Book serialisation: Far Foreign Land, Chapter 13

A meeting of the clans in Istanbul as Ordinary boys gather, the birth of scally/casual culture and the (comic) value of finding a local guide to show you around

To glory we will go

BOTH SIDES ARE milling around on the pitch, deciding which players have the nerve to take part in a shootout that could earn them a place in their club’s history or haunt them for their entire career – perhaps the rest of their life.

Carragher chases down Dudek and manhandles him, shouting and gesturing like an ejected drunk. He’s the most excitable person in the stadium. Everyone else is too nervous to expend energy.

The penalties are at the Milan end and they go first. Serginho steps up to take the first kick. He places the ball on the spot and walks back.

As he turns, Dudek starts to dance on the line. It’s 1984 again. Carragher’s a genius. He’s proven that history does matter.

* * *

Another station, another nation, another taxi tout. At 8.30 on Monday morning, we’re finally walking along the platform at Istanbul. The journey that began on Thursday night at Lime Street is over but the only thought was to shrug off the persistent hustler who shadowed me for about 30 yards despite being told that I was not interested. He was huge, so I suspected he was trying a bit of intimidation.

‘I’ve told you, mate, don’t need it. Now f…’

Dave rushed up beside me just as the man put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you blind?’

I must have been, because it was Big Al. So the first reunion of the day began, with more than a touch of embarrassment.

Al arrived from Sydney on Saturday and had either taken up trainspotting or been checking every arrival for two days. He was aware that we were arriving by rail, but unsure when.

As usual, we adjourn to the nearest bar to the station and settle down to catch up. We had hardly taken a sip of the breakfast Efes when Mark strolled past with a mate in search of an early morning kebab. It was like some kind of demented school reunion. He hadn’t seen Al for 15 years. ‘Alright mate,’ he said.

And then: ‘Were you OK in Turin? You went back into town, didn’t you?’

‘It was a doddle,’ I said, using the idiom of the 1980s.

With the exception of Dave, who is younger, we all go back that far and more. In the late 1970s, disorder on the streets and football had become forever linked. Travel to away matches had begun to be policed like military operations, with supporters herded on to ‘special’ trains, made up of the oldest rolling stock. They were the sort of carriages that would not be missed if a bunch of thugs decided to wreck their own transport. Destroying trains always sounded a crazy idea to us; after all, you had to have some way of getting home.

Special trains had the lowest standards of service humanly possible. Football followers tend to attract that kind of treatment, because the vendors know that they will come back for more no matter how brutalised they are.

Police watched the fans embark at their home station, marshalled them at the other end into what we called ‘the escort’, marched the entire trainload to the ground and then locked everyone in after the game before reversing the process for the homeward journey.

There was no buffet and no opportunity to stop for food and drink. Worse were the omnipotent powers of arrest for the police.

Yet many supporters believed that this was the only way to keep safe from attack by rival fans when off their own turf. Al and I reacted against this by taking the normal, scheduled trains. These were commonly referred to in Liverpool as ‘ordinary’ trains, to distinguish them from ‘the specials’.

‘Ordinary boys’ were not a gang, in the sense the ICFs and the Service Crews touted themselves. It was a loose collection of small groups who took this method of transport for a variety of reasons.

Most just wanted a drink and timed their arrival in cities across the country for pub opening hours. Others liked to pay for their adventures with a little prematch shoplifting.

A few, very few, liked to play at being hooligans.

If you left Lime Street early enough, the police would not be in place at the destination. It meant that if there were any local troublemakers waiting you were vulnerable. In practice it rarely happened. The main danger was after the match, but even that was overstated.

Most of the time it was easy to find a quiet pub. By about 7pm both police and locals had drifted home to get ready for Saturday night and the stations were quiet places again and homeward embarkation easy.

Taking the ordinary gave you a certain glamour. The specials might arrive back at, say, seven o’clock and we’d swagger into the Yankee at nine-thirty to the breathless question: ‘Any trouble?’

‘Nah, it was a doddle.’

Ordinary boys were the elite, the risk-takers. People listened to your itinerary with awe. ‘Youse’re mad, youse are,’ they’d say. And cool. You could hear it in their voices.

It was important to look the part, too. The whole ‘casual’ culture was beginning to be noticed in the media but things had moved on in Liverpool by the time that journalists noticed any trends.

The development of the terrace ‘look’ was originally an accident. Near where I lived, off Scotland Road, was a Salvation Army hostel used by the homeless and long-distance lorry drivers. The truckers parked in the wastelands levelled during the building of the second Mersey tunnel. There, local boys would attempt to break into the lorries.

Some time in the summer of 1976, a consignment of Adidas tee shirts was stolen. Within days, everyone was wearing them. Bought at a fraction of the retail price, they were very popular.

The next year, a lorryload of Fred Perry tennis shirts were nicked. Again, every young lad in the area seemed to be wearing one.

So when Liverpool supporters went to the Continent on the pre-season tours or for European Cup games, some paid for the trip with a little shoplifting. They stole what they knew was easily shifted back home.

In early 1978, Lacoste polo shirts started showing up in Liverpool, presumably because they were the nearest thing in Europe to Fred Perrys.

The Mod revival at the end of the 1970s mutated into a style popular with football fans. The suede boots of the Mod era were as common as training shoes on the ordinaries and, by 1980, the look was well established.

Lacoste, Lois or Lee jeans, Hush Puppies or adidas samba. As soon as the London mobs started to adopt the style, we junked it.

By 1982, we were avoiding labels. John Smedley botany wool crew necks – the new target for shoplifters – were expensive but unlabelled.

Some of us were getting Levi 501s sent over from the States, shrinking them and bleaching them. At Euston Station, West Ham fans waiting for a train north had their eyes on stalks as we came off the ordinary mobhanded in faded jeans. They were too shocked to cause any trouble. A couple of weeks later, when we visited Upton Park, it was clear there had been a run on bleach in the East End.

Then we stopped. The style had nowhere to go. We left the chase for a new designer shirt or jeans to others. The ‘scally’ look stayed understated as labels predominated. That said, we would always admire a classy pair of training shoes.

In 1982, Manchester United fans came into the Kop and there was serious trouble. The topic of conversation after the game was the high-profile arrest of a lad we knew. He’d been dragged out of the Kop with a policeman on each limb, flailing away in a manic and futile attempt to escape.

In the Yankee, Al was effusive in his admiration. ‘Did you see Wayne?’ he asked. ‘He had a lovely pair of Forrest Hills on.’ The trainers had caught the eye, even if the method of displaying them left something to desired.

Tasty trainers drew envy but, for the most part, we’d rather wear a quality pair of suede boots, preferably purchased at half the price they were marked up in the Jermyn Street shop that the boys visited. On the ordinaries, style mattered, not fashion.

So we were ordinary boys and proud of it. Status comes in many different ways and the subversion of the language was entirely in keeping with the culture we lived in, whose values clashed with the mores of British life.

It was a culture that flirted with lawlessness but, for us, never came near to drifting into criminality. We always thought Mark was living wilder than we were; it would not surprise me if he thought we were nearer the edge.

Mark and his mates had been to Istanbul before, when Liverpool played Galatasaray. He gushed about the place, saying that we would have a wonderful time. There was some concern at home that this was the city where two Leeds United supporters were stabbed to death in Book serialisation: Far Foreign Land, Chapter 122001.

‘Don’t know what that was all about, but I think those boys were probably unlucky,’ Mark said. ‘They’re friendly here. The Turks were great with us.’

‘Have you been the Blue Mosque?’ I asked. Mark was appalled.

‘I’m going nowhere blue,’ he said with conviction. ‘The world’s all red.’ It was and it felt good. The boys were gathering again and it was for the European Cup.

Then Mark was off. Like Al, he has lived away from Liverpool for a long time. Yet even if they get to fewer matches than they once did, the football club is the mooring line that keeps people like Mark and Al close to their identity. Their sense of self is tied up with a red shirt, a Liver Bird and the songs and experiences that have bound us together since we were barely in our teens.

The sun was out, the Turkish people friendly and things could not have been better. It was an auspicious start to four days in Turkey.

Without the aid of a street map and on the basis of a confused barman’s directions, we headed uphill to the hotel and immediately got lost. Of course, a taxi would have been less time-consuming but blundering into people and places is an integral part of the experience. Had we gone straight to the hotel, for example, we would never have met Bill.

We were standing on a corner, each having favoured heading towards a different compass point, when a portly Turk accosted us. We had already noticed that the local guidance industry was a competitive business and the more successful operators had an obvious mixture of charm, threat and knowledge. Bill came up short on all fronts, which probably explained why he was forced to try his luck with an unpleasant looking trio like us when there were clearly more affluent and pliable tourists in the area.

Bill’s grasp of English caused problems. There was always going to be a basic cultural misunderstanding between us. That’s because he spoke the language better than we did. He had an idiomatic form of expression that suggested he had once been a scripwriter on Minder. His physique and face could have seen him cast as a comic but violent villain.

He was short, fat and had an impressive scar running down his cheek. I could see Al liked him immediately and presumed he’d be with us for the long haul.

‘Where are you going? Let me see. Like a rabbit warren round here. Come on, this way. You have to be careful. Tea leaves everywhere.’

He didn’t need to tell us that. Most of them we knew from home.

Bill’s real name was incomprehensible but he was proud of his anglicised nickname. He led us around a variety of shops and bars owned by acquaintances and family members. ‘Ah, it’s the Bill,’ a waiter said.

Whenever cash was exchanged, he went off unabashed to haggle for his share. ‘I’ll just divvy up with them,’ Bill said as he sloped off to get his portion of our largesse from the owner of the business. ‘Cor blimey, this is alright,’ he’d gloat, proudly showing us the euros he had earned.

In bars, Bill was on safe ground. He ordered food for us with an aristocratic flourish and called for drink with the abandon of a man who never has to pay. He was less certain when the questions stretched further than catering.

Near the Blue Mosque, a hawker with a stall was wearing a fez. Publicity at home had suggested wearing such a hat was a mortal insult to Turks. ‘Why don’t people wear the fez, Bill?’

‘Ataturk didn’t like them.’

‘Why?’ Bill thought for a full 30 seconds and shrugged. ‘Everybody love Ataturk.’

‘Then why’s he wearing one?’ Al asked, pointing at the stallholder.

The question seriously taxed Bill. The delay was much longer this time. Finally, he replied. ‘Because he’s a c***!’ he roared.

Throughout the day, our group grew and shrunk as friends, people we vaguely recognised and even complete strangers arrived and departed. When someone told us he was in transit between the Blue Mosque

and the New Mosque, Dave sighed. ‘So many mosques, so little time,’ he said. On the face of it, Homer Simpson could not have expressed with any more precision the sense of living in a cultural void.

But we had filled that void. The Scouse diaspora had come together and the venue was incidental. For all they – we – cared, the Golden Horn was a dubious nightclub and the Spice Bazaar an unlikely Geri

Halliwell comeback. That’s because we were there for business.

Leave tourism to the tourists. Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul... the city had been here a long time. It will still be here when we want to see it properly. As it was, it felt like the Ottoman Empire was in bloom the last time we won the European Cup.

Going to football matches abroad is unlike any other type of travel. The destination is the least important thing in the whole adventure. Tickets, trophies and gathering with people with the same values and experiences are the only things that matter.

To suggest it was just Scousers arriving for the game, though, would be to underestimate the level of support for Liverpool. People had come from the Far East, all over northern Europe and the Americas.

We met a young Dubliner alone at a bus stop and invited him to drink with us. Bill had promised to take us to a special bar, his favourite. There was high expectation.

It turned out to be the place that we had visited nine hours earlier when we first left the train station. The barman recognised us but did not seem to know Bill. Our guide was despondent as we bantered away.

The young Irishman sat agape at sectarian insults that flew across the table. Al called us ‘dirty Taigs’, while he was immediately derided as an ‘Orange bastard’ in response.

‘You’ve shocked the bogman,’ Dave said when he noticed the lad’s expression.

‘I can’t believe it,’ the Dubliner said. ‘You’re English.’ He clearly thought we were putting on a show on his behalf.

It was time for a little history lesson. ‘Where I come from,’ I said, ‘we had an Irish Nationalist MP until 1929. So I won’t be called English by a Free Stater. I’m Scouse. Not only that. Go to O’Connoll Street when you get home and look at the statues: Jimmy Larkin with his arms wide open, one of Ireland’s great heroes. Well, he’s Scouse.’

Even if he didn’t get into the game, this boy would take a few stories back to Ireland. What he could not understand is that the residue of the religious divide remains in Liverpool, but is mostly confined to idle insults.

The football clubs have done much to help bridge the divides, drawing support from both sides. There is still the capacity for religious unrest on the Celtic fringe of the northwest, but it is very small. That we have grown up together merrily slinging sectarian insults around is probably the best sign that the communities are at ease with each other.

Unfortunately for Bill, he was now really out of his depth. Running out of material, he tried a little intimidation.

‘You don’t fuck with me. I’m a killer,’ he said.

Al, all six-and-a-half feet of him, put him in his place: ‘Yeah, you’re killing time drinking our ale.’

Bill made a last attempt to impress us. ‘You can have anything, the lot. I can get you anything you want in Istanbul,’ he said. There must have been ten of us around the table and only three had tickets. OK Bill, that’s what we want.

‘No bloody chance,’ he said sadly. ‘Big cash. Big cash. And I’m not getting it.’ He looked disappointed. A silence fell on the bar.

When even the Bill can’t get paid, it looked like it would be a tough day for the ticketless on Wednesday.

Yet it was hard to be too gloomy. Outside we could hear the call to prayer. Just. It was drowned out by Liverpool fans repeatedly parroting the trumpet line from Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. It would be a long, long night.

Read Chapter 14: With a Liver Bird upon my chest

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For those interested in the culture of Merseyside, try my non-football novel. Good Guys Lost, an epic of Liverpool life set from the 1960s to the 2010s