‘Oh my god,’ Joe said, ‘there’s them girls from next door again.’
I said, ‘What do you mean, next door?’
‘There’s three girls that live next door – didn’t you know? One of them has a kid …’
This was obviously excellent news for three single men, two of whom played for Chelsea. I joined Joe at the window just in time to see a woman in cut-off jeans with beautiful long hair glide by like a supermodel on roller skates. She had a little girl with her.
It was the most beautiful sight you can imagine. They looked so happy, rolling up and down Hunter’s Oak in the late afternoon light. I kept trying to get a glimpse of the woman, but the sun was low and I couldn’t make out her face. Joe and I were transfixed with these two, though – they looked so angelic, doing pirouettes, holding hands and screeching with laughter.
And then the woman turned towards 5 Hunter’s Oak and with the sun behind the houses at last, I could finally catch a glimpse of her face.
‘Oh my god, Joe,’ I said.
‘What, mate?’
‘It’s Tanya.’
‘Tanya?’
I’d last seen Tanya during the Suzuki debacle when she was 17; since then, she’d clearly turned into a woman. I’d read in the local paper about her heart transplant – it had been big news in Watford – and had been sorry to hear what she’d been through. Now, though, she must’ve been 24 or 25, and she still had those big, beautiful eyebrows, though her hair was even thicker than before. If she was the other side of the M1 from me back when we were teenagers, now she was five fucking M1s away from me; in fact, we weren’t even in the same country.
‘Yes, mate,’ I said to Joe. ‘It’s Tanya. I knew her when she was Tanya Lamont, from years ago. She’s married to Steve Terry now. She had a heart transplant. What the fuck is she doing on Hunter’s Oak with her kid?’
Joe said, ‘I spoke to her yesterday.’
‘What?’
‘She’s married to Steve Terry.’
‘I know, mate, I just told you that.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Joe.
‘Well, what you fucking talking to her for?’ I said. I didn’t need Joe Allon – or anyone – talking to Tanya. Not. At. All.
‘Her rabbit got out,’ Joe said. ‘Her little daughter’s rabbit got out of the thing. I caught it and took it back to the whatchamacallit?’
‘The cage, mate. It’s called a cage. Maybe a hutch.’
‘Right,’ Joe said. ‘The fucking thing was running around the street. It had a taste of freedom. Well, I say running. It was actually hopping. Anyway, I distracted it, corralled it, and took it back.’
This could only mean one thing. I had bought a house on a street in Hemel Hempstead, and now Tanya and Steve Terry and their kid lived next door. I’m not much of a mathematician, but I’d like someone to do the odds on that happening and I’d still never take that bet. As Rick says in Casablanca, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.’
We both watched in awe as the light faded and Tanya and her daughter roller skated up and down our street.
‘I am a fucking hero, mate,’ Joe said, referring, I think, to the rabbit.
A few days later, I happened to glance out of my bedroom window when who should I see but Steve Terry pulling up next door. A few minutes later, I noticed that he was putting the little girl in a car seat and then he drove away.
You didn’t need to be Inspector Clouseau to work out what was going on: Tanya and Steve must have split up. Later that day I asked Joe what he knew. He told me that Tans was living with a couple of other young women next door. One of them was Joanne Southern, who had gone to my school, Langleybury, and had been the one crying at Tans’ bedside when her heart had collapsed. Joanne had had a massive crush on me back then, apparently; she used to sit there all dinnertime watching me play football in the playground.
Well, now she was living next door with Tanya and Steve Terry had signed for Northampton Town. He was living there full time and had a girlfriend. It turned out that he and Tanya had bought the house next door to me a few months after I’d moved in but things hadn’t worked out. They’d tried to stay together for the kid’s sake, but eventually they’d split up. So now Tanya was living with her daughter, Joanne and another girl, and right next door it was me, Joe Allon and Dell. Some days I’d see Tanya’s little girl, Kaley, sitting on my wall, dangling her legs. Little did I know that Kaley, even back then a Man United fan if you can believe such a thing, was singing a little ditty about Chelsea players like me. She likes to remind me of this whenever she gets the chance:
Chelsea are rubbish
We know what to do
Flush all the players
Down the loo
Woo.
Quite the poet, our Kaley.
Now, not to give any credence to what When Saturday Comes thought of my living arrangements, but our house was, in all honesty, a bit of a carnage, shall we say? There were girls coming and going, lads coming and going – it was party time. We certainly did our fair share contributing to the bottom line of local watering holes, let’s say that.
For her part, Tans had realized I was next door and was dubious to say the least. She later told the Sun:
When I first saw him again, he was a skinhead with a diamond ear stud, and I was so shocked. I thought, ‘Oh god, he’s a thug.’ I used to read things about him and think, ‘how irritating’. I kept telling myself I hated him but every time I saw him my insides turned over. I was always looking for him.
One evening we were all in the pub and I was trying to have a good time, but something wouldn’t leave me alone – my brain kept fixating on something and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But everyone started to notice that I wasn’t really there, and let me be clear: when I’m there, I’m there full on and then some. But not that night, not at all. At about 9 p.m. I gave up and left; I felt like my clothes didn’t fit, or something, or I’d got a pebble in my shoe. Maybe it was the fly, leather New York Yankees hat I was wearing (in Hemel Hempstead); who knows.
For a while, whenever I arrived back at 5 Hunter’s Oak, I’d have the music up really loud in case it made Tans come out. I didn’t mind if she was annoyed, I just wanted to see her.
And then on the way home from the pub my brain cleared and I realized I was thinking exactly one thing: how do I get to actually talk to her, rather than just annoy her with The Clash or Madness? Back at Hunter’s Oak, I snuck up to Tanya’s front window and looked in – she was sitting in an armchair and there was a lad sitting on the couch. My heart sank; I remember saying out loud, ‘Oh, fucking hell. Whatever.’
There was nothing to be done, so I went to bed, my heart heavy. It was a warm night, so I left the windows open to let a nice breeze in … who am I kidding? I wanted to hear if the lad would leave or something. Actually, I don’t really know what I was thinking; my mind was still racing with that maddening thought: how do I get to talk to her? I knew she was several M1s beyond me, but I was right back at Sun Sports and Gaddesden Crescent, thinking about how to talk to her.
I was starting to doze off when I heard voices …
‘Yeah. OK then. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.’ Wallop – I’m at the window. The lad was in his car by this point and I watched as he drove off.
It was my chance. I put my clothes back on – not the leather Yankees hat, mind – and I rushed downstairs. Trying to be cool, I slowed down a bit and walked up to her door.
Vincent Jones had a plan.
Knock knock. She answers. ‘Oh my god, Vincent,’ Tans said. ‘Vincent Jones.’
So far so good. And then I put my plan into action.
‘I just found your rabbit running around in the alley,’ I said, ‘and I’ve just taken it around to the garden and put it back in its hutch.’
It’s not just Joe Allon who gets to be a hero.
‘Really?’ Tanya said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was worried it was going to g
et run over or something. Can’t be having that.’
‘That’s funny,’ Tanya said, pointedly not inviting me in.
‘Oh?’ I said, getting the feeling the plan wasn’t as watertight as I’d hoped.
‘Yes,’ said Tanya. ‘You see, we put a padlock on the door of the hutch a few days ago.’
Now, it’s not like I wanted the ground to open up or anything, but I wouldn’t have minded a quick tornado to spin down the street, or an earthquake maybe. Anything to take our minds off the fact that I’d just told one hell of a porker.
But I didn’t need an earthquake, because Kaley decided to get involved, even though she was only little. Suddenly, from upstairs, we could hear her calling out – she was probably three or four at the time.
Tanya said, ‘Can you wait a minute? My daughter’s crying.’ But still she didn’t invite me in. Instead, she kind of pushed the door to and ran upstairs. I was thinking, ‘So we met when we were 12 years old. We had the Suzuki incident at 18. Now we live next door to each other. She’s single. I’m single. I’m letting myself in.’
And that’s what I did. I stepped into that house, shut the door behind me and started my new life, right there and then.
The first thing I did in that new life was put the kettle on and find a packet of custard creams.
By the time the kettle was about to start whistling, Tanya was coming back downstairs. Naturally enough, she went to the front door, thinking I was still on the step. Not seeing me there, she came into the kitchen to find me with half a custard cream in my gob.
Tanya wasn’t impressed.
‘What’s going on?’ she said.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you took so long I thought I’d better make a cup of tea.’ We can thank the after-effects of the beers I’d had earlier in the evening for that line. I was filled with a kind of stupid courage.
‘You’re so cheeky,’ she said, still unimpressed.
And then we sat down with our cups of tea and our biscuits and we talked until five in the morning.
I would have kept talking past five, but I had to get to training.
It had been the most incredible night of my life. We’d shared everything – literally everything we could think of to share. I told her my whole life story up to now – Mum and Dad splitting up, running from couch to couch, blowing my chances at Watford, heading to Sweden, coming back to England to play in my own Cup Final, then Leeds, Sheffield and the son I had, and Chelsea, and now this: the two of us talking all night.
She told me about Steve, and Kaley, and the heart transplant, and the break-up. There were tears, and we laughed a lot too, but mostly we just talked and talked and talked until I had to leave to go to Chelsea.
As I got up to go, I went to give her a kiss on the cheek.
‘What?’ she said, pushing me away. ‘Certainly not.’
I tried something else: ‘Here’s my number,’ I said.
‘I don’t need your number,’ Tans said, ‘because I will never call you. I’ve never rang a man in my life.’
(As for George … I found out years later he froze to death in the garden. He couldn’t come in the house because Tans had to be extra careful about infections. Thanks anyway, George.)
That day at the training session, I ran faster than I ever had before, and I was known for winning every training race anyway. But I could have run through a brick wall that morning. Where my life had been 90 per cent or sometimes even 100 per cent, now it was a million per cent.
And it wasn’t just me, apparently. In a diary entry dated July 1992, Tanya wrote:
Today I fell in love with someone I hardly know,
and I let myself imagine he could love me so.
I forgot how beautiful butterflies in my tummy felt.
I never dreamt – Vincent Jones you’ve been gone so long –
would be my awakening.
I love it.
Some months later, Tanya told me that she’d had a quick nap after I’d left, gotten Kaley up and off to school and then had called her mum.
‘Mum,’ she said, breathless. ‘I’ve got to come see you. What time’s your lunch?’
When Tans arrived, and before they’d even properly sat down, her mum said, ‘What’s his name?’ Her mum knew straight away, probably because, as Tans later put it, ‘I was lit up like a Christmas tree.’
‘It’s Vincent Jones,’ Tans said. ‘We’ve been up all night talking.’
But Tans was a tough nut to crack.
A few days later I asked Tans if she might be going to the local golf club that weekend; I knew her dad sometimes went. She said she was indeed going, though that had been a fib; she apparently called all her friends to come with her. I had my dad and my uncles with me, and we all ended up in my back yard. I thought it was going OK, but Tans announced she had to leave, so I had to move fast.
‘Dad, go home,’ I said.
It wasn’t nice of me but needs must. After he’d left, I just up and told Tanya we needed to be together, but still she held out. To her, I could have anything and anyone I wanted, and she needed to know I wasn’t just playing.
It was killing me. I’d been round for breakfast one day, but she’d quickly run off to get Kaley. I didn’t know what to think.
So, it was time to find out. That night, I went around to see her again, and even though Joanne was there, I didn’t care. I just blurted out, ‘Do you see other boys?’
Who says that, really? ‘Other boys’? What was I thinking? Tans should probably have made fun of me for pretending I was in some kind of terrible rom-com, but instead she simply said, ‘No. I don’t. I just want to be with you.’
Then there were three people in the room suddenly, and it was a bit awkward. But I didn’t care.
‘I want to be with you, too,’ I said.
I was just glad Joanne didn’t break out into applause or something.
Then, Tans said, ‘I’ve got these butterflies inside me. It’s making me behave strangely. I’m sorry.’
Tans didn’t have to be sorry. Not at all.
From that day on I just wanted to spend every minute of god’s waking day with her. Training was just getting in the way. But there was still one big hurdle: Mr Lou Lamont, Tanya’s dad.
Lou is the epitome of an old-school guy – straighter than any arrow. At the time of Tans’ and my marathon talking session, Lou had been away in Bournemouth, golfing, so he hadn’t heard about what had happened. But it didn’t take long for Tans and me to start spending more time together – in fact, the three women next door and the three of us lads at 5 Hunter’s Oak spent all summer hanging out.
Later that summer, a friend of mine was throwing a wedding for his daughter and I’d been invited. This seemed like a great opportunity to take Tans on a real date. I asked her, but before she could commit to it, she told me she had to talk to her father. He was very much the head of the family: he organized everything, ran everything and everything went through him. He wasn’t strict, per se, just straight – a stickler. There were the right ways to do things and the wrong ways. And, let’s be honest, the right kind of people and the wrong. Tans was obviously worried that I’d be in the latter category.
But Tans was single-minded and when she wanted something, she wanted something – don’t forget this is the girl who rode her horse down Gaddesden Crescent whenever she felt like it. So, she went to see her dad to fill him in on what was going on.
Tans started out carefully, telling Lou that she was going on a date. It was the first date she’d been on since splitting up with Steve, so it was a big deal. Naturally enough, Lou was interested in who it might be.
There was a long pause.
‘Vincent Jones,’ Tanya said – she always called me Vincent. But it didn’t matter – Lou was able to work out who it was. At the time, my reputation was a national one, and let’s just say it wasn’t the best. There had been a few red cards and a few tackles that were notorious, shall we say.
Lou blew a gasket and
went through the roof at the same time. ‘Vinnie Jones? He’s a nutter!’ Lou shouted. ‘You’re not going out on a date with Vinnie Jones.’
But something about how Tanya looked, and what she said next, worked to bring him around.
‘I’ve known him a long time,’ Tanya said. ‘He’s the only man who’s ever held a car door open for me. He’s a perfect gentleman.’ Tans was adamant.
Eventually Lou came around and okayed the date. He and I would become close (and remain so to this day); he comes over to the States a lot, and we play golf together, and I see him a lot back in the UK, now we’re both without her. It’s the one thing I wish we didn’t share.
8
JOHNNY WATTS’ DAUGHTER GETS MARRIED
But I’m rushing ahead again. First, I have to tell you what happened on our first date and let me just say up front that it involves a helicopter and a man singing ‘War, what is it good for?’
At the time I still owned a house on St Agnells Lane in Hemel Hempstead, just around the corner from Hunter’s Oak. There were a few bungalows further down on St Agnells, and one of them was owned by a guy called Johnny Watts. If he sounds like a character from a Paul Weller song or a Blur album then that’s appropriate – he was larger than life was Johnny, a right old character, a gambler and a good-time Charley. All the lads used to go around to the bungalow and give Johnny the bets to go and put on at the bookies. We also used to see him in the pub and we loved him because he was just old school.
One day he grabbed me by the lapels at the bar.
‘Vinnie my boy, my boy Vinnie,’ Johnny said. ‘My daughter is getting married and I’d like you to attend.’ Then he said, ‘We got everything. We’ve even got a helicopter …’
Nothing was beyond Johnny Watts; he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought, and that was another reason why we loved him.
But St Agnells was a normal fucking street, so none of us had any idea how a helicopter would play into the plans. We couldn’t wait to find out.
It was too good an opportunity to miss. I went around to see Tans and told her all about Johnny Watts and the coming nuptials.
Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya Page 8
