Nearly Reach the Sky (10 page)

At its height, Huntley and Palmers employed 5,000 people in Berkshire’s principal conurbation, which is considerably more than the number of supporters Reading FC attracted when I first saw them. I used to go and watch them sometimes after my parents moved us out of London to Bracknell, where my dad had got a job.

I was able to justify to myself these expeditions to support a club other than West Ham with the fact that Reading’s goalkeeper – the memorably named Steve Death – had once been on the books at Upton Park. He only ever made one appearance for the Irons, but he was a legend at Reading. At one time he held the record for the longest period in English football without conceding a goal. He went 1,104 minutes without letting one in – that’s the equivalent of 12.25 games. He was a brilliant keeper, and I was genuinely sorry when I read that he lost his life to cancer in 2003.

It’s no exaggeration to say Huntley and Palmers was one of the main driving forces in Reading’s growth as a town. The Quakers who ran the company that bore their names were decent men who gave generously to the local community and offered their employees top-of-the-range working conditions. All of which made the football club’s response to the factory’s closure in 1976 seem somewhat less than gracious. Rather than revere its proud traditions, the club decided to ditch the Biscuit Men tag and go for a grandiose new nickname instead.

They wanted something that matched the times. And a year later we were all knee-deep in bunting from the endless street parties that marked the Queen’s Silver Jubilee as Britain renewed
its on–off love affair with the royal family. Berkshire likes to call itself the Royal County, so the big-wigs in the boardroom came up with the brilliant idea of calling themselves – you’ve guessed it – the Royals! Of course, there had to be a poll of the fans to give this idiotic idea an air of legitimacy – but that was about as democratic as an election in North Korea and ‘the Royals’ (unlike the family of the same name) was duly elected.

The closure of a factory is no excuse to drop a football team’s nickname (we didn’t change our moniker when our founding fathers stopped building ships with hammers). And when it involves a company who had done so much for the town that spawned the ungrateful football club in question, it’s a real slap in the face.

It’s fair to say I’m not a royalist at heart, even though the Queen is a West Ham supporter (I haven’t been able to confirm this personally but that’s what it said in the
Daily Mirror
, which is good enough for me). Had I ever been a monarchist, all those street parties would have cured that. I’d swapped my forklift truck for a typewriter and a career in journalism but, as a young reporter, I wasn’t given the big stories – so I got to cover the street parties. Hundreds of them. In fact, it felt as though I visited every patriotic knees-up held in Berkshire in 1977. Which is one of the reasons I jumped at the chance to swap general reporting for the sports desk soon after.

It was more politics than sport that made me want to become a journalist. Back then I was a bit of a lefty and wanted to change the world for the better. (Still am and still do, to be honest.) But I’d always been interested in sport and was on the verge of captaining England in football, cricket and rugby during various stages of my teens –in my imagination, that is.

The sports desk offered me a chance to learn a range of journalistic skills, and I will be forever grateful to the guys who took the time and trouble to teach me so many tricks of the trade when they could just as easily have been in the pub sinking pints of Courage Best. The acting sports editor in particular was a major guiding light in my early career. He answered to the name of Dibbo.

One of his many talents was to be able to swear in a way I’ve heard no British subject do before or since. He swore like an American, stringing long phrases together to come up with compound profanities that would make a squaddie blush. Think of Pepsi’s lip-smackin’ ad campaign of the 1970s, then substitute the most foul-mouthed abuse imaginable, and you’ll get the general idea. He was also a fantastic journalist, which is why he was the paper’s football correspondent as well as acting sports editor.

However, he was less than popular with the management of the football club whose affairs he was paid to report. Reading’s opinion of him wasn’t improved by an incident with a director’s Tupperware sandwich box, which Dibbo used to answer a call of nature on the team coach when the driver refused to let him off. Then there was the business with the fish and chips, which led to him being banned from travelling on the team bus altogether.

On this occasion, the man at the wheel had been persuaded to stop and allow his passengers the chance to buy something to eat before they hit the motorway for the long haul home, but he refused to pull over when it turned out the fish and chips they had all bought was half-cooked, cold and inedible.

No one quite knew what to do with it all until Dibbo came up with a solution. Once more they implored the driver to stop so Dibbo wouldn’t have to put his radical plan into action. And once
more he refused. Which is when the football correspondent of the
Reading Evening Post
opened the vent on the roof of the coach and began disposing of uneaten fish suppers through the gap.

Have you ever seen a coach carrying a team of sportsmen on the motorway – or any other road, come to that? They kinda stand out – they’ve generally got the team’s name on the side of the bus for one thing.

The driver of the heavy goods vehicle behind the coach on which Dibbo was now orchestrating the mass disposal of unwanted semi-fried food had certainly spotted the name Reading FC. So he knew exactly where to direct his complaint about what followed next. And, if he is to be believed, the poor man had a fair amount to complain about. One moment he is minding his own business driving south at a steady 70 mph down the M1. The next, his visibility is reduced to zero because his windscreen is covered with flying fish – coated in batter and accompanied by flying chips exploding from their flying wrappings.

By all accounts it was a minor miracle the bloke survived. If there truly was divine intervention that day, some might say it was the due to the piece of cod that passeth all understanding. But I’m not one of them. Anyway, the upshot of all this is the driver was compensated by the club (I believe Cup final tickets were involved) and Dibbo was banned from using the team coach to go to away games.

He wasn’t banned from home fixtures at Elm Park, though. That didn’t happen until he wrote a highly critical piece about how the club was run, pointing out that loyal fans were being let down season after season by a chairman, directors and manager who didn’t have the first idea what they were doing. He was right, too.

As a result, the
Reading Evening Post
was now looking for
someone to cover its local football club. I had done some reserve games, and Dibbo clearly reckoned I was ready for the first team. Much to several people’s surprise – not least my own – I got the nod.

Thoughts of using my journalistic brilliance to make this a better world began to fade. Instead, I now saw myself as a leading football correspondent, working for a national newspaper and having the pick of any game to cover – which, naturally, would always involve West Ham.

The day started really well. In the morning I went to the office – which was directly opposite the festival site for those of you who know Reading – expecting to carry out my normal duties before going to the match, but rather than give me a load of stuff to do Dibbo was happy for me sit quietly and do my preparatory homework while he did my work as well as his own. He really was a top bloke.

By the time I got to Elm Park I was armed with enough facts and figures to give Motty a run for his money (not that Motty would ever do a third division game of course – there’s not enough stardust for his liking). In fact my head was so full of the sort of vital information my readers would be demanding later that afternoon – the height of their centre half; Reading’s goal difference; the ref ’s inside leg measurement – that at first I didn’t notice some of the lads I’d worked with as a forklift truck driver in Bracknell when they started barracking me from the stand as I walked round to the press box.

They were curious about my reasons for being there, and it gave me an immense amount of pleasure to tell them. Because when I had handed in my notice no one at the factory believed I was truly swapping a life in the stores for one in newspapers. They’d heard
that sort of bullshit before – people leaving to get a glamorous job playing professional football or training to be an astronaut – and they weren’t going to be fooled again. I wasn’t exactly ostracised, but it was clear that making up such a whopper hadn’t gone down well with my workmates. In my final week they even stopped ‘discarding’ unwanted items and went back to throwing them away. It was really upsetting.

But now here I was on my way to the press box and grandly offering to take my doubters into the players’ lounge after the game. And if they still didn’t believe me, they could buy a copy of that evening’s
Post
, which, on the front page of the football special, would be displaying my byline. I tried not to sound arrogant as I explained that I had to be going now because I had work to do. Although I may have had an extra spring in my step as I skipped up the concrete stairs to take my place in the exclusive area reserved for the fourth estate.

You would think someone who was destined to be the country’s leading football writer would remember their first League game in the press box, wouldn’t you? Particularly as it turned out to be their last League game. But, for the life of me, I can’t recall the opposition that afternoon.

I do remember how extraordinarily difficult it is to write a running report of a football match for an evening paper, however. Unlike the reserve games I had covered, this wasn’t just a case of sitting back, observing proceedings, composing your thoughts and then typing up a few well-chosen words. To make the five o’clock edition a reporter must file copy as the game is being played. You don’t sit back, and there’s no time to compose your thoughts. You watch the match – and dictate your report over the
phone as you do so. The problem is, the action unfolds quicker than you can put together the grammatically and factually correct sentences that are required for a newspaper. As a result, you have to remember accurately what is taking place in front of your eyes while reporting what happened several minutes beforehand. It’s a bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time – knowing that several thousand people will be all too keen to point out any mistakes you have made the following day.

After the game I hung around briefly in the hope of picking up a couple of decent quotes for the piece I would be required to write for Monday’s paper, then hurtled back to the office to get a copy of that evening’s edition and see my report in print.

Dibbo was still at his desk when I got there. ‘How did I do?’ I asked.

‘How many people called Bennett were actually playing in this game?’ he wanted to know, squinting at me over the top of his glasses, which he was forever having to push back over the bridge of his nose.

‘Funny you should ask that,’ I told him. ‘There was one on each side. It made life quite difficult actually.’

‘Hmmm, thought it must have been something like that,’ he said quietly.

I enquired nervously if there had been a problem, and he rummaged around in the metal tray at his side before finding a copy of my story. He turned to the second sheet and began to read: ‘After winning a crunching tackle on the edge of the penalty area, Bennett laid off the ball to Bennett, who dropped his shoulder and waltzed round Bennett before putting in the perfect cross for Bennett to power home the header. Visiting keeper Bennett stood no chance.’

I waited for the tirade of abuse that was about to follow. It was some time before I could say anything. Sorry seemed as good a place as any to start.

‘What did you do – about all those Bennetts, I mean?’

Dibbo just smiled and shrugged. ‘I looked at the teamsheets and changed the names. No one will ever notice. Come on – let’s go and have a pint, you look like you need one.’

He was right. On both counts. A more senior colleague was asked to keep the good people of Reading apprised of their team’s fortunes for the rest of the season and the following year my mentor was allowed back in by the chairman, so I never did go on to be the nation’s No. 1 football correspondent.

I did finally get to see West Ham from inside a press box though. That, too, was down to Dibbo.

It was the 1980 Cup final. I couldn’t get a ticket for love nor money and, although I no longer worked for the
Post
, Dibbo got me in on a press trip organised by the paper’s owners. We had lunch beforehand with Daley Thompson (who two months later would win the first of his decathlon gold medals at the Moscow Olympics) and then went on to Wembley – with seats that offered the best view in the stadium.

Naturally, I’d have rather been on the terraces with the rest of the West Ham fans (honest, lads, it was hell having to accept all that corporate hospitality), but I tried to make the best of a bad job. If I recall correctly, some fella called Brooking scored a goal that day. Or was it Bennett?

I
HAVE A TERRIBLE
admission to make, and now seems like as good a time as any to own up to my sins: I have supported Manchester United.

It’s true: I was once a cockney red. In my defence I never stopped loving West Ham while I was seeing another club. Furthermore, I was very immature at the time. But I know now that it was wrong.

Before you judge me, let me try to explain. As a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old I had been sent to south Wales by my immediate employers to learn the basics of journalism – they clearly didn’t want to do it themselves, which was odd considering I had been taken on by a newspaper. There I found myself sharing a house with an even fresher-faced young man (unlike me he didn’t have a
stylish Zapata moustache), who came from somewhere called The North. His name was Bob. It still is, in fact.

It’s fair to say we were wary of one another to begin with. We had been allocated a student house on the outskirts of Cardiff with four other young wannabe members of our chosen profession and none of us had the faintest idea what the immediate future held for us.

As with any strangers trying to find some common ground, one of the first topics of conversation was football. We had all been instructed to turn up some time during the first weekend of January – which for any self-respecting supporter means the third round of the FA Cup. I was jubilant: the previous day West Ham had won at Southampton. Bob, on the other hand, was not so chuffed – it turned out he was a Man U supporter and they had been held to a draw at home by lowly Walsall. Three days later he was even more displeased when the Mancs lost the replay. Perhaps, looking back, I could have been more sympathetic at what must have been a difficult time for him.

What finally broke the ice was
The Sweeney
– the TV programme rather than the Flying Squad itself. Bob couldn’t understand a word of the rhyming slang that littered each episode, so I translated. And, as he gradually got to know his dog and bone from his dickie dirt, our friendship grew.

One of the many things we had in common was a pathological dislike of the city in which we now found ourselves living. So to cement our friendship we started going to Ninian Park on Friday evenings – which isn’t quite as silly as it sounds because, for much of that season, that was when Cardiff City played their home games. We supported whoever Cardiff were playing. (By the end of that season we were to take this to international level and, as two lone
Sassenachs, found ourselves in the midst of a baffled Tartan Army roaring on Scotland against Wales.)

Until this point I always thought of myself as a one-club man. But we were a long way from Upton Park, and once you start fooling around with other teams it’s hard to stop yourself. So when Bob suggested a threesome – him, me and Man Utd – it didn’t seem quite as grotesque as it sounds now. However, I wasn’t prepared to turn my back on West Ham completely; we had been in a relationship for many years by this time and you don’t give that up lightly. After examining my conscience I decided it would be OK to explore the exotic charms of the Red Devils if Bob was prepared to try a blind date with West Ham. We had ourselves a deal.

The year in question was 1975. We were on our way to Wembley. The mighty Manchester United, who only a few years before had been champions of Europe, were now in the old second division. It turned out to be a fascinating few months.

The first game we went to under our pact was West Ham v. Swindon in an FA Cup fourth-round replay at the County Ground. It was a mudbath. In fact, my overriding memory of West Ham’s Cup run that year is mud. It was as if we’d cornered the market in the stuff. The records show that there were 27,749 people in the ground watching Trevor Brooking and Patsy Holland score the goals that secured us a place in the fifth round and many of those were there to support West Ham. Be fair – that’s not bad for a wet Tuesday night in Wiltshire. It was certainly several thousand higher than Swindon’s average attendance in the third division.

Man Utd weren’t getting bad gates themselves. The glory years of Charlton, Best and Law were behind them, and the previous season had ended in a humiliating relegation. But former Chelsea
boss Tommy Docherty – the man once described as having more clubs than Jack Nicklaus – was putting together an exciting young side and the fans were turning out in huge numbers to support them. It is estimated that in the 1974/75 season Man Utd took 15,000 fans to Cardiff, 20,000 to Sheffield Wednesday and a staggering 25,000 to Bolton. At Old Trafford they never got fewer than 40,000, and in November more than 60,000 turned up to watch them play Sunderland. And all that in the second tier of English football at a time when attendances were falling because many people preferred to stay away rather than risk getting caught up in the violence making headline news with dispiriting regularity.

Manchester United’s travelling support – the so-called red army – had a reputation for causing trouble wherever it went. But then, so did West Ham fans. It’s true there were some serious headcases among both sets of supporters, just as there were at every club in the country, and no one is trying to defend how the violent minority behaved on occasions. In mitigation, though, it should be pointed out that the reception we got from the police as away supporters in the ’70s did nothing to ease the tension. We would be met at the station as the football specials pulled in and marched to our destination as if we were on a chain gang. You didn’t break ranks to get a pint or a bag of chips – it wasn’t permitted if you supported one of the nasty clubs. Local people would turn out to watch us go past – some hostile, others simply curious. Defiantly, we’d sing and we’d chant … usually with one eye on the police dogs you knew were itching to get their teeth into your denims and the other eye on the police horses ready to happily crush every bone in your foot if you failed to stay in line. If you did catch the eye of one of the policemen you realised just how much they wished you were somewhere else.

It’s a strange sensation, but when you’re made to feel like a criminal even the most law-abiding of citizens can be tempted to believe they are entitled to behave like one.

Before we go any further, let me make it perfectly plain that neither myself nor Bob, who is now a highly respected sports journalist, are, or ever have been, football hooligans. But Bob could look after himself. I knew his northern accent wouldn’t cause him any problems as a temporary member of the claret and blue army – we have recruits from all over the country after all. I, on the other hand, was concerned that my southern pronunciation would not go down well in Manchester. Bob told me not to worry, explaining that Man United have always had a large following in London and the cockney reds were much respected by their Mancunian brethren – mainly because they included some of the most terrifying individuals in the country at that time.

However, I come from a long line of cowards. In fact, cowards run in our family – and none of them run faster than me (boom boom!). Actually, when you’ve been given a chasing around a strange town by a bunch of morons intent on giving you a good kicking it really is surprising how rapid a person can be.

In the ’70s, after an away game, as you made your way back to the station and cattle trucks that passed as football specials, you’d think carefully before answering anyone who asked you the time – especially if the person making the enquiry was wearing a watch. Your best bet, if you found yourself alone and confronted by a group of young gentlemen with scarves tied around their wrists asking you some pointless question with the sole purpose of determining whether you had a local accent, was to sprint back in the direction from which you’d just come, then head off down the side roads.
Left here, right there, each turn an instantaneous decision – not knowing nor caring which direction you were going in, just trying to stay two steps ahead of your pursuers and hoping the patron saint of away supporters would look after you.

Old Trafford, for me, was about to become a home ground. Even so, the prospect of standing on the Stretford End pretending to be harder than the hard cases who surrounded me was not something that appealed greatly. Couldn’t we sit in the main stand instead? Apparently not. It’s the terraces for you, my lad – and let’s hear no more about it.

God knows how I got away with it – perhaps it was the camel hair coat (which will never truly go out of style while the real hardmen are still allowed to buy their own clothes); maybe it was the fact I kept my trap shut as much as possible. What limited experience I’ve had of truly dangerous people is that they say little and stare a lot. But, for whatever reason, I increasingly found myself in the midst of the red horde and being treated as one of their own.

Sometimes I’d be offered a cigarette, which I’d take with a curt nod and wait for someone to light it for me. And on the rare occasions we found ourselves anywhere near the fighting that was becoming synonymous with Man Utd I’d look at the skirmish as if weighing up the possibilities then simply shake my head – implying it was too minor for a cockney red to become involved and we’d leave this to the Manc infantry.

I was starting to wonder if there was a career in method acting for me. At the time it was looking more likely than a career in journalism. I was not enjoying the course I had been sent on, and got a reputation as a troublemaker when I tried to convince my fellow students to join the National Union of Journalists and
take industrial action to improve our terms and conditions. (Not only was 1975 a vintage year for hooliganism, it was pretty good for strikes too.)

Bob felt the same way as I did – we wanted to be real reporters, not schoolroom scribes trying to master the libel law and the workings of local government. And we didn’t like the nightlife in Cardiff. We’d walk into a pub and the place would go silent. Or we’d try our luck at one of the city’s discos and invariably draw a blank.

Up until then I hadn’t had been much of a one for discos. Some people just aren’t meant to boogie. On the rare occasions I had been to clubs with my mates in the past I’d forgone the dancing and stood with a pint looking like a really interesting sort of bloke, waiting for the girls to come to me. As a strategy it was spectacularly unsuccessful. But Bob taught me a few steps – I still use them today when the occasion demands – and with a sophisticated panache guaranteed to turn heads we’d hit the floor to the sounds of ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ and ‘Lady Marmalade’.
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?

I can’t think why we didn’t have more success with the opposite gender: I remember telling one beguiling Welsh wench that, being a journalist, I was an expert in shorthand and ready to take down anything she said at a moment’s notice. Rather than giggle knowingly at this astonishing witticism as I had anticipated, she lamped me with a right hook.

Things got so bad we decided to forget about Cardiff altogether and a bunch of us jumped into Bob’s canary yellow Opel Kadett and headed for the other side of the Severn Bridge. We ended up in a pub in Bristol with the two roughest-looking strippers who have ever disrobed in the name of eroticism. I don’t want to be unkind
here, but these two troupers were so repulsive they could make beer curdle.

We were still laughing about it on the way back to Cardiff when one of the guys sitting in the back dropped his cigarette down the side of the seat. As he was sitting closest to the petrol tank the general mood of hilarity changed quite quickly when he told us what he’d done. Bob was forced to make an emergency stop on the hard shoulder and we tore out the back seat to get to the smouldering Player’s No. 6 before it became necessary to look up just what the ‘fire’ part of a third party, fire and theft insurance policy really covers.

I realise the odds are heavily stacked against Hollywood superstar Steve Martin being on the M4 that night, but some years later he and John Candy re-enacted a scene that took our local difficulty to its ultimate conclusion in
Planes, Trains & Automobiles.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?

In a desperate attempt to be fair here, the journalism course did have its moments. On one occasion we were taken to a police training school – I think the object of the exercise was to make it plain to all concerned that journalists and police are born to mistrust one another. It’s genetic.

The best day of all was when we went down a pit – at least the blokes did: the girls weren’t allowed. Being something of a troublemaking rabble-rouser, my sympathies had been with the miners during their struggles with Ted Heath’s Tory government, which had been voted out the year before. But if they hadn’t been I’d have still become their most ardent supporter after spending a day underground in a mine. You really cannot believe the conditions in which those guys had to labour unless you’ve seen them for yourself.
And talk about taking your work home with you! That coal dust gets everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Your ears, your nose, your … well, you get the picture. And you don’t get rid of it in a hurry – it was weeks before I could get in a hot bath without the water instantly turning black.

These excursions notwithstanding, most of the time spent learning the rudiments of our chosen craft was desperately tedious. But at least we always had the football at weekends.

When West Ham’s season had kicked off in August with a thumping defeat at Manchester City I never dreamed that a few months later I would be queuing up to get into Old Trafford to support the red half of the city. But here I was, regularly doing just that. To be honest, all these years on and the games we saw have become something of a blur. But one that readily comes to mind is the Cardiff fixture. Such was our dislike of the Welsh capital we made a special point of going to Old Trafford to watch them play there. United won 4–0 and I saw Steve Coppell make his Man Utd debut.

There were a couple of United players from that team who ended up at Upton Park. Bustling striker Stuart Pearson would, among other things, later provide the cross-shot that Trevor Brooking headed home to beat Arsenal in the 1980 Cup final, while midfield general Lou ‘Lou, Skip to My Lou’ Macari was destined to be West Ham manager for all of six months. Who’d have bet on that? Come to think of it, Lou might. He was accused of betting on just about everything else.