by Bill Buford
A chant broke out—the first that afternoon—and it grew louder as more supporters appeared, entering the square from the various side-streets that fed it.
England.
England.
England.
England.
There were more people.
England.
England.
England.
England.
Now that I could take it in, the crowd was larger than I had expected, not the four thousand who had begun the march, but still one of considerable size—more than a thousand. They were appearing from all directions; they had all taken up this chant. They were celebrating: the national side had won.
I remained leaning against the wall, and remember saying aloud: My, my, my.
Many things fell in place. This chant: it was the only one I had heard in a day otherwise characterized by its enforced, sullen silence. And now: this declaration for England. It was such a simple but enormous thought: these fools, despised at home, ridiculed in the press, incapable of being contained by any act of impulsive legislation that the government had devised, wanted an England to defend. They didn’t want Europe; they didn’t understand Europe and didn’t want to. They wanted a war. They wanted a nation to belong to and fight for, even if the fight was this absurd piece of street theatre with the local Italian police.
I was feeling a little concerned, however. While I found these nationalist celebrations interesting to observe, I did not believe that the Italian police had disappeared. They may have pretended to disappear, but they would be back—with reinforcements. I was convinced of it and worried by it. Where would they come from? And how? I looked round but there was not a policeman in sight.
None of the supporters was worried. They had adjusted to their victory and were taking it in: they had beaten up the Italian police; the police had run away. Having had their day, the supporters now headed for the match. And so they turned and started walking up the hill that led to the ground.
Did they really think that they would now be able to stroll casually to the game? They were relaxed, chatty and, I felt, incomprehensibly stupid.
We walked through an intersection. I looked in both directions: no police. I looked up: no helicopters. There wasn’t even any press. Why? Were they being held back behind some police line, out of sight? Was something about to happen that the press would not be allowed to see? It was eerie. Why was I the only one who appeared to be worried? There was no traffic and no one else in the streets, although I could see people looking out through their windows. I was starting to feel agitated. Where should I go? Should I flee? I wasn’t about to walk in the direction in which the police had retreated; they would be waiting. Everyone was climbing up the hill, hundreds and hundreds of supporters, filling another street from side to side.
I made a point, this time, of getting up to the front. Something was going to happen, and I didn’t want to get caught in the middle. I didn’t want to get hit from behind.
About half-way up the hill, it happened.
It started with tear-gas, and, strangely, I was relieved to see it: there was something to respond to. The quantity of tear-gas, however, was enormous—greater than anything that had been used so far—and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The canisters, shot high into the air, followed a long, slow arc and came crashing down in the middle of the crowd. They seemed to come out of nowhere, one after another. It was as if they had been fired by a high-powered cannon or were being shot from the balconies of the nearby flats, as though tear-gas snipers had been planted there hours before. There were so many canisters that I covered my head. Several landed near me—close enough to be dangerous as missiles in their own right.
This was the retaliation I had feared. The smoke was everywhere, and I was afraid of what I might see emerging out of the brown clouds. I started running. I was up at the front of the crowd and made a point of remaining at the front. I ran hard. In this afternoon of continuous running, I never ran as fast as I ran then. I wanted to be as far away as possible. The police would be out for revenge and I didn’t want to be the object of it.
I sprinted to the top of the hill. I was the first one to reach it, with most of the supporters about twenty yards behind me, and as I arrived at the crest I saw them: the police. They were waiting down at the bottom of the hill, as if behind the starting line of a race—all primed, alert, leaning forward slightly, waiting for the signal, truncheons in hand. Behind them was another line: it consisted of more police with truncheons. Behind them was another line: more police with truncheons. There was a fourth line: the police with guns. And behind them was some kind of arrangement of vehicles: cars, vans and armoured personnel carriers. I would notice later that three large military helicopters circled above. Since arriving in Sardinia, I had seen a lot of police, but never as many police as I saw now.
I said: Shit, shit, shit.
I had run into a trap. The pretence of a police ‘retreat’, the tear-gas, the hill hiding what was on the other side: it had all been a trap.
I looked round, admiring the details. The street was very narrow, and the houses were built alongside each other, without alleys or passageways. Nice touch. There were no side-streets. It was a corridor of punishment. If I carried on, I would run straight into the police waiting at the bottom; I would be killed. They would not intend to kill me—it would be an accident—but they would do so all the same. If I turned round and went the other way, I would, once I emerged out of the tear-gas, run straight into the other mob of police. I did not think they would kill me—for some reason, I was equally confident about that—but I was certain that they would injure me badly. I did not want to be injured badly. I concluded, therefore, that there was no way out. I was trapped. I was impressed, but trapped nevertheless.
Shit, shit, shit.
I looked back down at the policemen. They were still waiting, leaning forward. I recognized one, an older one, with a round face and woolly eyebrows. He was one of the uniformed superintendents, and I had watched him trying to contain the crowd as it surged down the Via Roma. His face had been memorable—it was humane, sympathetic, expressive, warm. It was a different face now; it was hard and full of hate.
The other supporters had now charged over the crest of the hill and saw what lay ahead. Seeing that they, too, were trapped, they did the thing that anyone else would do in the same situation: they panicked. There was a petrol station a little further down the hill, a self-service Esso station, and behind it was a narrow passageway. It was the only escape. Why hadn’t I seen it? Immediately, this passageway to safety, however, took on the appearance of a passageway to death, as all the supporters rushed towards it at once. The passageway, not more than two feet across, was barred by a shoulder-high gate. It looked dangerous, and somebody started screaming ‘Hillsborough’, afraid of being crushed.
Just I was wondering if it would be worth the risk of joining them, I looked back down at the police and saw that they were charging up the hill: each of the great lines, one after the other, everyone sprinting, his head tilted slightly down, his truncheon swinging back and forth. Each one had this same look of powerful and uncompromising hatred. It was the intensity that impressed me; it was wild and exciting and savage. They had probably been waiting at the bottom of the hill for a long time, listening to reports from other parts of the city, counting up the injuries done to their colleagues, the damage to their homes, their property. They had been insulted and were now indignant and, in all likelihood, also afraid—tense, expectant, waiting for the first supporter to appear at the crest of the hill. And then it occurred to me: that was me. I thought about my clothes: a cotton shirt, shorts, dirty trainers. I looked like one of them. The police, I suddenly realized, had identified me as one of the leaders: I was about to be punished by the leadership fallacy.
I found myself regretting so many things.
My arrogant attitude towards those heavy, yellow plastic press badges, for instance. I wanted o
ne. One would be useful now. In my wallet somewhere I had some tattered press credentials but there wasn’t enough time. I imagined digging around for them and then displaying the limp, filthy things—one press pass was in Turkish—while running backwards in the face of several hundred truncheon wielding policemen and then being beaten to the ground.
I looked back down the hill. Time, in that punishing, familiar way, was starting to slow down, and I felt I was watching every step each policeman took, and, although I knew they were running with great determination, they didn’t seem to be running very fast. They seemed to be running in water. Their faces were vivid and distinct. Most of those faces were looking at me. I found myself reviewing my prospects again: go forward, get killed; go backwards, get injured. Fly? Can’t fly. Damn, I wish I could fly.
What would you do?
What I did was this: I crossed the street. I wanted to get as far away as possible from the Esso station and the thousand or so supporters crushed into its corner. That was where the police would end up; I could see that. So I crossed the street and got between two parked cars. I took one last look at the police—very close—and got down on all fours (bits of gravel pressed against the skin of my knees), covered my head and curled up into a ball on the ground. I surrendered.
I thought: I fooled them.
I thought: I’ve deprived them of the chance to beat me up. You can’t beat up someone who has surrendered and is lying on the ground.
And then I thought: Maybe they’ll truncheon me once en route to the other supporters. I had been truncheoned before; it stings, but the sting soon goes away.
I noticed three things the first time I was hit. One was the effort to ensure that I was hit powerfully. My head was down but I could tell that the policeman, rather than smacking me once on his way to the other supporters, had come to a complete stop: I could see his boots. He then pulled back his truncheon and paused, aiming his blow. I thought: he won’t do it.
And then I thought: OK, OK, so I was wrong.
Second, the target. It was my kidney. The policeman, I infer, had sized up the situation—fat man on the ground, curled into a ball, head covered with hands, cotton T-shirt rising up the back slightly—and concluded that the kidney, thus exposed, was the most obvious target: that was where he could do the greatest damage.
Third, I noticed that the blow did not sting. It hurt. It sent a sharp impulse of energy—like an electric thread—from the point of impact straight to my stomach.
There was a fourth thing. The policeman did not leave. He hit me again. This, I admit, surprised me. I thought I had fooled them. Then he hit me again. This, inevitably, surprised me less. Then he hit me again. This was no surprise at all. By the time he had hit me five times, I realized that he was not going to leave. He was going to stand over me, taking his time, lifting his truncheon, aiming it and then smashing my kidney. Each blow went to the same spot, the kidney. And each one, I found, hurt just as much as the one that came before it.
There was a fifth thing. Not only was this policeman not going to leave, but he was to be joined by a colleague. This did not make sense—why waste another policeman on me, when there were so many people still to beat up?—but the temptation must have been too great: here, on the ground, showing little resistance, was a perfectly adequate specimen, even if a bit fat. He couldn’t pass it up. The second policeman went for my head. My head was covered by my hands, and I remember thinking: although it hurts having my hands smashed up, I am grateful that I thought to cover my head with my hands because I would not want to see my head smashed up. The second policeman really wanted to see my head smashed up. I infer this from the damage he inflicted upon my hands—each knuckle was colourfully bruised, except for one, which was both bruised and broken. I believe his intention was to smash up my fingers so badly that finally I would pull my hands away—thus exposing an expanse of skull—so that he could then smash up my head. After a while, he gave up on the smashing-the-fingers tactic and took to pulling them away, grabbing my fingers with one hand, while pummelling the intermittently exposed bit of skull with his other.
The two policemen were soon joined by a colleague. It was getting pretty crowded, but there were still my shoulders. They became the concern of the third policeman. His real concern, I concluded after examining the bruising, was not the shoulders as such; he was trying to get to the collar-bone. He, too, was trying to move me around with his free hand, so he could get a clear view of his target; it was the snap-crackle-pop sound that he was after, the one the collar-bone makes when it breaks in half.
All of this was exceptionally painful, as would be expected, but my experience of it was different from that of the others who were being beaten up. Their experience was one of simple pain. For me, it was more complicated, because I knew that I would be writing about it. While being beaten up, I was thinking about what it was like being beaten up. I was trying to retain the details, knowing that I would need them later. I thought for instance that this experience was not so different from the one I had witnessed in Turin several years before when a Juventus fan, who had also surrendered, was beaten up by a number of Manchester United supporters. I thought of the fact that I could even think of this coincidence and marvelled at the human mind’s capacity to accommodate so many different things at once. And I thought about that, the fact that, while being beaten up, I could think about the human mind’s capacity to accommodate so many different things at once. I thought about the expenses I had incurred and was grateful that I was going to get something out of this trip after all. But mainly I was thinking about the pain. It was unlike anything I had known and I wanted to remember it.
The beatings went on so long that I was convinced the police would have to stop from exhaustion. But they didn’t let up, and after a while the blows blurred together and became one terribly loud crashing noise. I felt explosions of energy and, up and down my body, a long, protracted sensation of heat. It burned the way a fire burns—hot, hot, hot. I want to say it was a white heat, but only because I was seeing white. My vision was intermittently lost and I saw white flashes. These flashes seemed to emanate from the points where I was hit, as if some network of nerves had become overcharged and was carrying too much sensation.
As the beatings continued, I grew a little worried. I did not think that my kidney could sustain this much punishment and I was resigned to spending the night in an Italian hospital. I noticed that I was breathing very heavily. I was gasping for air but unable to get any. Why did I need more oxygen—what body function, in an experience so inherently passive, was requiring it? The need for air increased; it was imperative; I had to have it. Suddenly I felt that I was going to suffocate, and this made me angry and I stood up and wanted to fight back, but the moment I raised myself up I was hit across the forehead and I blocked one truncheon with my arm but was hit across the forehead again and then on my chin. I was astonished by the intensity of feeling that I saw on the faces of the policemen. It would have been impossible for me to communicate with them, to convey something powerful enough to counter the strength of their hatred. I was not a human being. I was some kind of object, some thing. Strangely, I thought of myself as a fact, one that they wanted to hurt, and I dropped back to the ground and curled up and covered my head, and one policeman went for my kidney, and another went for my head, and another went for my shoulders. I had lost interest in wanting to describe this experience, except that I briefly recall noting that I had lost interest in wanting to describe it. The experience then became something I wanted to end. But it didn’t end. I don’t know how much longer it went on. I don’t know what happened next. I had ceased to be a person writing about it. My next memory is that finally it ended. It was over. It had stopped because there was no one left to beat up.
Afterwards, I noticed little except my pain. I ran round in circles and went from one side of the street to the other. I couldn’t stand still. My body was full of a sharp electric stinging, and I was trying to shake it out but i
t wouldn’t go away. Slowly I started to take in what had happened.
Everyone was very still, except for the people who were writhing from injuries. There were many people on the ground. It was very quiet. The sense was of the old cliché made real, that the life had been beaten out of the people there. Near me were several lads who had got caught standing up—too proud to curl up and fall to the ground. One was bleeding badly, and all around him were great globs of his blood, balled up and animate, seeming to breathe. A deep gash ran from his ankle up the side of his leg and past his knee, and two flaps of skin fell off heavily to the side. Next to him was a fellow leaning against the side of a car. He was wheezing and throwing his head from side to side and his eyes were glassy. When I approached him, he started screaming and swinging his arms to protect his head and then he collapsed, clutching his leg. He was in shock, and his leg was broken: he had been beaten until his thigh-bone cracked into several parts. I thought it must be difficult to beat up someone with such force that it breaks the thigh-bone into several parts.
Most people had been beaten round the head, and their shirts were covered with blood. One was hunched up and retching from the pain, and on seeing that the supporter was vomiting, a policeman kicked him in the ribs. I remember the face of this policeman. I saw him on the television two days later at a press conference.
There were in fact several supporters vomiting. It wasn’t from drink. They were vomiting from pain.
Supporters were arriving from the other side of hill—some had got caught there as well—and they appeared, in two and threes, many holding their heads, wrapped up in T-shirts and bits of clothing. The number of head injuries surprised me; they included the girl with the silky pink blouse. She had lost her spectacles and had been clubbed across the forehead. She was bleeding badly—there appeared to be a cut just below the hairline—and the blood poured down her face and neck and across her blouse. Her boy-friend had not been hurt and, although holding and comforting her, he was very upset. They were both upset. They were trying to persuade the Italian police to get a doctor or an ambulance, but couldn’t get the attention of the officer in charge.
