Of course, I’m used to the repetition.
But I’ll never get used to that one.
Now we’re moving into the fifties
and here’s the treacle.
You can’t remember
the year I was born.
‘How can I forget that?’
Then with great authority:
‘NINETEEN FORTY-SEVEN!’
Hang on, Mum……
You weren’t married till fifty–three
And though I am a bit of an old git
I’m not THAT much of an old git.
It was FIFTY-seven.
Tears fill your eyes.
‘How can I forget that?
I remember you as a little boy.
Always questioning. Always loud.
‘No, Mummy!!’
‘Why, Mummy??”
Too right!
You say
‘I have spent my life doing.
But now I’m just… being.’
The move to Southwick when I was three.
The worms, then the fish, lizards, slow worms,
newts, terrapins, snakes.
Going to football every week with my father
And the one time I heard you argue.
Do you remember why it was?
That’s right.
He’d left his Brighton season ticket
in his trouser pocket.
You put the trousers in the washing machine…
We both laugh.
You say
‘Memory is such a wonderful thing.
But you don’t appreciate that
until it’s disappearing.
My brain feels like a sponge
with great big holes in it.’
I tell you how clever you are
to use that analogy
because if you look at a photograph
of the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s
that’s exactly what it looks like –
a sponge
with great big holes in it.
Sometimes you say your brain feels like soup,
or suet pudding, or sausages,
But mostly it’s a sponge.
A thirsty sponge, full of life
which soaked up everything it possibly could
for more than eighty years
and is now, gently, leaking it away.
You say:
‘I love you, my son.
You are my rock!’
I say
I love you too, Mum.
I’m your punk rock.
Then the difficult years:
My father’s death when I was ten
(yes, it was 1968, Mum…
I know it feels like a lifetime
– it’s half of one)
My battles with school
and a new stepfather
and so away, to university,
to the world of punk rock,
to a band and a squat in Brussels,
a flat in Harlow Town
with my friend Steve
and, in 1980,
to a life as Attila the Stockbroker…
a life you tried hard to understand
and discussed with me late into the night
on my visits home.
A life you always encouraged
and were proud of
and, on a few memorable occasions,
came to share.
As we will see.
Of course, you had your own life.
Very different from mine!
Organist at three churches
Teaching the piano
Singing with the Brighton Festival Chorus
Playing with Southwick Operatic Society
President of Southwick W.I.
(Remember the gig I did for your W.I.?
‘You must ask your son to come and read for us, Muriel…’
You were very worried.
I’m not surprised!
I chose my material, erm, carefully.
I got an encore.)
And, in 1981,
you’d won your first big battle:
Breast cancer.
You say
‘Alzheimer’s is such a cruel disease.
You can have your breast removed –
But not your head.
That’s a shame!’
The surgeon prodded your breast, and said
‘That’ll have to come off.’
His exact words.
So angered and devastated were you
by his unbelievable insensitivity
that, after your mastectomy
and your recovery
(via New Zealand, where you went to see your brother –
‘If this is going to kill me
I’m going to see Mick in New Zealand first’)
you started a local counselling service
for people with cancer.
Especially women with breast cancer.
Especially women with breast cancer
dealing with insensitive male bastards.
You knew.
You helped so many people.
And I was so proud of you.
You say ‘Time is all out of joint.
Things that happened yesterday
seem a long time ago
and things that happened a long time ago
seem like yesterday.
That is frightening.’
Now we’re in the 80s and 90s
and we’re knee deep in treacle.
Remember Canada, Mum?
Not really? I’ll remind you.
1989.
You said ‘I’ll come with you!
My old Bletchley friend Win
lives in Toronto…’
And you did.
I was touring, 11 cities,
east to west.
You stayed with Win in Toronto
then joined me on tour
all the way to Vancouver.
‘Hey, Attila’s brought his mom with him!’
You played piano for me
on my song ‘Tyler Smiles’
at the Vancouver Folk Festival
to a standing ovation
and enjoyed it so much
that two years later
you toured New Zealand with me
saw your brother Mick again -
and then to Australia.
‘Strewth, Attila’s brought his mum with him!’
They thought it’d be fun
for you to interview me
on national TV.
You were brilliant.
You say
‘I feel as though I am moving slowly
down a road
which is gently subsiding.’
Your swan song
with the Brighton Festival Chorus.
Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’
at the Royal Festival Hall.
Mum’s last gig.
Your favourite piece of music, ever.
I was there.
Then, in 1998,
your final tour with me,
my favourite memory of all:
Germany.
‘I’ve never been to Germany, John.
I want to go there before I die.
I want to talk to the people there.
All this prejudice in my generation
is just silly.’
But Mum, I said.
It won’t be like those other tours.
I’ve told you about Germany.
I play in anti-fascist squats and autonomous centres.
We sleep on the floor half the time.
Sometimes it’s really cold and very smoky
there is loads of very loud punk rock
and everyone drinks the most INCREDIBLE amount of beer.
Including me -
ESPECIALLY me!
I’m not sure it’s the right tour
For a lady of seventy-five…
But you were having none
of it.
So off we went.
You, me, Adverts punk legend TV Smith
and Danny the driver
in my old Citroen
charging up and down the motorway.
I’d told the organisers –
and they were brilliant.
They made such a fuss of you.
Clean, comfortable and warm everywhere
no smoke
and punk rock turned down where necessary.
Most solicitous of all
my old mate
Mad Butcher Mike –
a big, hard, red skinhead,
founder of a legendary hardcore anti-fascist record label,
loathed by every right wing scumbag in Germany.
You took a real shine to him.
And he to you.
‘He’s not a Mad Butcher at all, John –
He’s a very nice chap!’
Germany was your last foray.
You sailed into your eighties,
happy in Southwick.
I’d moved nearby years before
Then married Robina.
She spotted the signs before I did -
I guess I simply couldn’t believe
it would happen to you.
And then came that fateful day
in May 2004
when you set out in the car
to visit Daphne, your sister in law
and forgot where you were going
or why you were going there.
It’s been more than five years now
and here we are.
The psychiatrist says you’re doing very well
That the tablets are working
That we’re doing all the right things
That the hours we spend are precious hours…
We know that.
I know that.
I see it in your face, every time I enter the room.
Your indomitable spirit,
your need for human warmth,
for company, for stimulation
for mental challenge
is as strong as ever.
Anyway, for me, no contest.
You made me. You need me. I’ll be there. That’s it.
But it’s hard, Mum.
For us, and, above all, for you.
Which is why I wrote this poem.
To help you remember.
The poem of your life –
The poem of our life.
Mum died on June 9, 2010, the day before her 87th birthday.
Her last words to me were ‘Have a good gig!’
Thanks Mum.
I am.
TWELVE
BUILDING A BONFIRE
‘Build a bonfire, build a bonfire
Put Bellotti on the top
Put Bill Archer in the middle
Then we’ll burn the f***ing lot!’
The last time Brighton & Hove Albion featured at any length in this story we’d just had the finest hour in our history, losing the 1983 FA Cup Final replay to mighty Manchester United after a first match we should have won, hundreds of pages ago. Good, some of you will perhaps be thinking, and we don’t want to hear any more, thanks very much: we didn’t buy this book to read about football. It isn’t a football book, sure enough, but it’s my autobiography, the club I love and the game in general has always been very important to me – and in the early 1990s it took over other areas of my life, and did so for about eighteen years, in a way I never thought would happen and certainly never intended it to.
That’s why I’ve devoted the penultimate chapter of this book to some memories from the successful battle by Brighton fans to save our club and secure a new stadium after our Goldstone Ground was sold to property developers in 1995, leaving us homeless: a battle in which I was passionately involved from first to last. Even if you loathe the game, please read on. It could have been a much-loved theatre, a cherished community project or whatever: it just happened to be the Albion, and ordinary fans, most of whom had never been involved in protests before, rallied round and defeated the usurpers who nearly destroyed our club in what is without doubt the most successful grass roots campaign I’ve ever been involved with. And I’ve seen a few.
Our struggle has been well documented in the media and print, especially in Paul Hodson and Steve North’s wonderful books ‘Build a Bonfire’ (Mainstream Publishing, 1997) and ‘We Want Falmer’ (Stripe Publishing, 2011) and former chairman and Albion saviour Dick Knight’s ‘Mad Man’ (Sports Vision Publishing, 2013). If you want to read more, I can heartily recommend all three. I’m not going to write an in-depth, chronological re-run: that’s been done. I’m just going to add a few of my personal thoughts and anecdotes as co-founder of BISA, aka Brighton Independent Supporters’ Association, which co-ordinated the fans’ protests in the mid 90s, as a member of the ‘Bring Home The Albion’ and ‘Falmer for All’ campaign teams which fought first to bring us back from exile 70 miles away and then to secure planning permission for our new permanent home, and as the club’s stadium announcer, DJ and Poet in Residence at Gillingham and Withdean, our temporary homes, for 14 years - from 1997 when the Goldstone was taken from us until 2011 when the new stadium at Falmer, for which we’d battled for so long, finally opened.
Watching a game of football had always been a simple pleasure for me, a part of my life distinct from the rest: it’s fair to say that I have spent getting on for 40 years in a left-wing punky subculture and have little or no interest in most mainstream forms of entertainment. Brighton & Hove Albion, and football in general, is one of the few areas in my life where I meet people from all backgrounds, all political opinions, all ages, all tastes. I have always absolutely cherished that: it’s one of the things that makes me love the game so much.
I never, ever expected that my political views and my love of the Albion would coalesce in the way they did. Our fight was against ruthless, predatory capitalism, red in tooth and claw. An individual named Bill Archer, living at the other end of the country and with no previous recorded interest in football, gained control of the shares in our club for £56.25. He genuinely believed that this ‘business transaction’ conducted ‘in accordance with the law of the land’ meant that he could do what he wanted with ‘his property’ and that there was nothing we fans (or ‘half brains’ as he once famously called some of us campaigners) could do about it. ‘I own this club lock, stock and barrel!’ To add insult to injury, he appeared to think that because we were from the South Coast we didn’t really CARE about football like ‘real’ (presumably Northern?) fans did and if our club was destroyed we’d go off and play croquet or something.
After his home - about 270 miles from Brighton - had been picketed for the fourth or fifth time and, following an away game at Wigan, a load of Seagulls fans had marched through the quaint little Lancashire village where he lived (guess the organiser) putting leaflets through the door of every single resident with a poem (guess the author) explaining why we were there, what their neighbour was doing to our club and what we’d like them to say to him, he began to get an inkling that he was wrong. After his name had been pilloried all over the national press and on TV as a heartless, out of touch enemy of Brighton and football in general by quite a few media-savvy Albion fans with good contacts and a way with words (‘Half brains?’) that inkling increased.
After his business, Focus DIY, had been the subject of an energetic boycott and non-violent direct action campaign, not just by Albion fans but by fellow football fans all over the country outraged by what he was doing, he got the message a bit more. (A word to Focus customers and employees on those busy Saturday mornings when Brighton fans and our allies at other clubs arrived at outlets around England, loaded big trolleys to the brim with the smallest items available, synchronised their arrival at each checkout, stood while the staff spent an aeon putting each tiny item through the till while massive crowds built up behind - and then distributed leaflets detailing why they had done what they did and walk
ed out, leaving the cashiers needing to cancel each tiny item before they could serve the next customer. To quote British Rail: we apologise for the delay and regret the inconvenience caused. All part of the campaign.)
So what had Archer done? Armed with the shares, purchased for £56.25 as I say, he had sold our Goldstone Ground to property developers for ‘at least 7 million’ in Summer 1995, without making any provision for a new stadium. Before selling the ground, Archer removed a clause from the club’s constitution which stated that no individual could profit from its sale. I’m not going to go into a big explanation of how he got hold of the shares: it’s a long story of slow decline after our 1983 FA Cup Final defeat and financial chaos, exacerbated by the actions of other directors happy to make their shares over to him as the club’s fortunes plummeted and the actions and inactions of the previous chairman, Archer’s theoretical boss at Focus, Greg Stanley. (We’d started BISA - Brighton Independent Supporters’ Association - way back in 1992 to try and find out what was happening, and the associated Albion fanzine ‘Gulls Eye’, run by local undertaker and Albion hero Ian Hart and his friend Peter Kennard, had already been sued for libel by previous board members.)
After a mass pitch invasion at the last home game of the 1995-6 season which caused the match to be abandoned and brought our club’s plight into the national media in a big way, we were eventually told that at the end of the 1996-7 season we would be made homeless and the ground demolished, soon to become a retail park (one that many Albion fans will not visit to this day). That made us even more determined to get Archer out. We planned our actions at open-to-all BISA meetings on Monday nights at the Concorde music venue in Brighton, packed with hundreds of people, all prepared to get stuck in. There were boycotts, sit-ins, pitch invasions, the aforementioned pickets of his home and demo though his village – and the crowning moment was a wonderful demonstration of solidarity by fellow fans from all over the UK and abroad at the ‘Fans United Day’ we organised at a match at home to Hartlepool on February 8th 1997. (I had about 8 Germans sleeping on my floor that night!) We knew we were really getting to him - and eventually we ground him down.
I never thought I’d find myself at the Centre for Dispute Resolution of the Confederation of British Industry, but I did. I was there as an observer with fellow BISA co-founder and activist and good mate Paul Samrah, a local accountant who had found out about the change to the no-profit clause in the club’s constitution, alongside long standing campaigners Paul Whelch, Liz Costa, Tony Foster and Norman Rae, while a consortium led by local businessman Dick Knight had lengthy discussions with Archer about a takeover. (The Football Association, who are supposed to be football’s supreme governing body, had held up their hands helplessly, saying ‘it’s a business matter, he’s got the shares.’ At least they set up the CEDR meeting though.)
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