Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  My compliments slip had a telephone number. I wanted to know more about the National Front. I wanted to understand its relationship to football supporters.

  I phoned Nationalist Books and the man who answered recognized my name. An eerie moment—was I already known among members of the National Front?—until I realized that the man who answered the phone was Ian Anderson. Ian Anderson was also, it seemed, in charge of the switchboard.

  Mr Anderson was not very friendly, despite his encouraging note. Journalists made him nervous. It is possible that anyone not a member of the National Front made him nervous, but I wasn’t to know that yet. At the time, I was writing for a Sunday newspaper that had been particularly unfriendly to Mr Anderson. In fact, no Sunday newspaper—or any other paper on any other day of the week—had succeeded in being particularly friendly to Mr Anderson. This was perhaps why Mr Anderson was a little unfriendly himself. And you can’t really blame him: once you’ve had your teeth kicked in so many times you learn to close your mouth.

  He wanted to know why I would be any different from the others. Why should he speak to me?

  This was not a simple question: how do you reassure a racist militant that he doesn’t arouse feelings of hostility in you without saying that you, too, are a racist militant? I’m not a racist militant and, besides, he would not have believed me if I had said that I was one. So I said only that I was different.

  Yes, Mr Anderson persisted, but why should you be any different?

  Because I am, I repeated.

  The fact is I think I was different. I wasn’t hostile to the National Front. I couldn’t take it seriously: I really did regard it as a convocation of loons, although I probably didn’t know enough to justify making such a judgement. When I came to England as a student, everyone took the National Front very seriously: opposing it was a popular cause, a rallying point at the college bar for articulate, intelligent, liberal-thinking people animated by their distaste for what the National Front represented. Intelligent liberal-thinking people are meant to show a tolerance for dissent, but the National Front was fascist and so intolerable that it made liberals behave as if they weren’t liberals. This, I felt, was a tribute to the National Front. The National Front was evil. It was an evil of such an order that many of my friends believed that its members should be banished from society—imprisoned at the least; some wanted to see them maimed. Their feelings were that strong. This, too, was a tribute to the National Front. There was an element of fear in this, and not without cause: the local left-wing bookshop had been repeatedly fire-bombed, and it was said that this has been done by the National Front; there had also been National Front marches with Nazi banners that had ended with people being badly kicked in the head. For my friends, it would have been inconceivable that one might actually talk to a member of the National Front, let alone have a conversation. And that was why I was trying to have one. I was curious. I had a chance to meet the devil and I wanted to find out if he deserved his bad reputation.

  I would have hoped, however, that the devil wasn’t going to make his appearance in the shape of Ian Anderson. He was not a credible Satan figure. Photographs of him featured in the papers and broadsheets that Anderson himself had sent me: a tiny, tight-lipped little man, dressed in a suit with an outsize tie, at the head of the marches, always surrounded by big boys in boots. I had come across an article by Anderson, ‘Naughty but nice’, a heavily ironic account of a coach journey (‘There is no reason why a coach trip need be boring and dull’) to a Sinn Fein gathering. The accompanying photograph showed a minibus surrounded by lads attacking it with bricks—one was on the bonnet smashing the windscreen with his Doc Martens. The caption was: ‘Members of the public have meaningful dialogue with IRA supporters.’

  It was becoming evident, though, that I was not going to have a dialogue, meaningful or not, with Mr Anderson. At least not on this phone call. Suddenly he broke off our conversation. We’ll be in touch, he said abruptly. And then hung up.

  He was true to his word. More publications arrived. As before, each was delivered in a plain brown envelope, my name and address written out by hand, no other markings except for the Croydon postmark. These publications were different from the first batch; these were for grown-ups. Mr Anderson must have believed that I was different, after all.

  These had tides like Nationalist Today or Heritage and Destiny. Inside there were history lessons: on the anniversary of the fourteenth-century Peasants Revolt or the traditional British folk song or the achievements of the Vikings. There were intellectual appreciations: of Hilaire Belloc and William Morris. And a denunciation of Jacob Epstein and abstract art (‘Epstein’s work is not meaningless; it is sufficiently representational to project and reflect strong and racially alien aesthetics’). There was a four-part science series on racial inequality (‘Professor Arthur Jensen’s paper is a major breakthrough for the forces of science and reason over the opaque murk of Marxist, liberal and Levantine cant and ideologically inspired bigotry’). These publications, however distasteful their contents, were not unsophisticated and revealed how deliberate was the National Front’s effort to recruit football supporters: Bulldog was a recruitment paper; it was down-market, the National Front trying to talk to the football supporter in his own language. I can see now that the National Front had modelled Bulldog on the Sun—on the publication that the lads read. The lads, it would seem, were not held in especially high regard.

  And then, a few days later, I heard from Neil. He called me at home from a payphone in a pub. He understood, he said, that I had been speaking to a member of the executive board and that it looked likely that he would get approval for me to come along to Bury. The date for the party had been fixed, and it was only a few days away—Saturday, the fourteenth of April. Could I make it? He would meet me at the station. He insisted on putting me up for the night. I would be his guest. I arrived early and watched Neil setting up. The party was being held at a pub which—in the optimistic belief that its management has changed—I will refer to as the Green Man. It was in the centre of town, and Neil had reserved it from six until closing time at eleven. He had stereo equipment, a collection of records and tapes, party streamers which he had already hung from the ceiling and a large cardboard box filled with packets of cheese-and-onion-flavoured crisps. It was a party. An ordinary Saturday night party in a pub.

  The others, Neil said, very preoccupied, would be arriving from London shortly. And he kept repeating that. They’ll be here any minute, he said only a few moments later.

  It was evident that Neil was anxious. I wondered if it was evident to him that I was as well. For Neil the evening represented a chance to prove himself, and, if things went wrong, then his career as a fascist would advance no further. I had never thought of fascism as an endeavour characterized by its career prospects but that was what was at stake for Neil. Most National Front members whom I met later would be unemployed; many, it seemed to me, would remain unemployed for a very long time. Unlike the football supporters I was meeting, the rank and file membership of the National Front consisted mainly of people who felt, with some justice, that they had nowhere else to go. Neil was different: he worked in a meat-packing plant and had risen to the position of a middle-level supervisor. But it was clear that he believed he stood to gain more by the National Front than by anything he might do at his work.

  I was less sure about my prospects: what would the evening mean for me if things went wrong? I had seen nothing to change my view about the National Front. I still couldn’t take it seriously, but by that I mean that I couldn’t take it seriously as a political party. I didn’t see the political threat of fascism in Britain—at least not now and not from this lot. But that was armchair stuff. What I did take seriously was the National Front’s bad press. I took its record of violence seriously. And that was what I found myself worrying about. I would be spending the night here, and I was not comfortable about what might be in store.

  While Neil was hooking up the
stereo, I went to the bar and chatted with members of the pub staff. I wondered how much they knew about what was going on. I ordered a pint of bitter and asked the barmaid what she thought about having a party for, well, you know—? I couldn’t bring myself to say the words ‘National Front’; I thought it was something to be quiet about.

  She didn’t understand what I was asking. She thought I meant Neil and all his friends. Everyone knew Neil and his friends. They were regulars. And everyone liked Neil.

  No, not Neil. But the others. The NF, I said finally. What do you think about holding a party for the National Front?

  It’s an honour, she said, now clearly understanding. It’s an honour and a privilege.

  This surprised me.

  So she explained. The Green Man, she said, prided itself on being the most racialist pub in England. That was her word: racialist. There were other racialist pubs, she said. In fact, there were two more in Bury. But none was as consistently racialist as the Green Man. The Green Man, she continued, had never served a coloured person. No black or Paki had ever had a drink at the Green Man. And everyone who worked at the Green Man was proud of its record. It was also why everyone regarded it as a privilege to hold a party here for the National Front. They felt they had earned it.

  No wogs, her partner behind the bar added, perhaps for clarification.

  That’s right, she said. No coloured people of any description.

  I was surprised. I had not expected to hear racism expressed so explicitly by people working behind the bar of a pub—one owned by a brewery that was itself a public company. The fact was I hadn’t expected to hear racism expressed so explicitly by people I had only just met, regardless of where they worked. I felt soiled by it, implicated because I couldn’t imagine these things being said unless it was assumed that all of us, the bar staff and the National Front and me, thought the same. The barmaid was attractive—she had black hair and a soft oval face—and it was disconcerting trying to reconcile this face with the ugliness that came out of it.

  We also, she said, don’t serve Americans.

  Oh, not you, she said quickly, registering my unease. We’re serving you, aren’t we? The Americans we don’t like are the servicemen. We never serve the servicemen. We don’t like them and don’t like them here. We want them to take their aeroplanes and go back to America.

  There were American air bases throughout East Anglia, and Bury St Edmunds must have been one of the towns the servicemen visited on leave. The National Front, I remembered, was against the American military presence in England. It was un-English.

  Last night, her partner offered again, a Friday night, six American servicemen came in here and we wouldn’t serve them. One was a nigger. They got very uppity and started to argue. It’s a free country, they said, and I said that’s right and that’s why I’m not serving you. That made them even more angry so some of the lads had to take them outside and deal with them. They had a go at them up against the wall, just outside that door there. If you step outside, you can still see the blood. There was a lot of blood.

  I was having to think carefully about what I was hearing: I had spent fifteen minutes in an ordinary brewery pub in this perfectly ordered middle-class town and had been invited by the publican to look at the dried pool of blood just outside his front door.

  More people arrived, and I was introduced to them as a journalist. This information was not accepted with the grace and interest that I would have liked. And then I spotted Cliff. An ugly face, but at least one I recognized. Cliff, I called out, relieved, grateful, expectant. But Cliff didn’t answer. Cliff, I repeated. It is Cliff, isn’t it? I asked myself. He was staring at me. He seemed to be refusing to remember me. And then he became very agitated.

  What’s he doing here? Cliff asked; he was looking for Neil. Who said he could come?

  He found Neil and I watched as Neil tried to reassure him—telling him that it had been approved in London—but I could see that Cliff was unhappy. He looked at me, hard. ‘I don’t like him here. Why weren’t we told that he’d be coming?’

  I thought that now, after all, might be a good time to pop outside. I had no intention of looking at the wall and the blood that had dried on it, but I had decided that I wasn’t ready, just yet, for the evening ahead and that I would do well to organize my thoughts.

  What was I doing here? I looked at my watch. It was seven-forty. The last train to Cambridge would be leaving in about two minutes.

  I crossed the street and sat on a wall. I sat there for a long time. It grew dark while I sat there. I was not prepared for this; that was evident. So I sat there and decided that I would have to prepare myself. I didn’t know how I was going to do this. More guests arrived. Many, like Cliff, were cultural anomalies, skinheads, out of touch, not simply with what was current, but—everything. Life. The future. The world. A blond lad turned up. He was dressed in a black leather SS uniform. He had a red and black Nazi arm-band.

  I was having a hard time persuading myself that this was just an ordinary pub party. Blond men in black SS uniforms with Nazi arm-bands do not show up at ordinary pub parties. Inside, the not-so-ordinary-pub-party-goers were starting to chant.

  Bury skinheads we are here

  Shag your women and drink your beer.

  Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

  Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

  It was dark. By now my train must have been half-way to Cambridge. I was not sitting in it. I was sitting on a wall listening to people chant sieg heil. There was, I decided, no choice. I would have to re-enter the pub, but would make sure that I then got very, very drunk.

  The pub was packed with people. I went straight to the bar and ordered three pints, which I lined up, one in front of the other, on the beer mat. I would make it to the end of the evening. I did not know where I would be when that time came, but this way, it might not matter.

  Mid-way through my first pint, I found that someone had decided to befriend me. Neither of us knew why. I was, in his view, from the media, and he had made a rule of never speaking to the media. But having permitted himself to speak to me, he had some difficulty stopping. I was about to discover that, wherever I went in the pub, my new companion would always be there, next to me, telling me that he never spoke to anyone from the media. He was round and covered with fuzzy hair. His name was Phil Andrews.

  Phil Andrews was in his early thirties and over the course of a decade had lived a life of several extremes. He had trained as a policeman, but gave it up. He then became a militant communist, but gave that up, too. And now, for a while at least, he had become a career fascist. He had just been asked to help run the Young National Front, an important position—its aim was to recruit new members from schools and colleges, traditionally the ‘breeding grounds’ of the left—and Phil must have been picked for the job because he knew so much about the other side.

  None of Phil’s recruits would have been at tonight’s gathering. It was not a collegiate crowd. Everyone here would have been a Bulldog reader, drawn from the football grounds. I had heard that the football grounds were ideal for recruiting new members—Ian Anderson had said that there was nowhere else in Britain where you would find so much discontented youth in one place—but the problem, having brought them together, was to keep them from fighting. Neil had said the same thing at the start of the evening: his task, as the chairman, was to keep the Chelsea and West Ham supporters from having a go at each other.

  My new fuzzy friend Phil was disgusted by football violence—or at least he put up a good show of disgust. According to Phil, it was all of the government’s making. The government had the power to stop the violence if it wanted to, Phil believed, but it hadn’t because it was in its interest to keep the violence going. It was in its interest to turn working people against each other. It deflected working people from having to address the real problems of their lives.

  Spoken, I thought, like a true Marxist. There must be some comfort in being able to reuse, in his new capacity as a
member of the extreme right, many of the old arguments that he had developed when a member of the extreme left. But Phil was manifestly upset about football violence—the more he talked about it the more distressed he became—and he wasn’t about to be interrupted.

  He was upset, for instance, that the National Front was always being blamed for crowd violence, which, he repeated, he found disgusting. The National Front was blamed for the riots in France and the deaths at Heysel.

  One day, Phil said, there will be riots all over Britain. Those will be organized by the NF. But not now. People are always saying that the NF is responsible for the football riots. But what would possibly be the point? Even if we could organize riots of this kind, what we would get out of them? Why would we want to organize riots in Europe?

  Phil wanted me to understand this point—it was a complex one—and so he repeated it: Even if we could organize riots of this kind, wha would be the point?

  Phil then repeated it again.

  I looked around the room. It had filled up with Cliff-lookalikes, and Neil was playing the music—now at a fairly high volume—that was the most appropriate for heavy black boots. It was an antiquated, numbingly monotoned derivative of punk that consisted almost wholly of a crushing, unchanging percussion and an equally crushing, unchanging electric guitar. It had got the lads dancing, although at first there were not many—eight, maybe ten.

  The way they danced was intensely physical: they all huddled together in the middle of the room, and, rubbing each other’s head with one hand—most were shaved on top—and holding themselves closely together with the other, they jumped up and down. Each tune was played at the same brutal and breathless speed, and the lads, to keep up, had to do a lot of jumping. In fact, I don’t recall ever having seen people jump up and down so fast, especially people who were tied together in such a peculiar knot, with their arms and hands this way and that. The tune ended, the lads bent over, breathing heavily, Neil put on something else which my untutored ear was unable to distinguish from the last thing he had taken off, and the lads were off again: they clasped each other, rubbed their heads a bit and started jumping up and down. This looked distinctly ridiculous, but was apparently the thing that everyone had in mind when they talked about an NF disco. Somewhere in the middle was the birthday boy. The NF disco, I remembered, was also a birthday party.