by Lee Howey
There was not a huge amount to do in my spare time. I had no access to the BBC and, to any meaningful degree, the world was still awaiting the advent of satellite television. My viewing was all but confined to Eurosport. There wasn’t much point in watching the news in French or Dutch. And don’t believe the hype you hear about Belgian soap operas either; they’re not nearly as good as they’re cracked up to be.
But there was always Friday night, something I had been keenly anticipating since that first session on the tiles with Kenny Ellis. This, alas, brings me to the second blow to my social life following Danny’s volte-face over moving abroad. The swinging scene that I had informed my friends was rivalled only by 1920s Manhattan, was actually rather sedate. It turned out that my previous soirée had coincided with the weekend of the Wallonia Festival, an annual public holiday held on the third weekend of September to commemorate the Belgian Revolution – and a quite spectacular piss-up.
Downtown Namur on an average Friday night was virtually deserted, something that only became apparent when I hit the town in my best cheesecloth shirt and some liberally applied Old Spice (the classic masculine fragrance, the mark of a man). I tried to make the most of not so much a grim situation as a very dull one. I ambled out for a few drinks and reacquainted myself with a waitress I had met during my first trip there. We communicated as best we could. She didn’t possess particularly voluminous English, but it still eclipsed my French. So it must have been a combination of the most exclusive aftershave on the market and sheer animal magnetism that made her want to come back to my hotel after she had clocked off for the evening.
It was there that we made love with an intensity that the poet Byron might have said was…
Well, we had a shag, anyway. An otherwise disappointing week had ended on a high, not to say with a bang.
• • •
After a friendly on the Thursday, my proper debut for AS Hemptinne was a 2–1 win over an opposition I have long since forgotten, but I do remember scoring both of our goals. Good goals they were too, one from each foot. The crowd went wild – or at least the gathering went wild.
I quite quickly became something of a local celebrity. It was novel for the natives to have an English footballer within their midst, incidentally the club’s first professional, with the whole enterprise being bankrolled by Louis Gemine, whose factory was situated close by. My signing was a major part of his plans to make the club a bigger force than it had ever been before. In the bar after that first game I was apprised of the scheme by Stéphane. He also acted as an interpreter between myself and a local journalist who was keen to write a story about me. The Rolling Stones were unlikely to roll into Hemptinne any time soon; therefore I was the nearest person to the A-list that this particular hack would meet that day. He asked me some fairly prosaic questions about if and how I was enjoying Belgium, how I was fitting in at the club and the like. Then he dug deeper.
He asked: ‘How are you finding the girls?’ Saucy.
‘Well, I’ve only just arrived,’ I replied tactfully, as a gentleman never tells. Actually I had told all the lads, but I drew the line at giving details to the local media. Stéphane did it for me.
He blabbed: ‘Lee likes the girls; especially one.’
Evidently something was lost in translation when the newspaper went to print. Stéphane’s comment of ‘especially one’ had been published in French as ‘a special one’. The girl I had the liaison with read the article and was soon knocking on the door of my hotel room, smiling warmly at me under the unfortunate misapprehension that she was the unnamed special one. I tried to let her down as gently as possible by explaining the situation as delicately as I could.
Then we shagged again and I sent her packing. Merci, mademoiselle, if you happen to be reading this.
Oh, come on. Don’t look at me in that tone of voice. I was a fit and healthy nineteen-year-old bloke who was presented with an opportunity. Show me the man who, as a fit and healthy nineteen-year-old, would not have leapt (twice) with glorious abandon at this chance, then I will show you a liar; or as an outside bet, Mahatma Gandhi. Mine was not the behaviour expected of a preux chevalier from Thorney Close and I’m not proud of what I did, although describing myself as ashamed would be pushing it.
• • •
By the end of my three-month trial I had played eleven games for Hemptinne and scored in every single one of them, giving me sixteen goals in total; back to the scoring of my school days. Anyway, my efforts led to a renegotiated contract, my wages being increased to £280 per week and the club renting an apartment for me.
This wasn’t the big time I had dreamed of a few years earlier when I should have been doing my biology homework, but still not too shabby for someone of my age at the turn of 1989. More so when I was only expected to take part in two training sessions and one match each week. Additionally, the fact that I had been informed only the previous year that I was finished as a footballer somehow made life seem all the better. Perhaps more importantly, my knee was bearing up.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of a Walloonian waitress scorned, I would still venture out for the occasional spot of socialising in Namur and would even attract some appreciative shouts across the street: ‘Hey, grand Anglaise! Vien assis!’– or something. As I would later discover at Burnley, this type of moment is to be savoured.
My conversational French improved and I became acquainted with the essentials such as ordering a drink, please, thank you, hello, goodbye, yes, no, where are the bogs, you have beautiful eyes, my hovercraft is full of eels, etcetera. Even a tenuous grasp of the language is extremely useful on the football field. When learning any tongue in its native setting, it is usually the case that locals will teach you all of the dirty words first as they will never fail to find this hilarious. I was no exception and they just loved hearing the big Englishman behaving like a performing seal, trying to repeat whichever obscene vernacular they had just requested from me. I had no idea what I was saying, but it clearly was not the patois of civic occasions.
I was getting to know people and, although occasionally lonely, I was generally enjoying a perfectly splendid experience. I was a bit of a barfly at the time, something that was possible for a young footballer then, but certainly not now. It was definitely a bucket of fun and my extracurricular activities did not hamper my football.
One irritation that ground into me on the pitch was a cocky little winger we had called David Culot. David (pronounced Daveeeeed) was a tricky wee player, but he had the aggravating habit of cutting back with the ball to unnecessarily beat a defender two or three times, while the striker was waiting in the penalty area for a cross that could easily have been delivered, but wasn’t. A winger delivering a bad cross is quite forgivable. A winger deciding not to deliver the cross at all is another matter entirely. One particular day, this tendency of his got completely out of control, so I attempted to calmly rectify the situation by threatening him with physical violence.
He was chopping back to a quite infuriating degree, oblivious to my shouts of: ‘Traversez la ballon, David, traversez la ballon!’ (good eh?).
This had no effect whatsoever, so I switched to some very primitive English.
‘I’ll fucking kill you. You little bastard!’ and other eloquently phrased suggestions.
No matter what language I used, be it English, French or foul, it made no difference. When he had chopped back for the third time in the second half, to add to the umpteen other occasions in the first, it finished off my temper and I decided that my only remaining course of action was to chase him down and politely stave his face in. In the middle of a game, I ran after him with the express intention of eating his spleen, turning momentarily into the Basil Fawlty of the Belgian Provincial League.
At last, sensing that I may perhaps have been piqued, he wailed a panicky: ‘Mon dieu! Mon dieu!’
‘I’ll mon dieu you! You little twat!’ I responded cleverly.
Remarkably, he seemed to have n
o idea what this meant. Dieu Himself would have been no help to David if I had actually managed to catch him. Eventually things calmed down a bit and an indignant winger was substituted (for some reason), his departure accompanied by well-intentioned advice from me, such as: ‘Fuck you! Get off!’
There was a peculiar atmosphere after the game, perhaps palliated by victory and me scoring again (although not by meeting the end of a David cross). I chatted to Stéphane Gemine who told me that the referee had taken no action, possibly because he didn’t have a clue what was going on. The ref’s only query on the whole affair was: ‘What does “fuck” mean, because the big Englishman seems to say it a lot?’
It was usually Stéphane who would give me a lift for the 25-mile journey from Hemptinne back to my place in Namur. However, after this particular game he apologised, saying that he was unable to drive me back but it was OK because one of the lads was going my way in his car. Using your skill and judgement, can you guess which of the lads he was referring to?
I sat in the back of the car with David and his wife in the front. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was barely a word of conversation. My, what an awfully long twenty-five miles that was. When they finally dropped me off I thanked them and said a conciliatory ‘Ah, David’.
He was still nettled and responded with yet another ‘Mon dieu’, this time muttered and followed by some other sulky sounds that may have included a ‘Zut alors!’ or two, but were for the most part just indistinguishable French noises. For the first time in a while I thought of Steven.
David continued to be one of life’s irritants after that. But he did start to cross the ball more often.
• • •
At the end of the 1988–89 season, we narrowly missed out on promotion. But on a personal note, I was the league’s top scorer, the Major Buteur with twenty-nine goals (I still have the trophy). I was the star of the team and the proverbial big fish in a small, small, Low Countries pond. Hardly anyone outside a minute section of central Belgium had heard of me, but I was having a jollier time than most professional footballers – in any country.
My success was reflected in my salary, which was now up to about £300 per week. I sent much of it home to my parents, who banked it for me. As the club was still paying for my accommodation and utilities (they had put me in a better apartment too), I didn’t actually need a great deal of cash, so my savings accumulated steadily. I only really spent money on socialising and phone calls.
Mobile phones were virtually non-existent, so I would make a weekly call from a payphone to assure Yvonne and Norman that I was still breathing and in one piece. It was still the quickest way to get the all-important football results, although my dad would also send me the fabulous Football Echo, which I would read until the ink became dislodged. It contained every result and fixture from the European Cup down to schools and pub leagues. Being away from home makes you disproportionately interested in how the The Dun Cow got on against The Hastings Hill in the Cowies Five-a-side League. Like all the Saturday ‘pinks’, Sunderland’s Football Echo has now sadly gone. The last one rolled off the press in December 2013.
• • •
We signed just a couple of players from somewhere in northern Belgium, one of whom was big Frank Beys, a good midfielder. Otherwise we started 1989–90 with the same squad as the previous season.
Life was good and it improved further when we signed a centre-half I knew and liked who had been on the books at Newcastle, Paul Watson. Paul had learned French at school, so linguistically he became my wingman and, as he was Glaswegian, was arguably more adept at French than English. My reliance on him slowed down my learning of the language, such as it was. I didn’t see all that much of him socially as he had his wife with him, but he was a fine bloke and a fine footballer who later played back in Scotland and around the north-east of England.
Despite too frequently falling back on Paul to translate, my conversational French was improving (conversation being almost exclusively about football) and I continued to be heartily greeted in the street by strangers in Namur. Life was good and my social life was more than agreeable. Occasionally it was fabulous.
It may have been me who inadvertently started it off, but players from all the local clubs, not just AS Hemptinne, would gather at the same café/bar in Namur after Sunday matches and remain ensconced there until the small hours. It became the social hub for all the footballers in the area. If someone had a birthday they would have to buy a cake and drinks for everyone else in the bar. Tequila and whichever spirits were to hand were lobbed into a punchbowl along with the occasional lump of fruit. We were professional athletes, after all. These evenings served to encourage bonhomie between players of different clubs, not to mention cordial international relations. Truly I was the Ban Ki-moon of Namur, although it would be remiss of me not to mention that the main objective of these evenings was to get completely shit-faced.
Another of my teammates, Daniel Clamot, was there each week no matter where we had been playing. He was in his late twenties and married with kids, but still he would often end the evening literally crying. This would involve him saying his goodbyes, leaving and then returning about an hour later because he couldn’t remember where he had parked his car. The remaining squad members would help him find the errant vehicle, decant him into it and leave him. I hope he didn’t drive it. If he did, at least the roads were straight.
I was only involved in one regrettable incident and it happened in April 1990. I had become best of friends with our right-back, Daniel Demaerschalk, and not only because his parents ran the Renaissance, the only pub in Hemptinne. I was invited to his cousin’s wedding in Namur. This was held on a Saturday night, so I was under strict instruction to show professional restraint as we had an important game the next day: a top-of-the-table fixture against RUW Ciney (boo!), a team based twenty-eight miles east of Hemptinne who were second to us by just a couple of points.
The wedding was a genuinely pleasant occasion. My plan was to have one drink. But among the other guests were several fans who each bought me a beer. I found myself becoming deeply embroiled in football talk. Every time I turned round another beer had been planted at my elbow which I then had to politely drink. It’s worth remembering too that this was Belgian beer and not the horse’s piss that we have delivered to pubs in steel tanks in the UK that takes anything up to two hours to brew. The upshot was that by midnight I did not know if I was in Wallonia, Estonia or Catatonia. It was about then that I had this ingenious idea of having some more beer, as by that stage I simply didn’t care.
Daniel was doing his military service, which he had to attend the following morning and therefore had to make sure he had a disciplined, temperate evening (although so did I, supposedly). He said he would look after me. However, his vigilance seemed mainly to take the form of laughing and pointing at how completely bollocksed I was. He thought of a plan, such as it was, that he would shovel me into his car (by then it was 2 a.m.), take me back to his place and drop me back at my apartment (later) in the morning on his way to military service. Stéphane would then pick me up as normal to take me to the game. This faultlessly cunning plan was to ensure that no one would realise that I had been completely blotto in the early hours of that morning.
At 6 a.m., I was woken by Daniel after what felt like three minutes’ sleep. Did I want anything to eat? The answer to that was an emphatic ‘no’, but he insisted. I mused that he was probably correct to advise me to eat something, but he came back with a huge slab of gateau – a fucking cream cake.
I was hardly an authority on nutrition, but even I knew that this was not the ideal start to the day. However, in the absence of muesli, yoghurt, orange juice or indeed anything that might actually be beneficial to one’s health, I forced the cream cake down. I was aware that it wasn’t a breakfast that enjoyed the approval of dieticians, or even my mother, but I was still too drunk to argue. In other circumstances, I might have enjoyed it.
I was in my own bed
for a couple of hours before I awoke for the second time that day, upon which I had about a gallon of coffee before Stéphane arrived at 11.30 a.m., ninety minutes before kick-off and with me still momentously hungover. I hoped he wouldn’t think that I looked like a bag of shit, because I certainly felt like one.
‘Good morning, Lee. Mon dieu! You look like a bag of shit!’ were his first words.
‘I’m OK,’ I replied defensively, yet perhaps not convincingly. We had gone a few miles along the motorway in Stéphane’s Mercedes when I had to abandon even this feeble pretence.
‘Stop the car! Stop the car!’ I yelped.
This he did, allowing me to leap from the passenger seat and introduce my breakfast to the hard shoulder of the N951. Reason leads me to conclude that my mouth was the only orifice on vomiting duties, but at the time it felt as though I was puking from my nose, eyes and ears too. I gave myself a wipe and returned to the car where I was met Stéphane’s curious gaze.
‘Was that coffee and cream cake?’
‘Mind your own business.’
Twenty minutes later I gave a repeat performance. Stéphane was quicker to hit the brakes this time, fearful that my second Technicolor yawn of the day should land on his upholstery. We eventually arrived at the ground with my head feeling as though it contained an extremely busy blacksmith. It was a pleasant spring day, but it felt to me like an afternoon in Death Valley and a downpour would have been a treat. I didn’t get one. All I could do was keep telling myself that I would be all right. If you’re going to lie to yourself, make it a whopper, I say.
