upon a tremendously cunning means of keeping these three demanding kids out of his hair when they came to stay. "Here's a fiver, now bugger off to McDonalds", he'd rasp in smokey Australian. And so we would.

It's hard to convey how exciting and otherwordly those McDonalds were to kids our age when they first arrived on British shores. The milkshakes meant an eternity of numb-cheeked sucking, the frozen cement inside the beaker never seeming to go down no matter how much effort you put in. And Bill was the magician who had conjured all this magic up for us, this brilliant, vivid world; a new and seedy London with its enormous caverns filled with LPs, balconies of playful, leering whores and cabbage leaf-strewn markets for us to amble around, three princes in our Soho emirate.

I came across an interview with Rufus when I was trying to get my dates straight. His remarks about his slightly at arm's length, every-other-weekend relationship with his father are pretty perceptive:

It gave me this really bizarre idea of what makes someone cool, not really trying, but always having the potential to be fantastic

That catches Bill pretty well, I think; he had that and his two sons have both inherited it from their dad, for sure; the potential to be fantastic.

So, where are we in time and what do I believe; Google or my in-the-doghouse memory? Well, before I surf, I'll try to piece together what I can remember of those fabulous holiday-like weekends. I'm pretty sure that the whole of Soho was covered at some point with posters for an Ian Dury single. "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" (which seems most likely and is also ringing a louder bell than the other options) would place us in late summer 1977. "What a Waste" was out in early April of the following year, so that's unlikely unless the web is wrong about the year of Bill's death. Then there's the story Caspar always tells about the Elvis mirror Bill sent them a week before Elvis died. On opening it, they found that its glass had, with eerie prescience, been shattered while in transit by some supernatural force. That would also place us somewhere in the summer of '77. I'm sure Caspar always makes a mental connection with this, feeling that the mirror's calamity and Elvis's death were both in some way tied up with losing Bill; but whether that's through their proximity or symmetry, I'm not sure. But that feels a while before I first went up with them to visit Bill.

This might all seem completely irrelevant, and, besides, I could resolve it all by picking up the phone, I know. But I need to get my head around it, try to set my own version straight. For what could be worse than losing your own past? Increasingly, you become aware that its about the only thing you have, your sole protection against the welter of information you're bombarded with day by day; the sheer immensity of Stuff That's Happened, the unceasing jabber of the ticker tape; your mind a fizzing seltzer glass of comment and opinion. Your own past, that internal timeline of responses and observations, of upraised thumbs and screwed up noses, that is you. 'All the rest is propaganda'.

And in the same way, when we go, we're not really what we leave behind officially. If you want to know about Bill, for instance, this is all you'll get that's remotely worth knowing by searching on the web. He was the "bohemian animator" father of Caspar and Rufus, who left Australia to visit the home of his idol, the poet Dylan Thomas. He made the following animated films:

Redemption of the retainer (1961)
The apple (1962)
Mr. Know-How in all round comfort (1963)
The first adventures of Thud and Blunder (1964)
Thud and Blunder in haulage hazards (1964)
Handling materials with Thud and Blunder (1966)
Canada is my piano (1967)
The chair (1967)
Tidy why? (1967 - this was nominated for a BAFTA in 1968)
Two off the cuff (1968)
What is a computer? (1970)
Henry 9 'til 5 (1970)
The cranky princess (1971)
Think twice (1973)
Is this a record? (1973 - which featured several members of Monty Python, I think)

His best known work is probably the 'Lucy in the Diamonds' sequence from the animated Beatles feature, Yellow Submarine. It was an innovative application of the Retroscoping technique in which the animation is traced over live action film. The Beatles clip grew out of a longer piece Bill was working on, based on footage of Fred and Ginger that was going to be called Half in Love with Fred Astaire. Frustrated that his orginal work had been compromised for inclusion in the Beatles' film, Bill left the project, going to work for the Canadian Film Board.

There's probably more, but that is only a little part of Bill. He's in a million memories and this is where the sad part is. You see, when we lose the memories, it's as if we've lost that person all over again.

We think of time as something that unfolds consecutively, and it does; but that's not how we remember things. It's less an arrow in our memory and more a marble rattling around a wooden box, spinning through a maze of chambers, until its momentum tires, and the rolling ends. Somewhere in time, I did watch Archie Gemmill nimbly weave through the despairing dives of the Dutch defence, square up to the desperate 'keeper's lunge and clip the ball beyond him in an arc as calm and certain as the trajectory of time. And now I see us clearly, Caspar, Rufus, me; scurrying and larking as we hoof a ball about on a park in Hampton Hill. It's the day before the final, one the Dutch again will lose. An evening sky is forming, and Bill is somewhere else.


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

1975...

Wednesday 16th April, 1975: England 5 (MacDonald 5), Cyprus 0



Me with Helen, c. 1975. I'm wearing the England kit I got for my 10th Birthday. Apologies for picture quality; the original is very feint and was completely bleached out by the flash when I tried to get a close up.

England always lets you down in the end. And just to make things worse, it sometimes gives you hope. A 5-0 thrashing of Cyprus at Wembley and I'm allowed my birthday present early so I watch it in my replica kit. Malcolm MacDonald scores all the goals in an otherwise routine rout. It won't last; we fail to qualify for Argentina 1978. Within a year, the kit's outgrown.



"The Trafalgar Steamroller", c.1975: (Back row) Edwards, Embling, Webber, Allen, McCarthur, Unknown Teacher, Schikovsky? (Front row) Swipe, Mills, Unknown (Garry Someone?), Riboult (capt.) Whitehead, Jenkinson, Sleighmaker.

The school team has a good run that year though. We either reach a semi final or are in contention for the league. But in the season's crucial game at Fortescue against local rivals Stanley Road, we taste defeat. A midfield masterclass from William Rees, who'd turn up again at Orleans school, ends our season there and then. Rees's heroics apart, my only other recollection of the game is our coach, Mr. Saunders (Edward VIII) stood at the touchline barking encouragement, propping up a piece of card on which he'd daubed the legend, "The Trafalgar Steamroller Rolls On!!", a reference no doubt to our Arsenal-like ability to grind out boring 1-0 wins without playing particularly well. He always seemed to be smoking a pipe even, - altough this is possibly a trick of the memory - in class where in between puffs he'd fill up what felt like several hours with enthusiastic accounts of the repulsion of the Spanish Armada. I imagine that he liked a drink as well as pulling on that pipe and if my memory serves, he died while I was still at Trafalgar, not that long after the game with Stanley Road; eaten up by the brown residue of tar that caked his teeth. This is him, some years before, on a school outing to Belgium (picture by Martin Wells)



Gary Mills (next to me in the team photo) is also a smoker. I see him taking crafty puffs from the cup of his palm on his way home from school to Feltham. His parents are separated and he's a crazy mixed up ball of confusion. In one fit of rage, he attacks the Nun who takes our class, on placement from the local Catholic college, St. Mary's. He's one of those who'll either turn out as a star or a crook; has that wayward intelligence you need, the sort that's only really tolerated in the worlds of crime, entertainment and elite sport. Or he might be a dustman for all I know. He goes out for an Italian meal with Patricia Larrigan on her birthday. I've been in love with her since we were five, kissing her on the crown of her head in infants school, causing her to flee the room in floods of tears; an early lesson in the terrifying and volatile power of love. Sean Whitehead has a similar surly wiriness to Gary Mills. His father owned a building firm, I believe, and they had a nice big house not far from us. But Sean speaks what my mother called 'Twickenham Cockney'. I think she meant by it something along the lines of posh boys talking common. Mark Jenkinson wrote a play, I know that much. It's called The Art of Random Whistling and was first performed at the Young Vic in 1996. William Rees lives in North Wales from whence he sells secondhand books on the net. "I still love playing and watching football (I’m rather more accomplished at the latter)", he says on his Friends Reunited blurb. I'm very glad to hear it, Bill.

Mr. Embling is the headmaster. He's kindly and patrician. Mr Edwards is his second in command and is one of the two exceptional teachers into whose orbit I'm fortunate to fall. He's dapper, stern on the surface but deep down just as kind. I love watching him eat his lunch behind his desk, the same precisely performed ritual every day; an apple sliced then segmented, the knife steered by a firm and steady thumb, popped straight in the mouth as sliced, apple alternating with a wedge of crumbly cheddar. It's down to him that I win one of the three prizes the school awards to its soon-to-be-alumni. With the book tokens I buy this



and they stick a commemorative plate inside the cover:





I don't remember many games between now and the World Cup, although I'm sure I watch a lot. West Ham win the Cup Final, Leeds lose the European Cup. The following year, I win my prize. Concorde takes its inaugural flight, Southampton beat Manchester United in the FA cup, the Czechs beat the Germans in a penalty shoot-out to become champions of Europe. So, you see, there was hope. Lots of hope, back then, before England let us down.

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

1974...

Sunday July 7th, 1974: World Cup final - Holland 1 (Neeskins [pen.]), West Germany 2 (Breitner [pen.], Muller)

It's Sunday, June 23rd and Poland are playing Italy in the 1974 World Cup. Or it might be the Saturday before that, when they beat Argentina 3-2. Or maybe it's the day before the Final itself, when they played and beat Brazil. One-nil. Lato scores to clinch third place for the England conquering Poles. But I'm pretty sure that Szarmak got a goal on the day I'm thinking of, and it was played in the afternoon, which would make it Italy. You see, on the day I'm trying to recall, there was a quite well known actor at the window behind me, giving me the two fingered salute and burping the word "bollocks" whilst I tried to watch the game. And you don't tend to forget stuff like that, do you? Even if the world cup games played long ago begin to bleed into one, you don't forget Rufus Sewell, burping bollocks, two grubby fingers raised, then mouthing "fuck off" while you try to watch the game - especially when the team who took your place at the World Cup are playing.



Rufus, it was really nothing: the audition was a close-run thing, but Billy MacKenzie would go on to get the Associates gig in the end...

He was only six at the time, of course, and taking a break from playing kiss chase with my sister. Not yet famous, no starring roles beyond his turn as Rumplestiltskin at Trafalgar Infants School. Maybe that was a little later, the following year, perhaps? But there is no doubting that he was already a prodigious talent. I couldn't even burp to order, let alone form a coarse vocabulary in that beguiling foreign tongue, yet here he was, already swearing in it fluently. In fact, the infants' production of Rumpelstiltskin would enjoy such a dazzlingly brilliant run, be so acclaimed that they'd eventually transfer it to the main school, with its larger assembly hall for a special one-off performance. So we juniors all got to enjoy Rufus stomping around, shouting a lot and generally stealing the show in the title role, being excellent as that funny little goblin child-man in a performance all of our own and absolutely free.

I've not seen Rufus for a while now. I think he's had some tough times - the usual life stuff - as well as some wonderful successes - most recently in Tom Stoppard's play set in the Prague of 1968, called Rock 'n' Roll. I didn't get to see it - should be more assertive about using contacts, going through the door when it's being held open for you, I suppose - but it's never felt quite right. I've heard that he was very good and still oozes power and charisma on the stage. I'd be lying if I said I didn't envy him a little his having met some of my own personal heroes; Bowie, Lieber & Stoller, Peter Cook and Jack Lemmon are the ones that spring most readily to mind. But I don't envy him his success, because that's precisely what it is; his. I still feel a gentle glow of pride, every now and then, that he was one of us and now holds his own with all of 'them'. I guess the fact is, to invite total ridicule by pursuing a football analogy, that he's been West Germany to my Holland. For all the fine approach play, all the clever-clever stuff I might have come up with that should have blown the opposition apart if only I'd been a slightly better finisher, he's the one who's done the business on the pitch, won the trophies, has his medals and all I've done's fuck all.

Bob Dylan sang, "there's no success like failure and failure's no success at all", and if that's the case, I suppose the Dutch and I can't really claim any kind of moral high ground, as if not winning were some badge of honour to show we were too worthy for the game. What's an actor without an audience? What's the point of writing if you're not prepared to be read? And in Holland's case, why turn up to a final, to prove a point instead of to win? The records will bear out the facts of life: Sewell 1, Swipe 0, Holland 1, West Germany 2. And one day that is all that history will know. And then that too will be forgotten, as the universe yawns and savage winds torment the dust.

But then life as it is lived isn't about statistics, is it? I know I've been relying on them to fill the void of my memory, but they're only a loose guide to what really happened. Just as two figures separated by a dash are all that remain of the all the blood-pumping endeavours of the 22 who played, so the write ups and awards cannot reproduce the play. In much the same way, the words lose the story and the story cannot hold the life.

In his book Football Against the Enemy, Simon Kuper charts the footballing enmity between Holland and Germany as dating back to their meeting in the semi final in the European Championship on 21st June 1988. Holland won that game, Marco van Basten scoring a late goal that sent 9 million Dutchmen on to the streets of Holland in a wild frenzy of celebration, as Kuper describes the scene:

In the Leidseplein square, Amsterdammers threw bicycles (their own?) into the air and shouted "Hurray! We've got our bikes back !" The Germans, in the biggest bicycle theft in history, had confiscated all Dutch bicycles during the Occupation.

But there would be no bicycle throwing in 1974. In fact, I'm surprised that Kuper is so sanguine about the earlier game - it caused a rumpus back in Holland almost as traumatic as the war. To read the quotes of the astonished onlookers in David Winner's Brilliant Orange, you'd think they were talking about different games, those cycle-wielding Dutchman avenging not the war but a later, footballing defeat. "There is still deep, unresolved trauma about 1974. It's a very living pain, like an unpunished crime", says Anna Enquist. And she should know how deep that trauma goes; she's a psycho-analyst. "The defeat of 1974 is the biggest trauma that has happened to Holland in the twentieth century, apart from the floods of 1953 and World War II", concurs playwright Johann Timmers. We English think we have an unsophisticated, occasionally neanderthal view towards the descendants of the Third Reich, but even we don't feel quite like this, do we?:

We have to admit that one of our weak points is that we always have to start talking about the war and revenge when we play against the Germans, no matter what sport it is.

Sure, we love to beat them, but is there anything off the pitch to avenge? There is for the Dutch, or so Kees Jansma, a sports presenter on Dutch channel, Canal+ says. He was nine when he went with his father to see Holland play the then World Champions West Germany in Dusseldorf in 1956:

When we won, 2-1, I saw my father jumping and crying because we'd beaten the World Champions. There must have been between six and eight thousand Dutchmen there and they invaded the pitch and carried the players on their shoulders. In the train going back, everybody was celebrating wildly. I'd never seen my father like that - he'd gone mad, singing, dancing. Later I realised it was because of the war, because of the strong feeling about the Germans. It was a very strong feeling for all the people there, that we had some kind of revenge for everything they had done to us.

And what better revenge than to completely humiliate your opponent, on their own turf, in a World Cup final? That's precisely what the Dutch set out to do. Winner describes it so beautifully, I can see it happening before me again:

Holland kicked off and immediately began an extraordinary passage of play, insolently moving the ball backwards, forwards and sideways with the Germans unable to make a single effective challenge. Van Hanegem to Cruyff...Van Hanegem to Neeskens to Krol...Rijsbergen to Haan to Suurbier...Haan to Rijsbergen to Haan (by now the incensed German crowd is whistling their fury)...Cruyff to Rijsbergen to Krol...Neeskens to Rijsbergen to Cruyff. Cruyff finally darts forward and is tripped by Uli Hoeness.

English referee Jack Taylor (James Garner) points to the spot (how could he not?) Neeskens steps up to take the penalty and finally, two minutes in to the World Cup final, the hosts at last get to touch the ball, Sepp Maier having picked it out from the back of his net.

That should have been that. But the Dutch were so intent on rubbing it in to the Germans just how much better they were than them that they forgot to win the game. Paul Breitner (Anthony Sher in The History Man) scores from the penalty spot and then Gerd Muller, "Der Bomber", scores a second for the Germans. The Dutch attack, but the game is lost when it never seemed that they could lose. And there it was, an early, object lesson in how not to win a game.

But there is another universe out there, somewhere deep in some collective mindset where the team in orange not white went on to win that game. In that parallel realm you don't get points for scoring, it's how you played that counts. "I want to win it better", says the fictional Brian Clough in The Damned United. He wants Leeds United to win the league playing football, not fouling and cheating as he feels they did under his successor, Don Revie. He lasts forty-four days at the club. "How shall we live, Brian?" is a question oft asked of him throughout the novel by an unspecified voice in the crowd. And we could ask the same ourselves. How shall we live, Brian? Do we want to be cynical, or cling to an ideal? To be Individuals or a community? The game plays out these dramas for us, as we wrestle with them in life.

I saw van Basten and Johann Cruyff at the Emirates in the first ever match played there. Cruyff was in his fifties and van Basten hadn't played competitively for well over a decade. There were some fabulous players on display that day. They'd turned out for Dennis Bergkamp's testimonial; Cruyff, van Basten, Davids, Vieira are just a few who spring to mind. It was a very emotional day; Dennis Bergkamp's father, Wim, who'd recently been battling with cancer, kicked the game off by passing the ball to his son, who duly passed it on to his in a pretty triangle; the miraculous cycle of life played out in that virginal centre circle. Then at half time the names of the returning Arsenal heroes were announced by Bob Wilson: Seaman, Keown, Bould, Dixon, Winterburn, Vieira, Wright, Kanu... It was rousing stuff for the Arsenal faithful but the guy sat next to me and I both turned to one another in surprise and joy when we heard the name of Cruyff. He was tubby, could hardly breathe (probably all those fags - he used to be an eighty a day merchant) and several passes went astray. But you could still feel the class, the suspicion that there was magic coming whenever the ball touched his boot. There was still that whiff of genius and he carried himself as if he still was what he had been; the man who lent the kicking game the grace of a ballet.

Van Basten and Bergkamp ran him close for grace, poise and skill, but Cruyff was always out on his own for me. It wasn't just the football; here was a man, you felt. Imagine any player nowadays tearing off an adidas stripe; running 'round with two-lined arms when your team mates all have three. Winner's right about the "brilliant orange", the kit was dazzlingly cool. And that huge, black silhouette of lion placed exactly above the heart. All that and the talent too; the turns, the jinks, the power and the pace. And the goals. The one that sticks in my mind is the goal he scored against Brazil. It was, in effect, a semi final and the Brazil side that year was atypically hard. As a sign of how the game was played then, one defender rugby tackles Cruyff and gets away with staying on the pitch. For this bruising, physical encounter the Dutch were in white, the Brazilians wore blue as if to spare their traditional colours the shame of such an uncharacteristic display. The Dutch prove too strong, too athletic, have too much skill. Neeskens clips the ball over the 'keeper in a sublime arc just after the break and fifteen minutes later, Johann bullets through the air to karate kick the ball home off a deep cross from the left. The Dutch players' huddle bubbles like champagne, bobbing and and bouncing, fizzing with relief.

"You've been here two and a half years, Dennis," I said, half in sarcasm half in motivation. "Isn't it about time you won something? It would be a shame not to with your ability."

Only a professional with the dedication and honours of Tony Adams could get away with saying something like that to Dennis Bergkamp. As in football, so in life; is it what you win, or how? This isn't meant to be an answer, but if you went 'round any playground at the time they both played, I'm sure only a handful might have swapped you all those Adams medals for a touch of what the Iceman had. Perhaps it takes a child to see it, as I did then, when I saw Johann Cruyff and gaped in awe.


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

1973...

Wednesday 17th October, 1973: England 1 (Clarke [pen]), Poland 1 (Domarsky)



Salford: "Them was rotten days". (This wonderful photo by Mark Pilkington used non-commercially under Creative Commons license and with thanks)


The wonders of the age of Google...

I'm trying to research Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads in the hope of validating the claims my memory is making that the famous No Hiding Place episode was shown as part of the build up to this game. It turns out to have been originally broadcast on Tuesday 20th February, 1973, so probably my recollection is at fault; although it's true that the programme may have been repeated in an attempt to steady the nation's nerves. More to the point, the game was shown on ITV (they'd paid £50,000 for the rights - I looked it up). So, unless some sense of impending national humiliation had brought about an unprecedented degree of bipartisan co-operation between the rival broadcasters, I'll just have to assume that my memory is wrong. The matter still unresolved, I'm intrigued by the title of one of the links at the bottom of the screen so I click on it. It turns out that When Things Were Rotten is merely the next title in the BBC database's alphabetically arranged hall of comedy fame. It was a TV comedy; Mel Brooks' first stab at a Sherwood Forest spoof, by all accounts. Unfortunately, it didn't exhaust its subject matter sufficiently so as to have obviated the need for Robin Hood: Men in Tights, but it would be curmudgeonly in the extreme not to accept that it's still a rather brilliant title.

I'm reminded by it of the grafitti that cropped up recently on Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain; "Them was rotten days", scrawled across a wall. Whether by balaclavaed Provo or patch-pocketed football hooligan, it didn't seem to matter much; it just summed up the time, and all those rotten, rotten days. I'd assumed that there was some folkloric explanation for the phrase - and there is, I suppose if you count modern popular culture as the folklore of tomorrow. To the best of my knowledge, it's a saying that belongs to the fictional Nottingham of Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and the Salford of The Queen is Dead rather than being a commonly used, everyday one. Arthur Seaton's Aunt Ada, played by Hylda Baker, spits it out and her very words are etched into the run-off of the Smiths' 1986 LP. So that is, I'm sure, a relatively recent daubing by a Smiths fan of a line from a screenplay and a song and not some spontaneously sprayed agit. prop., or anti-British curse. But it still rings true; they were. And they weren't. Them days. Rotten, that is.

And one day was perhaps the most rotten of them all; Wednesday 13th October, 1973. The OPEC crisis and England's one-all draw with Poland landed on us with all the force of some karmic, cultural and political double whammy. If the oil embargo that would kill off what was left of the nineteen sixties, came as an unforeseen uppercut that rocked us on our heels, then the stiff Polish resistance to the massed ranks of Sir Alf Ramsay's strikers was the steadily aimed left hook that brutally finished us off. 'Sniffer' Clarke, who had broken my heart the year before at Wembley, scored the penalty that gave us hope. But the Poles held firm. No Banks, no Moore, no Stiles, no Charlton; England had lost its spine.

You need a strong spine. In football, that means an experienced or exceptionally capable player at each of the key positions moving up the vertebrae of the side - goalkeeper, centre half, central midfield and centre forward. Books need a good spine too - and not just the sort that holds the glue that keep the things together physically - I mean in the traditional beginning, middle and ending kind of way. And so, increasingly, does the memory. Fixture lists and discographies have become my spine. So when, for instance, I think of 1973, the obvious point of reference for me is October 17th of that year, because I know that England drew with Poland that day and couldn't score for trying that one solitary extra goal that would take them to the World Cup finals. Just as, when I think of 1986, I go back to that Thursday afternoon when I walked home from Richmond clutching a precious green square of cardboard, inside it a treasured disc of vinyl and the legend "them was rotten days". Or three days later, on that Sunday, the 22nd, when I watched two Maradonna goals, one foul, one the fairest of them all, once again leave England sickened. Another rotten day.

Without those dates, I'm lost. Other times close by to them encroach and blur the image of the precise time that I want to see; the mind's double exposures can confuse. So that Netzer and Domarski, Lato and Muller all combine, play in the same game on the same pitch, in the same strip - red or green - at roughly the same time. It all blurs into one, otherwise. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why "telling stories is telling lies"; we simply can't keep the truth contained, isolate one moment from the tales the other times are telling. But that said, certain things do happen, on certain days and are documented thus and these can help us, when we grope our way, near blind, uncertainly through history, through time. Maradonna's power and grace destroying England won't happen on any other day that June, or in any other year. Some records do prove true, some facts can't be made to lie. We may argue as to the why, but at least not as to when and where things happened or did not. Fixture lists, discographies, charts and league tables. I really would be lost without them, June become September, nineteen-eighty, eighty-three.

Them was rotten days when things were rotten.

In my memory at least, they were. In my mind, watching Steptoe and Son felt more like watching something verite than situations filmed inside a studio. There still were a few totters about, even after that show's run came to an end. I'd hear one from my bedroom, calling out that eerie, bygone cry, and the out of kilter clip-clop of his bedraggled Hercules. And then there was next door. We called it Steptoe's yard; Mr. Martin (Billy Wilder) and his millenarian stockpiling of every last decaying timber, every pot and glass or paint can he could find, racked up in the gaps between the rows of peas and beans. It was more allotment or wrecking yard than garden. He too worked at Hawkers, but on the other side from George. Churchill had him put under surveilance during World War II. A union activist in a sector vital to the military; a stirrer, a trouble maker, a fifth columnist at the heart of the war effort; "a whited sepulchre in our midst". "Red" Roly Martin, they'd called him, but I found this out too late. I'd mistaken his sullenness for sourness, his dejection for distain. Now I see that he wasn't just some hard-bitten old bastard, perhaps; just another beaten man. And that October day would sew the seeds of my rebellion. I would store up this defeat and one day join his disaffected ranks; turn my back on my own country, renounce the sovereignty of my Queen. But that was later, I still had faith in England for now. But how I wish I'd had the chance to ask him more, to learn some more about defeat.

And this is where it all gets hazy, the phases of one's life begin to blur. In my mind I'd lumped in England's Wembley despair with broader national events. True, the OPEC Crisis began the day of, or perhaps the day before the game. But I remember power cuts being quite a regular thing. The three day week was later, early 1974, the normal working week was not restored until 8th March the following year. At least, according to Google, with its reassuring handrail of calenders and facts. But now, with time, it all feels of a piece. In truth, those nights that felt like wartime, with their cricket from down-under on the wireless, the candles shedding their unruly light, a phantasmagoric riot running nimbly around the walls; they could have happened anytime. Or perhaps it's just an appealing mood, the politely grim nostalgia of one who doesn't know they're born. Something I've clung on to to make that time my own. But everything did feel different then; was it me, or was it time?

Them was rotten days when things were rotten.

And yet they weren't. We had the big England games live, could watch at home on TV, no need for pubs with Sky. Two highlights shows each weekend; The Big Match as well as Match of the Day. Brian Clough, Malcolm Allison; pundits who'd actually row. The whole place felt more feisty, more honest in a way. The Likely Lads themselves appeared to be less a sitcom than a dialectic being played out on your TV screen; Bob, upwardly mobile, getting on; the other, Terry, mired in the past. Pig happy there as well. A prime time Mark E. Smith, only well before the Fall. That show seems to catch the moment, the gyres in mid-shift. The transistion of England from forward thrusting industrial dynamo to backward-looking wretch is captured nowhere more eloquently than in the lyrics of Mike Hugg and Ian le Frenais' theme song:

Tomorrow's almost over
Today went by so fast
And the only thing to look forward to;
The past...



Clarke/Collier/E. Smith: the apotheosis of the working man.

It depends what you want, I guess. There was less then, but wasn't what we did have not a little better? I can't recall too many television characters as popular and enduring as the Steptoes and the Likely Lads, few since have seemed as real as them, have seemed so on the money or summed things up so well. And how prescient is No Hiding Place? It must have been filmed a good year or so before the England v. Poland game, but it's as if they had already read the runes. England played just such a tough away game, in Chorzow, Poland, on 6th June that same year. Bobby Moore, the golden haired emblem of English insuperability, had a stinker and was at fault for both their goals. I watched it through the snowstorm of the primitive satelite link. There was no heavy pitch, no deluge, although the players may well have trudged off to drown their sorrows in bottles of communist state-owned brown ale. But if you'd tried like Bob and Terry to evade the score and watch the highlights, you'd have felt precisely the same sense of anxiety as to how the game would end. Just as some still trot out Terry's reflex bigotries as their old certainties recede. Then, in real England, watching as our players failed out there in the real soviet bloc, we could have done with the apocalyptic downpour that eventually postponed that fictitious England game, postponing the probable defeat. Putting it off until October, when the whole damned thing would cave in on our heads for real. It's a canny nerve to hit, is football, if you wish to sum up national decline. England always lets you down, you see. As we found out that night. As I'm sure it will again.


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

1972...

Saturday 22nd April, 1972: Amateur Cup Final - Enfield 0, Hendon 2





The first time I went to Wembley was for the 1971-72 Amateur Cup final, played that year between Enfield and Hendon. It's the day before St. George's Day, so quite appropriate that my father and I should accompany yet another George, this one our neighbour, Mr. Rixon. My memory can't suppress the idea that the 23rd may also have been his birthday, but the writer in me sees that would be too neat. It's more than enough for him to share my Granfather's name and that of England's patron saint. Regardless, it's five days after my birthday, making me a newly turned seven year-old on my first trip to that historic ground. George (Frank Cannon) works for Hawker Siddley and must be quite high up there because he's got us complimentary tickets, good ones too. We're right next to the Royal box, close to those famous steps and their historic balcony. The monarch and her court are protected from the swearing and the roaring of the crowd by a cube of glinting glass. I don't believe that was there for the World Cup Final of 1966, so must have been a fairly new innovation on the day in question.

There would only be two more Amateur Cup Finals after this, as the Football Association did away with the distinction between professional and amateur clubs in 1974. Enfield, today's losing finalists, had played in one of the best known Amateur cup games in the competition's history. In the semi final, they were drawn against Highgate United (not my Highgate, unfortunately; there's also one in Birmingham). The game was played out in the horrendous thunder storm that eventually saw the game called off before half an hour had been played and which was severe enough to see several players struck down by lightning, one of whom, Tony Allden, tragically died. The tie was replayed at Villa Park where Enfield stuffed their still shell-shocked opponents six-nil. The final against Skelmersdale attracted an astonishing 75,000 crowd to Wembley. Enfield won that one 3-0.

Hendon win today, but I can't tell you anything about the game. Oh, I was spellbound alright, I was taking it all in. It's just that what has stuck with me is not the game so much as the pitch. It's hard to convey just how dazzling the pitch at the old Wembley was to young eyes. It had evidently been sewn more from gold than grass. And that was the magic of the day; not the game, not the glitzy proximity to the great and the good; not the swanky (for 1972) ease with which we strolled a step or two to the comforts of the lounge and bar. Just as a theatre-lovers lifelong passion can be sparked not by the play but by the splendour of the proscenium, so I fell entranced with this pulsating stage of grass.

George would have driven us back in his pride and joy, a sumptuous sonic blue saloon that he seemed perpetually to be buffing and primping, and that would have been that. Over the years, I'd go back several times to see the big touring bands - The Stones, Bruce Springsteen and U2 - but the next game I'd go to see there would be another special one.

The following weekend, England host West Germany in the first leg of the 1972 European Championship quarter final. George and his wife Rene have a colour televison, so Dad and I are invited to watch the game there. Although the timings of the goals suggest a tighter game (it was 1-1 with thirteen minutes to play), I seem to recall that Germany took England apart. This extract from Brian McIlvanny's match report in the Observer appears to confirm my hazily recollected childhood despair:

No Englishman can ever again warm himself with the old assumption that, on the football field if nowhere else, the Germans are an inferior race.

There, in the light of a lurid lava lamp, with only a 'glass of pop' and a pouffe for comfort, I watched as, "on a Wembley pitch left as lush as an Irish meadow by the rain", England were undone. This was to be my first immediate experience of the disappointments of England. England always lets you down. And this was only 1972. We hadn't even had the OPEC crisis yet. We hadn't even had Poland.

*

What a bloody week that must have been. The following Saturday, 6th May 1972, I watch the Centenary FA Cup final; Arsenal v. Leeds United. I used to have the programme, hoped I'd come across it when we cleared out the family home but it must be long gone. I can't remember where it had come from; George most likely. I used to love scanning through the long list of previous finals, marvelling at the the quaint old names;

Royal Engineers

The Wanderers

Old Etonians

Clapham Rovers

Old Carthusians

Blackburn Olympic

Queen's Park

And then, from 1886 onward, the finalists take on a more familar look:

1886 BLACKBURN ROVERS 2 - 0 West Bromwich Albion
1887 ASTON VILLA 2 - 0 West Bromwich Albion
1888 WEST BROMWICH ALBION 2 - 1 Preston North End
1889 PRESTON NORTH END 3 - 0 Wolverhampton W'rs
1890 BLACKBURN ROVERS 6 - 1 Sheffield Wednesday
1891 BLACKBURN ROVERS 3 - 1 Notts County
1892 WEST BROMWICH ALBION 3 - 0 Aston Villa

Those all took place at Kennington Oval. The three finals immediately before the first at Wembley in 1923 took place at Stamford Bridge. I wonder if Roman Abramovich knows that? Or any of the men who tore down the towers that watched over all the games that were to come. Arsenal lose to Cardiff, beat Huddersfield Town, lose to Newcastle and beat Sheffield United. Portsmouth hammer Wolverhampton Wanderers 4-1 in 1939 before six repeated phrases are left to stand for all the horror of World War II:

1940 (no competition held)
1941 (no competition held)
1942 (no competition held)
1943 (no competition held)
1944 (no competition held)
1945 (no competition held)

Derby County finally prize the cup from Pompey's wartime grip, beating Charlton Athletic 4-1 after extra time. Always a war, always a game. Someone recording the particulars.

And now another game, played out just like the ninety finals played before. Someone loses, someone wins. Leeds win, we lose, 1-0. Allan 'Sniffer' Clarke scores the goal. So another loss, and more to come. So much lost within a week.




The special one: our two programmes, Dad's and mine.

You want to know about the special one, I suppose? No, not Mourinho. Not even the game, or the result or the occasion; just a simple moment, that sort of special one. Wednesday 30th, 1998 at Wembley, Arsenal play Panathinaikos in the Champions League. It's just before 7.45pm and the game's about to start. We take our seats, low and close to the pitch in one of the corners and look out at the pool of floodlit green. I catch my father's face, cheeks involuntarily blown out as if some small explosion of pleasure has gone off inside his mouth. I catch him like that and hold him there because I know, even then, that one day I'll have need of this; this moment when a father became a son, a child the father of the man. Always war, always hunger, always fear but always love as well. It keeps me warm still, the vision of that face, as it does then in the chilly autumn air that freezes two men in to boys.

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

The Heart of the Matter...

Sunday 2nd September, 2007: Arsenal 3 (Adebayor [pen.], Fabregas, Rosicky), Portsmouth 1 (Kanu)

....how sad we all were to hear of the death of Antonio Puerta. It's not credible that this should happen in the modern game. Also, it raises some questions; was the player aware of any [heart] condition himself? Was the club aware? If not, why not?

...It's appalling to die from something that could have been detected and treated. However, it could also be the case that the player knows what he has and decides to carry on. That happened in France. A player called Omar Sahnoun, a French international, knew he had a heart disease that could be deadly but he decided to go on. He basically decided to take the risk of dying rather than not play football.

Arsene Wenger's matchday programme notes

Before leaving for today's game, I start to watch the recording of Friday night's Super Cup final between Milan and Sevilla. All 22 players have PUERTA printed on the back of their shirts, the memento mori of his name beneath their squad numbers a ghostly echo of their own. It's as if they're saying it could have been anyone of us collapsing like that, dying like that. Any one of this haunted 22, but for the grace of God, dead at 22. When Renato scores, the Sevilla players join him in celebration. Huddled together, each points heavenward, up towards the teammate they've lost, offering this otherwise unexceptional goal to his memory. I don't get to see the second half, don't know who won the game even, but it doesn't seem to matter which eleven Puertas triumphed or if the game ended a draw.

Sevilla play AEK of Athens tomorrow night to decide who will join Arsenal, Slavia Prague and Steau Bucharest in Champions League group H. Sevilla are two goals up from the first leg, so chances are that their faithful will be making the trip to London on 19th September, when they'll no doubt unfurl the same 'Puerta Presente' banner that summed up the spirit of Friday night's game. Rightly or wrongly, football's often described as a religion. Those Spanish fans clearly felt some transubstantiative force around the game and that transcendant shimmer of shirts, their votive arms upstretched to the one they'd lost was very, very moving.

In any case, if football were little more than harmless escapism, you wouldn't know it from leafing through today's matchday programme. Aside from the tribute to Puerta there's a memorial to Ray Jones, the promising QPR striker who died in a car crash last weekend. Next to that is a get well message to Clive Clarke, the Leicester City loanee who survived a similar collapse to Puerta's in a midweek game. Then there's a plug for HIV/AIDS charity 'Football Reaching Out For Africa' who are putting on a 'do' at the Royal Albert Hall (hosted by Patti Boulaye, no less) where you can pay to go and see Greg Dyke massacre 'Great Balls of Fire', apparently. Snowdon 500 is a sponsored climb up and down the Welsh mountain in aid of prostate cancer; there's the obligatory help-line number for anyone affected by such issues. And we're only up to page 9.

The Basra challenge takes up most of Page 10. Flight Lieutenant Allan Pluckrose (who surely should have been a 1950s inside forward with a name like that) and Corporal Dan Harmer (his opponent in defence) will run a mile for every goal Arsenal score between the beginning of the season and the end of their tour of duty in Iraq raising money for Bob Wilson's Willow Foundation. That's the charity the former Arsenal goalkeeper and his wife set up as a permanent memorial for their daughter Anna, who died of cancer aged 31. The whole of page 20 is devoted to Treehouse ("Ambitious about Autism"), Arsenal's Charity of the Season 2007-2008.

Page 23 sees the launch of the "Arsenal for Everyone" initiative, "which aims to celebrate diversity in all its forms at the club". It's been set up "as part of the club's work towards achieving the intermediate level of the 'Racial Equality Standard'. Only intermediate? Pages 34 and 35 concern another initiative, this time devised by the Premier League. "Creating Chances" (mmm, nice one) is "emphasising that community work is now more important than ever for football clubs around the country". On to pages 38-40 which detail Arsenal in the Community. "Write Now and Then" is a film and poetry project for local school children based around Islington's literary heritage (Dickens, Orwell, Hornby, Charlie George's autobiography etc.), whilst the Arsenal Double Clubs offer a variety of courses to supplement the school and college curriculum. Former Arsenal reserve Danny Rebuck reports on his successful Israeli Summer Soccer Camps and we are asked to contribute to the Arsenal in Galilee Peace Programme, "the climax of a year of co-existence football among 12 Jewish and Arab towns and villages in northern Israel". If only, you find yourself thinking, the bloody government would get its finger out and help the way that Arsenal is, there'd be a better world and we could all get back to reading about the sodding football.

In fact, it's almost a relief to reach the blank backing of the pullout poster of Cesc Fabregas stapled to the programme's middle, but still the world of misery and pain outside the game intrudes. On page 45, Arsenal Remembers:

Billy A... - Remembering our true little gooner on your 14th birthday on September 7th. Miss you loads. Thinking of you always. All our love, Mum, Dad and Danny xxx

Page 67 features a letter from Joyce Vernon whose husband Les used to play for the club in the 1950s. "He is now 72", she writes "and it would be lovely for him to see this matchday programme and cheer him up as he was due to go into hospital on Thursday for a spinal operation". Finally an interview with Arsenal physio, Gary Lewin. It's titled, "The Heart of the Matter", and in it Gary gives details of how Arsenal's defibrillators and cardiac screening programmes should, God willing, prevent an occurence for Arsenal and England such as the Puerta tragedy.

The real world finally subdued, we can read about today's opponents, Portsmouth. Manager Harry Rednapp is five victories away from his 400th win as a manager, John Utaka's nickname is "The Torpedo" and today sees a return in Pompey colours of former Arsenal players Lauren, Kanu and (as part of the Portsmouth coaching staff) Tony Adams.





For Tim: "Hard cheese, old boy!"

I'd been looking forward to seeing Portsmouth play, but they don't seem to get going until the second half - they probably read the programme too. By then they're already two goals down; a coolly taken Adebayor penalty that sends David James the wrong way after the 'keeper had brought down van Persie in the box and a swivelling Fabregas shot from close range from a Gilberto knockdown at the near post. At half time, things are serene and calm, the only irritations being the nerve jangling sleighbells someone's insisted on bringing along and shaking continuously, perhaps by way of an oblique, Provofiev-style Russian reference and the slightly sinister connotation that now accompanies the Arsenal faithful's chanting of "Red Army".

But I needn't have feared; sure enough, with the second period barely begun, there's the obligatory event. The lumbering Senderos gets caught out the wrong side of Kanu (whose own history of heart problems is surprisingly absent from the programme's litany of woe, misfortune and tragedy) and brings the gangling Nigerian down. Senderos is duly sent off by Mark Halsey, a decision that, whilst strictly correct by the letter of the law, seems a little harsh in the context of an otherwise well-contested game. But then Halsey is the refereeing equivalent of Coronation Street's uber-pedant Roy Cropper. Portsmouth somehow contrive not to score from the resulting free kick on the edge of the Arsenal box, "The Torpedo" blasting a close range Exocet over the bar when it seems easier to score.

Strangely, the dismissal appears to work in Arsenal's favour, as if the lessening of passing options has brought a clarity to their play. In the game's crucial period in the wake of the sending off, they hold their own and even manage to score a third; the lively Rosicky who has thrived in the extra space that's come with the game opening up takes Cesc's quickly taken free kick in his stride and blasts low past James from a narrow angle to seal the game for Arsenal.

Or so you'd think. But no, seconds later, with what is either astonishing good fortune or outrageous skill, Kanu has allowed a seemingly harmless ball into the box to hit the heel of his size 14 boot and slice providently into the Arsenal net. Portsmouth come back strongly, right back Glenn Johnson coming more to the fore and new signing Nugent looking lively, but Arsenal just about hold firm. They keep playing their assertive passing game and almost conjure a delightful fourth; a succession of first time passes and the play is spread across the pitch like a fan opening up, the ball eventally spirited out to increasingly assured young left back Gael Clichy. His perfect cross invites Diaby to plant a header in the corner, only for the tall substitute to power the ball a foot or so wide.

Arsenal cling on at a series of late Portsmouth corner kicks, but with three minutes of time added on, the visiting Scummers begin to leave in their dejected lines of blue. I stay to watch the obligatory centre circle love-in, the errant Diaby who is wondering off alone for his bath is called back to join his colleagues, so seriously do they seem to take this admirable show of community that it has to be completely inclusive; probably something to do with that new initiative.

We're briefly halted at the crowd control barrier while the tube absorbs our crowd. The mounted police in their lurid Chelsea away strip flourescent bibs form a quota-driven snapshot of modern Britain - alternating, white, black, Asian, male, female. They barely seem aware of us, appear bored and distracted; no doubt planning how they'll spend today's colossal overtime. I drink in the scene. The solid-built cockney behind the mobile burger bar proffers a long, drooping sausage to a time-honoured regular while his chubby Chinese colleague deals with the rest of the queue. To the side of their wheeled porta-cabin stand three young Sikhs, turbanned and bearded, their clothes adorned with Arsenal. An Irish-looking woman twirls a strange dervish in front of me as she tries to avoid a wasp. I look up at the question marks of the crescent moons on the Finsbury Park Mosque.

The District and Victoria lines are barely functioning today, so I take the long haul of the Piccadilly line back to Hammersmith. On the tube, my head forced into a respectful bow by the restrictive arc of the doorway, I peer through the bodies and see a heavy-lidded Arab stood before a Homburged Orthodox Jew with a straggly ginger beard. 'Co-existence football'. 'A new initiative'. On the train to Richmond, a pretty blonde in cool black shades twitters way on her mobile, "dobry, dobry" she trills, twirling her clog-like, stilleto heeled shoes as two peacock gays ooh and coo beside her. Someone looks up from their mobile, the Chelsea match update; "Villa have just scored."

I see the Russian(?) blonde disappear off towards the shops of Richmond, still dobrying away into her phone and I realise that this is it for two weeks now. No more football during the international break, only England. I suppose that means that for the moment I'll have to tell you about England. England and me. England, me and Wembley.







L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!

Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!

Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!

Watch Bob's promos on Youtube

Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!

Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!

Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises