by Nick Hornby
This is how close I came to becoming a professional: at college, one or two of the first team (I was in the third team in my final year) played for the Blues, a team consisting of the eleven best players in the whole of the University. To my knowledge, two Blues players in my time went on to play at a professional level. The best one, the university god, a blond striker who seemed to glow with talent in the way stars do, played as sub a few times for Torquay United in the Fourth Division – he may even have scored for them once. Another played for Cambridge City – City, Quentin Crisp’s team, the team with the wonky Match of the Day tape and a crowd of two hundred, not United – as a full-back; we went to see him, and he was way off the pace.
So… if I had ranked number one in my college, as opposed to number twenty-five or thirty, then I might have been able, if I had been lucky, to look bad in a very poor semi-professional team. Sport doesn’t allow you to dream in the way that writing or acting or painting or middle-management does: I knew when I was eleven that I would never play for Arsenal. Eleven is too young to know something as awful as that.
Luckily, it is possible to be a professional footballer without walking on to a League pitch, and without being blessed with a footballer’s physique or pace or stamina or talent. There are the grimaces and gestures – the screwed-up eyes and slumped shoulders when you miss a good chance, the high-fives when you score, the clenched fists and hand-claps when your teammates require encouragement, the open arms and upturned palms indicating your superior positioning and your teammate’s greed, the finger pointing to where you would like a pass delivered, and, after the pass has been delivered just right and you have messed up anyway, the raised hand acknowledging both facts. And sometimes, when you receive the ball with your back to goal and knock a short pass out wide, you know you have done it just right, just so, and that were it not for your paunch (but then, look at Molby) and your lack of hair (Wilkins, that Sampdoria winger – Lombardo? – again), and your lack of height (Hillier, Limpar), were it not for all those peripherals, you would have looked just like Alan Smith.
A Sixties Revival
ARSENAL v ASTON VILLA
11.1.92
There was a part of me that was afraid to write all this down in a book, just as a part of me was afraid to explain to a therapist precisely what it had all come to mean: I was worried that by so doing it would all go, and I’d be left with this great big hole where football used to be. It hasn’t happened, not yet, anyway. What has happened is more disturbing: I have begun to relish the misery that football provides. I am looking forward to more Championships, and days out at Wembley, and last-minute victories over Tottenham at White Hart Lane, of course I am, and when they come I will go as berserk as anyone. I don’t want them yet, though. I want to defer the pleasure. I have been cold and bored and unhappy for so long that when Arsenal are good, I feel slightly but unmistakably disoriented, but I shouldn’t have worried. What goes around, comes around.
I started this book in the summer of 1991. Arsenal were the runaway First Division champions, about to enter the European Cup for the first time in exactly twenty years. They had the biggest squad, the brightest prospects, the strongest defence, the deadliest attack, the most astute manager; after their final match of the 90/91 season, in which they crushed poor Coventry 6–1 with four goals in the last twenty-odd minutes, the papers were full of us. ‘READY TO RULE EUROPE’; ‘THEY’RE GUNNER RULE FOR FIVE YEARS’; ‘WE’RE THE BEST EVER’; ‘CHAMPIONS SET SIGHTS ON THE BIGGEST PRIZE OF ALL’. There had been nothing in my time to compare with this sort of rich optimism. Even Arsenal-haters among my friends were predicting a triumphant and stately procession through to the European Cup Final, as well as another League title for sure, no trouble.
There was a little hiccup at the beginning of the season, but the team had found their form by the time the European Cup started in the middle of September: they crushed the Austrian champions 6–1, a magnificent performance which we believed would scare the rest of the continent rigid. We drew Benfica of Portugal in the next round, and I travelled on one of the two supporters’ club planes to Lisbon, where we hung on for a creditable 1–1 draw in front of eighty thousand Portuguese in the intimidating Stadium of Light. In the return at Highbury, however, we got stuffed, overrun, outplayed, and it was all over, maybe for another twenty years. Then we dropped out of the running for the Championship, after a string of terrible results over Christmas; and then, unbelievably and cataclysmically, we were knocked out of the FA Cup by Wrexham, who had the previous season finished bottom of the Fourth Division as Arsenal finished top of the First.
It was strange, trying to write about how miserable most of my footballing life has been in the midst of all that post-Championship hope and glory. So as the season crumbled to dust, and Highbury became a place for discontented players and unhappy fans once more, and the future began to look so dismal that it was impossible to remember why we thought it bright in the first place, I began to feel comfortable again. The Great Collapse of 1992 had a sort of sympathetic magic to it. Wrexham was a quite brilliant and entirely authentic recreation of Swindon, humiliating enough to enable me to relive childhood trauma; at the same time as I was trying to recall the old boring, boring Arsenal of the sixties, and seventies, and, yes, the eighties, Wright and Campbell and Smith and the rest obligingly stopped scoring, and began to look as inept as their historical counterparts had ever done.
Against Aston Villa, one week after Wrexham, my whole life flashed before my eyes. A nil-nil draw, against a nothing team, in a meaningless game, in front of a restive, occasionally angry but for the most part wearily tolerant crowd, in the freezing January cold… All that was missing was Ian Ure falling over his feet, and my dad, grumbling away in the seat next to me.
I’d like to thank Liz Knights for her
tremendous support, encouragement and
enthusiasm; Virginia Bovell for her tolerance
and understanding; Nick Coleman, Ian Craig,
Ian Preece, Caroline Dawnay and Viv
Redman.
If you would like to...
Turn the page for an extract of
Funny Girl,
the brand new novel from Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby
FUNNY GIRL
1
She didn’t want to be a beauty queen, but as luck would have it, she was about to become one.
There were a few aimless minutes between the parade and the announcement, so friends and family gathered round the girls to offer congratulations and crossed fingers. The little groups that formed reminded Barbara of liquorice Catherine wheels: a girl in a sugary bright pink or blue bathing suit at the centre, a swirl of dark brown or black raincoats around the outside. It was a cold, wet July day at the South Shore Baths, and the contestants had mottled, bumpy arms and legs. They looked like turkeys hanging in a butcher’s window. Only in Blackpool, Barbara thought, could you win a beauty competition looking like this.
Barbara hadn’t invited any friends, and her father was refusing to come over and join her, so she was stuck on her own. He was just sat there in a deckchair, pretending to read the Daily Express. The two of them would have made a tatty, half-eaten Catherine wheel, but even so, she would have appreciated the company. In the end, she went over to him. Leaving the rest of the girls behind made her feel half-naked and awkward, rather than glamorous and poised, and she had to walk past a lot of wolf-whistling spectators. When she reached her father’s spot at the shallow end, she was probably fiercer than she wanted to be.
‘What are you doing, Dad?’ she hissed.
The people sitting near him, bored, mostly elderly holiday-makers, suddenly went rigid with excitement. One of the girls! Right in front of them! Telling her father off!
‘Oh, hello, love.’
‘Why wouldn’t you come and see me?’
He stared at her as if she’d asked him to name the mayor of Timbuktu.
‘Didn’t you see what everyone els
e was doing?’
‘I did. But it didn’t seem right. Not for me.’
‘What makes you so different?’
‘A single man, running… amok in the middle of a lot of pretty girls wearing not very much. I’d get locked up.’
George Parker was forty-seven, fat, and old before he had any right to be. He had been single for over ten years, ever since Barbara’s mother had left him for her manager at the tax office, and she could see that if he went anywhere near the other girls he’d feel all of these states acutely.
‘Well, would you have to run amok?’ Barbara asked. ‘Couldn’t you just stand there, talking to your daughter?’
‘You’re going to win, aren’t you?’ he said.
She tried not to blush, and failed. The holidaymakers within ear-shot had given up all pretence of knitting and reading the papers now. They were just gawping at her.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so,’ she said.
The truth was that she did know. The mayor had come over to her, whispered ‘Well done’ in her ear, and patted her discreetly on the bottom.
‘Come off it. You’re miles prettier than all the others. Tons.’
For some reason, and even though this was a beauty contest, her superior beauty seemed to irritate him. He never liked her showing off, even when she was making her friends and family laugh with some kind of routine in which she portrayed herself as dim or dizzy or clumsy. It was still showing off. Today, though, when showing off was everything, the whole point, she’d have thought he might forgive her, but no such luck. If you had to go and enter a beauty pageant, he seemed to be saying, you might at least have the good manners to look uglier than everyone else.
She pretended to hear parental pride, so as not to confuse her audience.
‘It’s a wonderful thing, a blind dad,’ she said to the gawpers. ‘Every girl should have one.’
It wasn’t the best line, but she’d delivered it with a completely straight face, and she got a bigger laugh than she deserved. Sometimes surprise worked and sometimes people laughed because they were expecting to. She understood both kinds, she thought, but it was probably confusing to people who didn’t take laughter seriously.
‘I’m not blind,’ said George flatly. ‘Look.’
He turned around and widened his eyes at anyone showing any interest.
‘Dad, you’ve got to stop doing that,’ said Barbara. ‘It frightens people, a blind man goggling away.’
‘You…’ Her father pointed rudely at a woman wearing a green mac. ‘You’ve got a green mac on.’
The old lady in the next deckchair along began to clap, uncertainly, as if George had just that second been cured of a lifelong affliction, or was performing some kind of clever magic trick.
‘How would I know that, if I was blind?’
Barbara could see that he was beginning to enjoy himself. Very occasionally he could be persuaded to play the straight man in a double act, and he might have gone on describing what he could see for ever, if the mayor hadn’t stepped up to the microphone and cleared his throat.
It was Auntie Marie, her father’s sister, who suggested that she should go in for Miss Blackpool. Marie came round for tea one Saturday afternoon, because she happened to be passing, and casually dropped the competition into the conversation, and – a sudden thought – asked her why she’d never had a go, while her dad sat there nodding his head and pretending to be thunderstruck by the brilliance of the idea. Barbara was puzzled for the first minute or two, before she realized that the two of them had cooked up a plan. The plan, as far as she could work out, was this: Barbara entered the pageant, won it and then forgot all about moving to London, because there’d be no need. She’d be famous in her own hometown, and who could want for more? And then she could have a go at Miss UK, and if that didn’t work out she could just think about getting married, when there would be another coronation, of sorts. (And that was a part of the beauty pageant plan too, Barbara was sure. Marie was quite sniffy about Aidan, thought she could do much better, or much richer, anyway, and beauty queens could take their pick. Dotty Harrison had married a man who owned seven carpet shops, and she’d only come third.)
Barbara knew she didn’t want to be queen for a day, or even for a year. She didn’t want to be a queen at all. She just wanted to go on television and make people laugh. Queens were never funny, not the ones in Blackpool anyway, or the ones in Buckingham Palace either. She’d gone along with Auntie Marie’s scheme, though, because Dorothy Lamour had been Miss New Orleans and Sophia Loren had been a Miss Italy runner-up. (Barbara had always wanted to see a photograph of the girl who had beaten Sophia Loren.) And she’d gone along with it because she was bursting to get on with her life, and she needed something, anything, to happen. She knew she was going to break her father’s heart, but first she wanted to show him that she’d at least tried to be happy in the place she’d lived all her life. She’d done what she could. She’d auditioned for school plays, and had been given tiny parts, and watched from the wings while the talentless girls that the teachers loved forgot their lines and turned the ones they remembered into nonsense. She’d been in the chorus line at the Winter Gardens, and she’d gone to talk to a man at the local amateur dramatic society who’d told her that their next production was The Cherry Orchard, which ‘probably wouldn’t be her cup of tea’. He asked whether she’d like to start off selling tickets and making posters. None of it was what she wanted. She wanted to be given a funny script so that she could make it funnier.
She wished that she could be happy, of course she did; she wished she wasn’t different. Her school friends and her colleagues in the cosmetics department at R. H. O. Hills didn’t seem to want to claw, dig, wriggle and kick their way out of the town like she did, and sometimes she ached to be the same as them. And wasn’t there something a bit childish about wanting to go on television? Wasn’t she just shouting, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ like a two-year-old? All right, yes, some people, men of all ages, did look at her, but not in the way that she wanted them to look. They looked at her blonde hair and her bust and her legs, but they never saw anything else. So she’d enter the competition, and she’d win it, and she was dreading the look in her father’s eyes when he saw that it wasn’t going to make any difference to anything.
The mayor didn’t get around to it straight away, because he wasn’t that sort of man. He thanked everyone for coming, and he made a pointless joke about Preston losing the Cup Final, and a cruel joke about his wife not entering this year because of her bunions. He said that the bevy of beauties in front of him – and he was just the sort of man who’d use the expression ‘bevy of beauties’ – made him even prouder of the town than he already was. Everyone knew that most of the girls were holidaymakers from Leeds and Manchester and Oldham, but he got an enthusiastic round of applause at that point anyway. He went on for so long that she began to try and estimate the size of the crowd by counting the heads in one row of deckchairs and then multiplying by the number of rows, but she never finished because she got lost in the face of an old woman with a rain hat and no teeth, grinding a piece of sandwich over and over again. That was another ambition Barbara wanted to add to the already teetering heap: she wanted to keep her teeth, unlike just about every one of her relatives over the age of fifty. She woke up just in time to hear her name, and to see the other girls pretending to smile at her.
She didn’t feel anything. Or rather, she noted her absence of feeling and then felt a little sick. It would have been nice to think that she’d been wrong, that she didn’t need to leave her father and her town, that this was a dream come true and she could live inside it for the rest of her life. She didn’t dare dwell on her numbness in case she came to the conclusion that she was a hard and hateful bitch. She beamed when the mayor’s wife came over to put the sash on her, and she even managed a smile when the mayor kissed her on the lips, but when her father came over and hugged her she burst into tears, which was her way of te
lling him that she was as good as gone, that winning Miss Blackpool didn’t even come close to scratching the itch that plagued her like chickenpox.
She’d never cried in a bathing suit before, not as a grown woman anyway. Bathing suits weren’t for crying in, what with the sun and the sand and the shrieking and the boys with their eyes out on stalks. The feeling of wind-chilled tears running down her neck and into her cleavage was peculiar. The mayor’s wife put her arms around her.
‘I’m all right,’ said Barbara. ‘Really. I’m just being silly.’
‘Believe it or believe it not, I know how you’re feeling,’ said the mayor’s wife. ‘This is how we met. Before the war. He were only a councillor then.’
‘You were Miss Blackpool?’ said Barbara.
She tried to say it in a way that didn’t suggest amazement, but she wasn’t sure she’d managed. The mayor and his wife were both large, but his size seemed intentional somehow, an indication of his importance, whereas hers seemed like a terrible mistake. Perhaps it was just that he didn’t care and she did.
