Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya

by Jones, Vinnie

  I was determined to do everything right; I was already a better person just by being in the same room as her. I wasn’t acting all Jack-the-Lad; I was respectful, just grateful to be there. Her mum was so nice to me too – they both treated me with respect and warmth. But I knew I shouldn’t overstay my welcome – her dad was due home any minute – so I made my excuses, gave Tanya the slightest peck on the cheek and headed out the back door.

  I left the house on cloud nine. The five minutes back to the Three Horseshoes took a millisecond. All I could think of was the softness of her cheek as I’d kissed her goodnight.

  But things just never went right for me back then. I felt like a big dark cloud followed me around. I still had to pick up my Suzuki at the pub, but when I got there it was nearly midnight and the place was closed up. Worse: where my motorbike had been, now there was just the stupid, huge helmet I’d wear, sitting on the front step of the pub.

  Nicked.

  It was the first time something of mine had been stolen and I needed that bike to get around, back and forth to work and all that. I was fuming and freaking out. Now I was stuck in Garston with no ride to whichever couch I was staying on that night, and I hadn’t even paid for the thing yet. What the hell was I going to do?

  It was late enough that there wasn’t much traffic about and above the sound of the odd truck on the Kingsway, somewhere in the distance I could hear a high-pitched whine, like the sound of a cheap motorcycle. On a hunch, I picked up my helmet and followed the sound until I got to Garston Park. Once there, it was obvious what was happening. I thought, ‘You’re fucking joking.’ In the dimly lit park, I could make out a few lads who’d been hanging out with Tans and her mates in the pub earlier – now, they were joyriding the Suzuki up and down, hooting and shouting and laughing and doing wheelies and all that.

  I wasn’t having it. Sneaking behind a tree, I waited for the bike to get closer, and as it passed, I stepped out and swung my helmet at the kid on my bike. Bosh – down he goes like a ton of bricks, the bike toppling over and stalling. I think he was more startled than hurt; he quickly jumped up and ran and all of his mates ran off too, leaving me with a banged-up, keyless Suzuki and a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not because they’d nicked my bike, though that had been bad enough. What I felt then was that I’d maybe been set up by Tanya Lamont. Perhaps she’d only agreed to let me walk her home so that her mates could steal my bike and have a drunken ride around Garston Park.

  All my insecurities came flooding back, there in the dark park with my motorcycle on the ground. My demons, which I fought and fought, showed up once again; the big cloud got darker, deeper. All my trust in people had been shattered by what had happened at home, so I was able to see betrayal everywhere I looked.

  Would Tanya set me up like that? Well, of course she would; it wasn’t that she was bad, it was just that I didn’t register in her life, and certainly not in her heart. I was several thousand miles from being at her level, so of course she’d help her real friends pinch my motorbike. She was just a beautiful decoy.

  I was underwater and she was up there on the surface, swimming through life.

  Tans was always the other side of the M1 from me; there was no way across. And what happened in May 1984 proved it, though I wasn’t to know it at the time.

  On 19 May 1984, my beloved Watford ran out at Wembley to play Everton in the F.A. Cup Final. This was the great Graham Taylor-led team featuring Nigel Callaghan, Mo Johnston and John Barnes. That said, the Everton team weren’t bad that day, either – Neville Southall in goal, Gary Stevens and Trevor Steven confusing commentators up and down the country, Peter Reid in midfield and Graeme Sharp, Adrian Heath and Andy Gray up front.

  Playing centre back that day for Watford was Steve Terry – remember him? He always wore a big white sticky bandage on his forehead. He’d first cut his head badly in an aerial duel with Justin Fashanu against Norwich in the early eighties (I would go on to be mates with Justin’s brother, John). In those days, there was no concussion protocol – you got stitched up and sent back out. That’s what had happened to Steve; they patched him up, sent him back on but, because he was a tall centre back, he’d of course have to head the ball at some point – when he did so, it opened up the wound all over again. Ridiculous. After that, he wore the big plaster on his head during games to stop the old wound rupturing.

  But despite all that, Steve Terry made quite the career for himself at Watford. I, on the other hand, had screwed it up completely.

  On the day of the Cup Final I was 19 years old; I wasn’t playing football, I was just Vinnie Jones, working-class guy with no real prospects, doing this, that and the other. Tanya Lamont? No idea. After the Suzuki incident I’d accused her of setting me up and we’d fallen out. And it hadn’t helped that someone told her I was claiming we’d had a snog on the way home (I didn’t tell anyone that – it wasn’t true for a start, but also I would never brag about such a thing in any case). But we lost contact once again, and I figured that was it forever.

  When I got let go from Watford, Nigel Callaghan had got taken on, and now he was in the first team and getting ready to play in the Cup final. Nigel was from Garston – right across the street from the Three Horseshoes, if you need one more coincidence. Nigel was a good lad and had slung a couple of Cup Final tickets to my mate Russell, who – if you remember – had been with me the day at Sun Sports when I’d first met Tanya Lamont. Russell knew I’d been a Watford fan all my life and that I was on my arse at the time and he offered me the second ticket. Cup Final tickets were like gold dust in those days; Wembley held 100,000 people (and then some), but you were still really lucky if you could get a ticket. There was no secondary online market in those days; it was either a tout or nowt.

  It was a gorgeous, early summer day in north London. My beloved Watford had made it to the Cup Final for the first time in their history and everywhere we looked we saw a sea of gold scarves. It seemed like the whole town had shown up. Elton John had brought some razzmatazz to the club for sure, but they were also a really good team (they’d finished second in the league behind Liverpool a year earlier). We were all pinching ourselves that we’d made it to Wembley … and I couldn’t help thinking that I could have been in that team if things had been different. Then again, it was a bit like how I felt about Tanya Lamont; she was also a million miles from me, so there was no point harbouring too much of an upset about it.

  But just as I was thinking about how life had gone south, Tanya was right in front of me, though I had no idea.

  Russell and I were standing on Wembley Way, looking to cross the road to head into the stadium, when a big bus draped in Watford colours came along. Some copper stopped us – threw his arm right across us – as the bus passed. It couldn’t have been the team bus as the players had been in Wembley for a while, probably, warming up and doing that poncy walkabout before the game. I looked at Russell and nodded at the bus, saying, ‘players’ wives and girlfriends’. I thought nothing more of it.

  What I couldn’t know was that at that exact moment Tanya Lamont – soon-to-be Tanya Terry – was on the bus, saw me on the pavement and had shouted out my name.

  Things had greatly changed for Tanya since I’d walked her home from the Three Horseshoes the night my bike got nicked. She was still living with her parents in Gaddesden Crescent, and it turned out that her next-door neighbour, grouchy Annie Nicell (she of the roses), used to have all the lads from Watford living with her. Graham Taylor had a rule back then that all the players had to live within five miles of Vicarage Road (Gaddesden Crescent is three and a half miles away) so he could keep an eye on everyone and know when they were going out too much (I’m not sure how well I’d have done under Taylor to be honest, at least back then!). He was a stickler, Taylor, big on discipline, which was a difficult task with a bunch of young men. (It was made even more difficult when you remember that Mo Johnston – a man who, according to one article, very much enjoyed the ‘flamboyant, high
-living champagne lifestyle’ – was in that team!) But Taylor’s way must have worked – he turned Watford into a really good club.

  Anyway, Tanya’s neighbour Annie Nicell had John Barnes, Steve Terry and Kenny Jackett all living with her until they made it to the first team and started earning enough money to get their own places. (It didn’t come soon enough, apparently: Mrs Nicell fed the lads such inedible mashed potatoes that they used to secrete them in flower pots up and down Gaddesden Crescent.)

  Things being how they are, these lads ended up meeting Tanya and all her friends. One day, a visitor had arrived to see Shane and Tanya, whose job it was every day to wash up after the evening meal, had gone to the front door in her bright yellow Marigolds. As she opened the door, she saw Steve Terry arriving at Annie Nicell’s, and shouted hello; they proceeded to chat for a while outside, though Tans never took her rubber gloves off. It didn’t seem to dissuade him, though – by 1984 Tanya Lamont and Steve Terry were dating.

  Cut to Cup Final day – Tanya is on the wives and girlfriends’ bus and clocks me being held back by the copper on the pavement as the coach passes. According to what she told me much later, she ran to the window and shouted my name. She’d probably seen my hair before she’d seen me – back then I had a big old shock of curly hair, a huge thing taking up space above my forehead.

  Her friend, Suzy Bicknell (who was dating John Barnes at the time and would subsequently be married to him for a decade), said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘That’s Vincent Jones,’ Tanya said.

  Suzy was confused, apparently – she probably noticed the way that Tanya had lit up when she’d recognized me, even though she was dating Steve – but soon the bus was out of the traffic and away to the stadium. And I was none the wiser; I just kept on my merry way, went into Wembley, got to my seat and watched Tanya’s boyfriend and the rest of his teammates lose to Everton 2–0.

  When I’d heard two years later that Tans had married Steve Terry, I thought: ‘Yeah, it makes sense – of course she’s going out with a pro footballer. Of course she is – she’s beautiful and smart and it makes sense.’ I didn’t even have a little knot in my stomach about it. She was still on the other side of the M1 to me and I couldn’t cross. There was too much traffic. It was too dangerous.

  No, not dangerous, just impossible. I was ducking and diving, doing a bit of window cleaning, a bit of labouring, I was working at Mitsubishi, temping. Or I was on the dole. But Tans? Married to a First Division footballer who’d already played in the Cup Final, friends with Suzy Barnes and John Barnes – they’d all got on a boat and it was sailing happily down the river.

  The M1 is wide, and it never sleeps, and it is impossible to simply run to the other side. I was over this side, struggling, stuck outside Wembley, standing on the pavement, being held back; she was on the bus. Being with Tans wasn’t even an option.

  Even though they’d lost, I remember Watford had a celebration in an open-top bus that ended up at what was then the Watford Harlequin shopping centre. I stood in the huge crowd and quietly said to myself, ‘One day I’ll play in an F.A. Cup Final.’ It was more a dream than a hope.

  Until it became a reality, of course.

  4

  A GANG CALLED CRAZY

  When I was about 19, I got a job just south-west of Watford at what was once the Masonic School for Boys on The Avenue in Bushey. My mate Mark Attwood’s dad, Pete, was the head groundsman on the property and hired me to be a gardener. It was a beautiful place and my job was to whiz around on one of those huge mowers making everything look like Wembley Stadium.

  One day in the summer of 1984, Pete said, ‘Do you know the measurements of a football pitch? We’ve got this team, Wealdstone, coming to do their preseason here.’ At the time, Wealdstone were a big deal, at least in non-league football. They were leading the Gola League then (the Gola League became the GM Vauxhall Conference became the Nationwide Conference became the Blue Square Premier and so on – basically, it was the league below the old Division Four) and they would go on to do the League and F.A. Trophy double in 1985.

  When the team arrived for their first training session they had a pitch all marked out by yours truly. As they warmed up, I got chatting to Wealdstone’s manager at the time, Brian Hall, and I just happened to mention that one of the last big games I’d ever played was here at the school. I said, ‘I played for the county.’ By this point I was getting back into football a bit – I’d been playing for Bedmond – and, even though I was standing there in my groundsman’s overalls, Hall, bless him, told me to bring my gear and join in with training. This was a big deal – at that level, former pros were still plying their trade and an up-and-comer called Stuart Pearce had recently left Wealdstone to join Coventry City (he had played for them for a full five seasons, starting at age 16).

  Things went well enough with Wealdstone that I ended up being taken on to the team, though I did manage to fit in a few drunken fights at pubs on away games.

  Alcohol …

  Since Tans died, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how alcohol affected my life.

  As I’ve said, many nights my sister and I would huddle together in her bedroom while downstairs my parents fought out all their hurt. For some people, this might put them off alcohol for life – I met one young lad recently who told me that because his mother was an alcoholic, he has never had a single drink because he associates it with that violent snap that his mother would get.

  Sadly, it had the reverse effect on me: I turned to it, and it would make me aggressive. I think that’s because I was comfortable with it – I knew how alcohol could breed aggression, and so even though it was deeply painful, I felt at home in that pain; it was just how hurt got released. Even though it’s damaging, it was just more comfortable to me to be in the thrall of alcohol. Conflict became something I was used to, because it was every fucking night until three o’clock in the morning. I had found out it was great to have a fight and I was quite good at it. People would say, ‘Did you see Jonesy knock him out?’ That was all the talk – it had become the weekend sport.

  I guess it’s all about what side you want to be on. I went to the aggressive, heavy-drinking side because I was comfortable with that side. In my home life there had been drink involved and there were the arguments and everything. For the lad I talked to the other day, well, it worked the other way for him – I wish it had mine.

  When I was a young lad and my parents were screaming at each other, I couldn’t be as strong as I wanted to be. Alcohol gave me that strength, even when it deeply damaged my life, and more importantly, Tans’ life. I wish I could take back the years she knew me as a drinker, but I can’t. At least she got the last six years … But I’m jumping ahead. I can’t help it; I can be telling a story – any story – and the vision of her comes to me and I have to go back to her, to talk to her in my head, to tell her I’m sorry and that I love her and that I hope she was at least a little bit proud of me, even though I could be a right pain in the arse.

  Anyway, eventually I got a break into the Wealdstone team for good, though I wish I hadn’t, given how it happened. Dennis Byatt, who played centre half (and would go on to be Wealdstone’s manager), went through a terrible tragedy – his young wife and baby both died in childbirth. I stepped in for Dennis and even ended up playing the F.A. Trophy semi-final against Enfield. But my first game was Frickley away on a freezing night – in fact, it was so cold that the Frickley fans built a big fire on the little hill behind the goal. The wind was howling and you couldn’t see the goal because of all the smoke. We won 2–0, I think, though I’m not sure, given that we couldn’t see anything.

  Eventually, Dennis came back and I ended up on the bench for the F.A. Trophy final, and never got on against Boston. Wealdstone won that day, and won the league, becoming the first team to do the semi-pro non-league double. But I wanted more than a spot on the bench. What I got was a life-changing call from Dave Bassett and a taste of fame in northern Sweden.


  There were two lads who played for Wealdstone – Nigel Johnson and Andy Divel – who spent part of the year playing in Scandinavia. When I heard about that, I wanted in. I still wasn’t earning much at Wealdstone and I also wanted real playing time. I heard on the grapevine that the Swedish thing was partly brokered by none other than Dave Bassett, who’d watched me when I was an under-12. Back then, he’d told my manager, ‘Keep me up to date on that kid’, but as the years went by, he’d also gotten wind of some of my drink-fuelled shenanigans. So when I went to see Bassett to ask for his help in getting a pro gig in Scandinavia, his initial reaction was a big no thank you. But I told him, ‘I’ll get down on my hands and knees and I give you my word, nothing bad will happen.’

  Apparently, Bassett called his contacts in Sweden and said, ‘I’ve got this trialist, this young lad, and I need you to turn him into a man.’ To me, a few days later he called and said, ‘Right, you’re going to Sweden, IFK Holmsund. Just stay out of trouble – no fighting, no aggro, nothing.’

  And that’s how, on 2 April 1986, I found myself 400 miles north-east of Stockholm in the town of Umea, on the Bay of Bothnia. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly Miami Beach, but I loved it and I didn’t get into a single scrap.

  At the time, Holmsund were in the third division and I played one season as their centre half. I made the Swedish team of the week on multiple occasions, signed a bunch of autographs around town and I like to think that if I went back there they would raise a few tankards of Carnegie Porter to my time there (though mine’s a Coke these days, thank you very much).

  That season, Holmsund just so happened to play Djurgårdens IF in the Swedish Cup. Djurgårdens were a top-tier team – they even had Brian McDermott playing centre forward for them just a couple of years after he’d left Arsenal. Nevertheless, we beat Djurgårdens 4–2 – the equivalent of Accrington Stanley beating Manchester United. It was the lead item on all the news shows and in all the papers.