by Ted Kessler
I grab his elbow. ‘Dad, what are you doing?’
‘I’m a sixty-five-year-old man. What possible harm can I do?’
As the game begins so do the dirty looks.
It’s a feisty opening few minutes: both teams have chances and now the fans behind us are waving twenty-pound notes and chanting, ‘WE’RE FACKIN’ LOADED, DA, DA, DA, DA, DA, DA, WE’RE FACKIN’ LOADED, DA, DA, DA, DA, DA.’
I can see in Dad’s face that he’s irritated by it – it’s the swearing: we’re sat next to some young kids and he doesn’t think this use of language is appropriate. On the Kop, growing up, it was always witty and fun. It had a sense of humour – he’s proud of that: it’s part of what being a Liverpool fan is.
The game is close and still nil–nil. Next up from the Chelsea repertoire is the classic ‘YOU ARE SHIT, YOU ARE SHIT, YOU ARE SHIT, YOU ARE SHIT’.
My dad can’t help himself. I try to stop him by putting my hand on his arm but it’s no good. Instead I pretend it isn’t happening, I try to focus on the game but I can’t: I’m listening. He turns and addresses the bank of lads directly behind us. ‘I don’t mind you waving your twenty-pound notes and singing about being loaded, at least that has a modicum of wit, but You are shit? How is that clever or funny or witty? And there are kids here. What message are you sending out?’
Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m thinking, as I hear the reactions, like a wave passing up the bank.
‘It’s fackin’ Johnny Boll.’
‘Look fackin’ ell it’s only bloody Johnny Boll.’
‘Johnny Boll just told us off for swearin’.’
‘Fackin’ Johnny Boll off the telly don’t like me swearin’, you fackin’ what?!’
I can hear this guy’s mind exploding.
Somehow – perhaps it’s the shock, the sheer temerity of it, perhaps it’s because on the whole he’s universally loved, the eccentric, crazy, funny one off the TV who impossibly got everyone into maths and science by dressing up as Archimedes and fooling around, the classroom prankster, but a clever adult version who knows stuff – I don’t know exactly why but they let this interruption slide, this impudence; it doesn’t kick off. Not yet.
I breathe a sigh of relief while thinking, The balls on this guy. (I shouldn’t have been surprised. Years before, at Old Trafford, when Michael Owen was sent off, we caught the eye of a group of United fans. ‘Stare at them, Nick. They don’t like it!’ Dad said. ‘STARE AT THEM? THEY DON’T LIKE IT?’ ARE YOU CRAZY?). Dad smiles at me, a smile that says, ‘That’s them told,’ and then I hear it. The next chant up. The same but different. ‘YOU ARE RUBBISH, YOU ARE RUBBISH, YOU ARE RUBBISH,’ and then, ‘WE’RE REALLY LOADED, DA, DA, DA, DA, DA, WE’RE REALLY LOADED.’ I dare to glance back at the sniggering faces looking down on us, so pleased with their swear-less chants. Just get to half-time, I think. If we can just make it to half-time, it’ll calm down.
And then – BOSH! Bruno Cheyrou buries one for Liverpool and we’re both out of our seats.
We sit back down but things aren’t the same any more. The Chelsea fans are livid. It’s no longer funny that the clever fella off the telly told them off for swearing. All goodwill has been eclipsed by the massive unavoidable fact that there are two Scouse fans among them. This will not stand. There will be no more swear-less chanting. ‘OUT, OUT, OUT, OUT, OUT, OUT’ is the call now, their faces twisted and thick, furious gargoyles, features bulging, fingers pointing. It spreads upwards fast, Borg-like, assimilating the vacant minds of fans who are so far away they can have no idea why they suddenly find themselves shouting, ‘OUT,’ repeatedly. The hive mind in full effect.
And now furiously rotund stewards in hi-vis jackets are pointing at me, and shouting the same thing. I turn to Dad, who is ignoring the hate, trying to watch the game, oblivious. ‘We’re being thrown out, Dad.’
‘I’m not moving,’ he says. And he repeats his mantra, ‘I’m a sixty-five-year-old man. What possible harm can I do?’
The stewards are coming down both ends of our aisle, faces like smashed crabs. They’re gesticulating angrily at me while the fans behind us shout far worse things than just ‘Out.’ With the stewards almost upon us I stand up, resigned to my fate, and a flicker of disappointment passes across my dad’s face. I wonder how he had seen this ending. Actual physical violence is seconds away. ‘Well, I’ll see you later, then, Dad . . .’ I say.
He reluctantly stands too and begins remonstrating with the steward as we’re shown to the door. But now the gob is raining down on me, gloopy saliva slamming into the back of my head. The abuse is horrific. Dog’s abuse. Those kids are learning some new words today, I think. Dad is ahead of me now, impervious, no doubt repeating his mantra to the uncaring steward. I feel like I’m in Midnight Express or any of those prison movies. Just focus on the exit, I tell myself, the perimeter fence. It’s close but very far away, a glowing light, freedom. Everything is in slow motion. If I can just make it to the exit, make it to the light . . .
Stay on target. Blinkers on. I’m covered in spittle but I’m nearly there. Just as I’m out I feel a hand on my shoulder and I’m yanked back in. ‘I HOPE YOU BREAK YOUR NECK ON THE STAIRS, YOU SCOUSE CUNT!’ An old swollen cab-driver type is screaming this into my face with such vitriol, his mouth so wide that I wonder if he’s going to swallow me whole. I pull myself clear and fly down the steps to safety. I find Dad going bonkers, repeating his ‘I’M SIXTY-FIVE’ mantra over and over. We’re shown to a tiny poster that apparently says there’s to be no away support here. The adrenalin is ripping through me, the rush so strong I can’t focus on the words. We’re hauled off to the exit. Game over.
But just as we’re walking through the door the steward turns, his face curious, as though a light just got switched on in a derelict house. ‘Eh, I know you, you’re Johnny Ball off the telly, I love your stuff. Think of a what’s-it-called and all that. You’re the reason I’m where I am today!’ Dad and I share a look, eyebrows raised. ‘’Ere, I’ll get you in the away end.’
So we’re ushered into the Liverpool end where Dad recounts our ordeal to a growing audience of adoring Liverpool fans. ‘Get these boys a beer,’ someone shouts, and we’re handed pints. Heroes back from war. As he tells our story I can see from their faces what they’re all thinking: THE FUCKING BALLS ON THIS GUY.
Nick Ball is a screenwriter. He lives in west
London with his wife and two kids.
HE’S THE FIRST OF MY MOTHER’S LOVERS NOT TO HAVE A SERIOUS FLAW
Mr Holt by Nina Stibbe
My stepdad came into our lives in 1974 and, as happens in all the best stories, we almost mistook our hero for a villain.
These days, he is known as Mr Holt, the name I gave him in my novel, Man at the Helm (and again in my next one, Paradise Lodge), and I’m calling him Mr Holt here, too, because he doesn’t much enjoy the spotlight. I chose the name Mr Holt for the fictional him because it’s strong and straightforward and it’s the name of a market town on the King’s Lynn to Cromer road, close to where he grew up and where he went to borrow library books. He was the only child of working-class parents, Harry and Ethel, and it seemed right to acknowledge his geography, his Norfolk accent never having left him (or ceased to amoose us).
As a boy, Mr Holt loved school and had a huge appetite for learning, but long spells off sick with bouts of asthma – so bad at times that he’d be rushed to Cromer Hospital in the doctor’s car – resulted in his failing the 11–plus. Had Mr Holt passed his 11-plus he would likely have been recognised as the exceptionally bright boy he was and might even have been considered for a grammar-school scholarship. Instead he was put into the lowest classes at Wells-next-the-Sea Secondary Modern with all the pupils labelled ‘dunce’. It must have been demoralising, but his parents had brought him up not to think too highly of himself, and he accepted this with no argument.
Over the next couple of years, though, health permitting, he’d cycle over to Holt Library, some eleven miles away, to
stock up on books. His avid reading helped him work his way up to the top classes, but by then it was too late for him to consider staying on at school. In any case, his parents wouldn’t have entertained it. He left school, like his parents had, at fifteen and went to work full-time in Mr Dale’s grocery shop in the village, where he wore khaki overalls and sometimes made bicycle deliveries. His mother and father (a cleaner and a gardener at the grand Blakeney Hotel) were quietly pleased with this outcome, especially since so many others had landed up on the dole.
Around this time, in the Midlands, my mother was at boarding school and, like other girls of her ilk, doing her utmost to get up the nose of her form mistress – and, hopefully, even expelled. Like Mr Holt she was clever and curious and, as with him, higher education was never an option (in her case for reasons of gender rather than class). Instead she was coaxed into a ‘good’ marriage before she was twenty. It produced four children, one after another, and lasted just six years. And though the divorce was amicable, and she’d started out full of vim, the reality of being a divorcee at that time, in the English countryside, was unbearable. It turned her from fun-loving and adventurous to lonely and depressed, and soon she was dependent on the pills prescribed by at least two doctors, washed down with whisky.
Her mother, who might have been a support, was bitter and disappointed by the divorce. ‘No man will take you on with four children,’ she said, ‘and no woman will befriend you without one.’
In my novel, Mr Holt, a disciplined and intelligent man with no airs and graces, falls for my (fictional) mother (a posh, alcoholic divorcee, fallen on hard times) when she appears for an interview at the laundry he manages.
It was the same in real life. Mr Holt had worked his way up via various organisations across East Anglia and the Midlands, including the delightfully named Maypole Dairy Company, and had landed, in 1974, at Initial Towel Supplies (now Initial Services), Leicester branch, where he managed the staff.
At this time, my mother was looking for work. Her four children were aged between twelve and eight. The family business had gone bust in a national recession, and because she’d accepted shares in the business in lieu of maintenance, she was now broke. She answered an advertisement in the Leicester Mercury for van drivers, and Mr Holt interviewed her for a job. He thought her eccentric, interesting and probably trouble, but since no one else applied – certainly no one who was used to driving a vehicle the size of Initial’s Leyland vans – he’d had no option but to offer her a test drive. She was a very good driver (she’d driven horseboxes and trailers to horse events throughout the Midlands for years), she could read a map, and was a quick learner when it came to changing the towel machines. Despite her foul language, she passed with flying colours. Mr Holt became my mother’s boss and she began servicing the roller towels in public toilets across the county.
She disliked the job and the boss intensely. ‘The boss doesn’t like me,’ she’d tell us at home. ‘He picks on me. He doesn’t think I’m good at the job.’
And it was true: he had serious concerns about her. Of course he did. She drove like a maniac, parked illegally, had a habit of holding the van on the clutch bite and ran around in flip-flops or bare feet. She smoked and ate ice cream at the wheel, listened to cassettes on a portable player and drove with the sliding doors open. She was rebellious, careless, late and, frankly, didn’t seem quite ‘with it’ on occasions. And she’d been known to race along the A6 with drivers from a rival laundry.
Mr Holt spoke to her frequently about the above and she’d apologise sullenly, then try to let off steam to her new colleagues. They weren’t having any of it: ‘He’s a fair boss,’ they’d say. So she’d leave the depot, seething, and get it off her chest at home. We adored our mother: we didn’t want her going off driving a van and leaving us on our own, and found it all too easy to believe the boss was all the things she said. A stickler, a pain in the fucking neck (we said ‘neck’ in those day, not ‘arse’), a blot on her daily landscape and a fly in the ointment. The names got worse. He was that eagle-eyed tyrant, that miserable fucking bastard and that total cunt. As far as we were concerned, he’d ruined our lives, first by employing her and then by being so consistently mean and picky.
My mother and Mr Holt, for all their differences, couldn’t ignore the fact that they were essentially on the same wavelength and they started going out for the occasional drink after work, then discovered a common love of cricket, books and a sense of the absurd.
And she stopped calling him so many awful names at home and eventually told us that she and he were on friendly terms. In my novel, as in real life, Mr Holt is the first of my mother’s lovers not to have a serious flaw (like being nineteen, or married, or gay, or a conman, or a teacher) and that must have felt wonderful to my mother. ‘Turns out he’s quite a nice bloke,’ she said one day, then told us she’d invited him round for dinner.
When he arrived, we couldn’t believe our eyes. We’d been expecting Blakey from On the Buses but he looked more like Hannibal Heyes from Alias Smith and Jones. We continued to be suspicious, though, especially as he clearly wasn’t au fait with spaghetti and chopped his into little pieces rather than doing the spiralling-on-the-fork thing that any fool knew. He came for dinner again, and this time tucked expertly into a casserole, albeit with a biro behind his ear. And the next time, he did the cooking (introducing us to the Fray Bentos pie).
Over the next few visits Mr Holt really lived up to some of the names our mother used to call him. He suggested forcefully, in his brusque manner, that we might help with the washing-up, polish our shoes, tidy up and so forth. Then, just when we were fed up to the back teeth of him, he fixed our little telly by changing the fuse, and told us it was never broken in the first place. When he did the same with a lamp, we began to change our minds about him. He helped us when one of our dogs died, and we saw suddenly that he cared for our mother in a way we’d never seen before. It was such a lovely thing that we knew we could never let him go. I worried that he’d find out what a druggy she was and begged her to tell him ASAP.
‘Does he know about all your stuff?’ I asked. ‘Because he won’t like it.’
And she told me to mind my own business and I told her it was my business, if she was going to shack up with, then scare away, the only decent man in Leicester. Better to be upfront, I thought.
One night he took her to visit his bedsit in a less nice part of Leicester. She’d been mithering to see it for romantic reasons. She’d known it wouldn’t be very nice – single men in blue-collar jobs back then lived in grim places – but she was shocked by the extent of its grimness and didn’t want him to live there a second longer. With typical spontaneity, she said, ‘Come and live with us.’ And for some reason (probably that he was in love with her), he said OK – but on the condition that she sort herself out. Meaning the pills, because he wasn’t an idiot.
My mother, having read Germaine Greer (and having a habit of telling people to mind their own business), told him it was no concern of his. He quite sensibly said it would be his concern if he was sharing a bedroom with a pill-crazed woman every night for the rest of his life. Put like that, she had to agree. And that was the start of her recovery.
It occurs to me that had Mr Holt not been so new to the town he might have had a good friend who might have warned him off. And this friend might have pointed out the awkward class difference and the problematic nature of the in-work relationship, especially with a junior colleague. They might have reminded him that he had been perfectly happy, for years and years, living alone in peace and quiet, listening to the wireless and reading political thrillers or books on history. And this hypothetical good friend might have told him that it would be utter madness to take on this drunken-divorcee-pillhead and her four children, however clever, pretty and knowledgeable about cricket she was.
But there was no sensible friend, sibling or parent around, thank God, and Mr Holt moved in. It was hard for him and for us. For the first month
he still held the lease on the grim bedsit. He would go there for retreats and was barely able to force himself to come back to our madhouse. Our mother begged us to be on our absolute best behaviour and we begged her the same. And then, after a honeymoon period – during which we’d been as quiet and good as we could be, we went back to normal. Mr Holt couldn’t cope with the chaos that was our norm and took to doing his paperwork on the way home from work, parked up in a field gate.
He couldn’t believe we didn’t have any routine, that we didn’t clean our shoes on a certain day or go to bed at such and such time. There was no basic weekly agenda or timetable for shopping and laundry. He was shocked to see that my sister had made the bookcase into an aviary, by fixing chicken wire to the front, for her canaries, Pippy and Luke, and that our dog ate from a pudding basin.
We did all the things that kids do: we were noisy, we fought, made a mess and played with matches. And all the upsets and joys that happen in families happened. We broke things and he’d fix them. We upset the neighbours and he’d apologise for us. We got caught shop-lifting in the village and he’d shame us with his severe tellings-off, while our mother would lurk and worry and bite her nails and say he was too hard on us, and he would say she was deranged. And there were some awful, illegal and very bad things that I shan’t go into.
There was the time the village policeman wanted to blame my brother for something, just to tick it off and have it solved, but Mr Holt fought it, like a lawyer in a book, until the policeman backed down. And the time I made a pie and wrote Mr Holt’s first name in pastry letters on the top, and my mother said it was like something gruesome from Roald Dahl.
We were like any family and, though that doesn’t sound all that exciting, it was, and still is, marvellous for us.
Mr Holt is a grandfather now, many times over, and though he still doesn’t particularly enjoy a houseful of shrieking children (and you’d never catch him at a school play or a birthday party at the local Go Bananas) the kids love going to his allotment and nicking raspberries and carrots. They phone to ask him to run through the Cuban missile crisis for a school project, to talk about football or clarify something when Wikipedia isn’t 100 per cent clear.
