by Gary Imlach
My father accepted the decision, but I don’t think he could understand it. An unquenchable passion to play had carried him through cartilage trouble and a slide down the divisions as far as Chelmsford City in the Southern League. Regardless of the opposition or the remuneration, he had played because there was nothing else he’d rather do on any given afternoon than be out on the pitch matching his talent and determination against someone else’s. He could always fall back on his skills as a joiner to make a living, and he’d often had to. But it was only his bad knee that finally stopped him playing in benefit matches. How could Mike, fit and strong, the family’s best physical specimen, give it up voluntarily?
I secretly admired Mike’s decision. I hadn’t had what it took to be a professional player. But if I had, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to walk away from it. I played outside-left, my father’s position. He told me – and I think I might have preferred it if he hadn’t – that I had more ability than he’d had at the same age, which is to say fourteen or so. My problem was my temperament. Everybody knew that, and under the obligation to do justice to my sporting inheritance it got worse.
My father, famously, had never been booked in fourteen seasons as a professional player. The standard package of principles that he drummed into us – play fair, own up, try hard – was one he could back up by his own example. Even the one caution he did eventually pick up, as a coach, was borne out of his fiercely black-and-white view of justice – approaching the referee at the final whistle after an Everton defeat at Derby to harangue him about his failure properly to discharge his duties. My reaction to provocation was usually physical, retaliating against some fourteen-year-old hard-knock with facial hair from Kirkby or Litherland who didn’t appreciate a Formby nancy boy beating him for speed or skill.
I can only remember my father coming to watch me play for the school on two occasions, both district cup finals. In the first I hit what seemed then, and still seems now, a miraculous half-volley from barely five yards inside our opponents’ half, a distance long enough, in memory, for a slow cross-fade of crowd noise from what-the-hell-is-he-doing to bloody-hell-what-a-goal. It probably had something to do with the height of the opposition keeper between the full-sized posts at Marine FC in Crosby where the final was played, but nonetheless it was a great goal, made greater by the fact that my dad had actually seen it and wouldn’t think it an exaggeration in the retelling.
The following year Formby High were back at the same ground in the same final. This time, though, I was apprehensive. Two or three weeks before the game the threats had started: the St Joseph’s right-back was going to put me out of the final by breaking my leg. School football on Merseyside always involved a fair bit of physical menace. Traditionally, the best teams came from the toughest areas and Liverpool had plenty of competition. Formby was where Liverpool kids came on day trips to visit the pine woods and the beach; we were too middle class to be allowed to be any good.
Strangely, I knew the boy making the threats. We actually played in the same Sunday league side. But the tribal obligations of school games cut across all other loyalties, and anyway he was a headcase. Early in the game I sealed my own fate by scoring – a free kick which went in and stayed in, lodging behind the stanchion and having to be punched free by an adult.
Then came the promised leg-break attempt. He might as well have produced a baseball bat from down his sock for all the disguise that went into the challenge. He was big and reasonably quick, but he lacked the guile to put the boot in with any finesse. I had pushed the ball past him half expecting it, and when he came in with both feet I jumped high over the danger. All I had to do was land, look aggrieved and hope that the referee would punish the intent rather than the outcome. But while I was up there some overdeveloped sense of injustice took over. Why should he avoid a sending-off simply because I’d had reactions quick enough to save myself from serious injury? Why should it take me being carried off in order for him to get his comeuppance? I landed, turned and swung my left boot as hard as I could in his direction. In coming after me with both feet he had slid in low and was still on the ground. I connected perfectly with his head, just as I had with the free kick. You always know when you’ve struck it well: there’s almost no resistance, just a glorious instant of football physics, a 100-per-cent-efficient transfer of energy from foot to object.
I think I was off the field before I was actually sent off, surrounded by a phalanx of Formby parents and teachers, simultaneously protecting me from the St Joseph’s contingent intent on killing me, and resisting the urge to kill me themselves for being so stupid. The St Joseph’s right-back was still down as I reached the relative safety of the dressing room, although even inside we could hear the mob banging and shouting threats of retribution through the wooden walls.
I can’t remember if my mother spoke, but I know my father did: ‘Right, that’s you! That’s you!’ That’s you finished is what he meant, but in his fury he didn’t have the patience to get to the end of the phrase. I understood him well enough. ‘That’s you’ was like one of my dad’s multi-headed screwdrivers; a whole range of sanctions could be fitted on the end of ‘That’s you’. Worst of all, sometimes none was, leaving you in a limbo of dread about what the punishment might turn out to be.
Not this time. After a minute or two of generalised reproach, sentence was passed. ‘If you can’t control yourself, then you can’t play.’ In another context this might have been a coaching homily, impressing on a group of promising youngsters the need for self-expression to be grounded in self-discipline. In the rickety dressing room of Marine FC, with ugly shouts still coming from outside, it was the ultimate punishment – a ban on playing until I could behave myself on the field. Pleading mitigating circumstances was no use with my father. He dealt in certainties, rights and wrongs, and I was clearly wrong. Fizzing with the injustice of it all, I wanted to tell him about the threats, how I was just standing up for myself the way he’d said we should.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t have a temper of his own. In that respect I was a chip off the old block. But there was no arguing with history; this was the man who’d played 423 league and cup games without ever being booked, let alone sent off in disgrace in a cup final. It was only after he died that my mother told me about Makepeace of Doncaster Rovers.
‘Ooh he was a sod, he used to go for your dad every time.’
Brian Makepeace – the name couldn’t have been contrived – was a notorious hard man who graduated from the colliery team in Rossington where he was born to Doncaster, where he was captain and right-back for eleven years. He was a year older than my father and had already been in the league for a season when my dad made his debut for Bury, his first professional club. Whenever they met, my father would beat Makepeace and Makepeace would kick my father. That was the basic winger/full-back dynamic, and the level of intimidation had to be fairly high before it would register on the refereeing radar of the ’50s. Justice was generally deferred until the perpetrator had the ball himself within range of one of the designated hard men on his victim’s team. During one game my father couldn’t wait.
‘I think it was a night game,’ said my mother, ‘and he’d clattered Dad a few times and the crowd were getting really worked up. Well, he clattered him again, and your dad had him on the ground, hammering him.’
‘What did the ref do?’
‘He just said, “Now, now Stewart, I’ll deal with this,” and they got on with the game. Now of course he would have been sent off.’
‘And the ref didn’t even book him?’
‘Oh no, Dad never got booked, you know that.’
In the end it wasn’t my temper that sabotaged my dreams of playing football but something else in my temperament. Or something not sufficiently there. That is to say whatever internal force it was that had propelled my father from a tiny Scottish backwater to the World Cup in Sweden, whatever mechanism it was that hoovered up all the available oxygen around him and turne
d it into pure effort – whether the game was a cup tie or a charity match.
I had trials with Plymouth Argyle but no offer came, and I drifted off into areas in which I had less to live up to. I may have inherited my father’s raw talent, but clearly there’d been more to his success than that. More substantial virtues that he hadn’t handed down.
Chapter Two
Leaving Lossiemouth
THE HARBOUR AT LOSSIEMOUTH is full of yachts now, weekend boats that never seem to move, save for the gentle lifting and lowering the tide gives them at their moorings. I’d heard that it had happened, but this was the first time I’d been back to see it for myself.
‘It just seems like a waste of a harbour. The east coast of Scotland isn’t that suitable for yachting, it’s too exposed. On the west coast you can dodge round an island. On the east coast you’re either in or you’re out, and if you’re out at the wrong time, you’re out on your own.’
Donnie Stewart, born here like my father in 1932, is Lossiemouth’s unofficial historian. In their day – and even in mine on the annual trek north for the family summer holiday – it had been a busy fishing port, the harbour full of trawlers. The town had been built with herring money and maintained by the trade in cod and haddock. The point of the place was emphasised by a gentle camber in the headland on which the whole community was built, the wide handsome streets sloping down to the sea on three sides. The road was for visitors like us coming in from the south. The chief way out for the locals was to the north, east and west, by boat.
I sat in Donnie’s living room, a short walk from the water as all Lossie’s living rooms are, and listened to him sketch the boundaries of childhood in a fishing community of 5,000.
‘We had nothing to do with more than half a mile inland, we’d just no interest in it. I mean we’d go up to Elgin on the bus, but it would never occur to me to get off anywhere in between. That was country. We were fisher, they were country. You could tell the difference between the town folk and us. They walked different. They would put their feet down flat whereas here you walked on your toes because fishermen were used to balancing. So you could literally tell the difference as they walked down the street. England? I don’t think we ever thought of England really.’
Why bother? Once past the massive stone bulwarks at the mouth of the harbour there was the whole ocean-going world to choose from. And since every man set out to sea knowing there was a good chance he might not return, a fair number of them decided to make one-way journeys of their own choosing: Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand. The masthead of the local paper bore the legend: The Northern Scot, A Popular Journal For Scotsmen At Home And Abroad. There was a weekly ‘Kith and Kin’ feature with photos of those who’d made it safely across.
Alexander Davidson, who went to Canada 21 years ago, is a groom on a farm in Nanton near Calgary.
John Reid, born Lossiemouth, February 1866, has died at his home, 4057 N. Interstate, Portland, Oregon.
Those seemed to be the options on offer to the men of Lossiemouth: leave and never come back, or stay and perhaps never come back anyway. In either case, the people of the town faced largely out to sea and not back over their shoulders.
The exceptions were my father and Ramsay MacDonald. Growing up it had seemed to me like a handy pairing: Lossiemouth’s two most notable sons, the footballer and the politician, heading south to make their names along the road we drove in on every year. By the time my father had reached the age of five, Ramsay MacDonald was already back – in the cemetery up at Spynie, bedded in for the long wait for history to rehabilitate him. Some of the local children sat on their parents’ shoulders to watch the funeral cortège pass by, but I can’t imagine my grandfather allowing himself the luxury of time off work.
John Imlach was a man of the utmost correctness in all areas of his life. The town relied on it – he was the regional superintendent for the Scottish Boatowners Mutual Insurance Association. A marine engineer, he’d been to sea himself, only leaving the merchant navy to spend more time at home when my father was born. On land he was respected, and occasionally feared, for his fairness. If he said a boat needed repairing there was no disputing it. If a ship sank, he would travel to the courtrooms in Edinburgh to give his opinion as to whether or not it had been done deliberately.
He had absolutely no interest in football. If he had, it would certainly have been documented. John Imlach maintained records of everyday life as though they too might later be called into evidence. In notebooks he kept the details of every car he ever owned, recording the purchase price, the sale price and the particulars and cost of any repair work. Ancillary tables charted the rising price of petrol through the years. When he was ill he made case notes, hour-by-hour, and presented them to the doctor on his arrival at the house. His own death he oversaw with punctilious dignity, refusing to leave his home and go to hospital for any kind of treatment that might prolong his life: ‘I’m a car that’s run and done.’
Having ordered his affairs, and with most of his extended family either under the same roof or within a two-mile radius, his English grandchildren became the last outstanding order of business. My father made the journey home every year of his life, regular as a salmon. But after fifteen years of family holidays in Lossiemouth, we’d all grown up, started careers, travelled abroad and – one way or another – failed to get back there each summer. There was no formal request but, feeling that it was about time, the three of us organised a trip. His Mini (purchase price recorded, sale details pending) had stood, undriven by him, outside the house for months. He managed to get out of his room for a day trip with us. We visited as many of the fishing ports under his old jurisdiction as we could – Buckie, Findochty, Portsoy – and he was recognised and well received on the harbour-sides in all of them. Three weeks after the holiday we were back in Lossiemouth for the funeral. Once we’d left, he’d taken to his bed with the quiet satisfaction of a man who’d finished a large filing job that had been preying on his mind.
My father came from a male line of alternating Johns and Jameses, so if there was any debate at all in advance of his christening it can only have been over the minor placings. Names in Lossiemouth weren’t subject to fashion, they were given in the literal sense – handed on from a current or past owner as a badge of family continuity. That was part of it, I suppose, especially with the frightening annual turnover of names at sea. It was also, perhaps, an expression of natural thrift. Why spoil a child with a new name when there were perfectly good ones in the house that could be reused?
Of course, having given the new arrival a name identical to that of half his relatives and a third of the rest of the town, his family then had to give him another in order to avoid confusion. The phone book is the last place you’ll find anyone in Lossiemouth – the streets are awash with nicknames, sea-names, mother’s maiden names, and every conceivable alternative to the information originally handed over to the registrar.
My dad got both barrels – he was christened James John – and for individuality’s sake had to revert to the third name on his birth certificate. Apart from official envelopes addressed to J.J.S. Imlach Esq., which always looked stylish on the doormat as well as slightly menacing, he’d never been known as anything other than Stewart, until he got ill. It used to upset my mother on visits to the hospital to find that a fresh shift of nurses, with nothing to go on but the information on his chart, had printed James on the card above his bed. It was bad enough that he was slipping away from her, without his name preceding him. He couldn’t see the card and that made it worse, as though he were the unwitting victim of an office joke, tottering towards the exit with a kick-me sign on his back. One more indignity to add to the long list that illness had brought with it. But, without realising, the nurses were perhaps putting him in his proper place, reconnecting him to the long family file of Jameses and Johns dot-dashing their way back down the Imlach line.
My father had discovered at the age of fifteen that he’d be the
first Imlach in five generations not to take the family name to sea. That is, he took it to sea once and brought it home in a sick bag. The custom was for a boy to make his trial voyage on the trawlers as the ship’s cook, packed off with a parcel of food already prepared by his mother to minimise the damage he might do to crew morale. My father went out on The Snowdrop, the boat of his Grandad Dovey, and was sick enough that he had to be tied to the wheelhouse so that the men could get some fishing done. It was, perhaps, the pivotal episode of his life. Until then my father may have dreamed of being a footballer, but he’d assumed that he would go to sea, where trips to the fishing grounds would blow holes in the fixture list and the game would become a weekend passion. Exhausted and queasy as the boat returned to harbour, he realised only that he had to find a way to make a living on land; he must have felt that his horizons had shrunk not broadened. He rode the butcher’s delivery bike for a year until he was old enough to start an apprenticeship as a joiner. Football may have been his life, but there was nothing in the history of the family, or the community, to suggest that it could ever be a livelihood.
What leap of imagination had it taken to change that? My love of football had been handed to me ready-made, it was in my blood. But it hadn’t been in his. He was an only son, with two sisters, and a father who never played the game and seldom willingly watched it. Perhaps its endless improvisation offended my grandfather’s sense of order. Once, after his son had turned professional, he was cajoled down to England to see him play. On the Richter scale of local sports journalism this registered as a newsworthy event, and he had a visit from a reporter on his return. What had he thought? ‘Och, I’ve seen games just as good on the square round the corner from my house.’
The square is still round the corner, but now from the house of my dad’s sister, May, and her husband Slater, who had better sea legs than my father and did forty years on the trawlers when the fishing was still good. It doesn’t look that promising as a football pitch. It’s large enough, but the grass playing surface is divided by diagonal footpaths into a St Andrew’s flag of four awkward triangles. Either the games they played were extremely narrow affairs, or the wingers on one flank would suddenly find themselves negotiating a strip of concrete as they headed towards the byline to get a cross in. My father and his friends would play football anywhere, but this was the focal point of the endless impromptu kickabout that his childhood telescopes down to in the memories of those who lived it with him. By the time he was a teenager, the games on the square were so popular that large crowds were regularly gathering to watch them. In May 1948 the town council’s Playground and Recreation Committee recommended a ban.
