Far Foreign Land: Free To Read For 20th Anniversary Of Istanbul

I've sent this out before but I'd put all but chapter one behind the paywall. The rest of the book is available to for anyone again. Links to next section at bottom of each piece

I will tell you the story of a poor boy

A TEXT MESSAGE CAME through just after the half-time whistle blew. ‘God’s good,’ it said. It was not meant as consolation. It was gloating. Across the Liverpool section in the stadium, people sat in silence, with a bemused, helpless look on their faces. It was cold and most seemed to be squirming in their seats. If there was anywhere to go to get warmth and comfort, most would surely head in that direction.

Not far away, a man stood up and, with a voice filled with pure spite, started to sing.

‘When you walk,

Through a storm,

Hold your head up high…’

And, after a slow start, when it looked as if the song would stall and not take hold, more and more people hauled themselves to their feet and joined in.Well, we might be beaten, we might be a long way from home, we might be supporting a heartless bunch of losers, but at least we could show the Italians and anyone watching on television that mere defeat can’t break our spirit.

So, we rose and sang, putting every ounce of our beings into it, and that hackneyed, cliched, plodding song became soul music, like it does every once in a while. A perverse miracle of emotional chemistry was under way with the mix of despair, anger and defiance somehow emerging as uplifting pride. This song gains eloquence and potency in defeat and, tonight, it was a philosophical circling of the wagons. It articulated a dry-eyed resistance and commitment. We stood unbowed, even though rout and humiliation were inevitable.

Liverpool were only losing 3-0 in the European Cup final, so it wasn’t a weeping matter. Worse things happen.We know.

When the song finished, someone chanted: ‘Four-three, we’re going to win four-three…’ And we laughed, really hard, before joining in.

After the passion we’d just emitted, there was a need for light relief. The next 45 minutes were not going to be pleasant. Relax, don’t take it seriously.

It’s only football. It’s not a matter of life or death…

More than an hour later, after midnight in a Turkish field miles from civilisation, a man upsides of 17 stone leapt upon me and kissed me hard. It was not a nightmare filched from Midnight Express, but one of the greatest moments anyone could experience. ‘How did it happen?’ he asked as I staggered backwards and fought off a hernia. ‘How the hell did we get here?’

The simple answer was by train. From Lime Street to Istanbul over four surreal days. He didn’t mean that. The journey he was talking about was more metaphysical, taking 20 years, from youth to middle age. Or he may have meant… but it’s easier to talk about rolling stock, timetables and the long ride from Anfield to Ataturk.

* * *

How many journeys have started and finished with a pint in the Yankee? Too many to recall. This bar holds an iconic place in the folklore of a certain type of Liverpool supporter, the tales of mad nights there exaggerated and cherished across generations.

More than 20 years ago, when long, glorious hauls across Europe were the rule rather than the exception, the Yankee was in full flight.

Some argue that it was the birthplace of naked pole dancing – even if girls rarely ventured in on deranged Saturday nights.

Some considered it admirable to climb the support column in the middle of the bar area and, on wilder nights, young scallies would shin up to the ceiling and lead the chanting from on high. Because they were full of ale and likely to drop on to the clientele and cause a disturbance, the management greased the pole to make this sport more difficult. The slippy, sticky stuff wasn’t a deterrent in itself – it added an extra dimension to the triumph of successful climbers – but the effect it had on Lacostes and diamond Pringle sweaters led to complaints and a drop off in takers for the challenge. That was until an enterprising and welldressed youth stripped to his boxers and showed how it should be done.

And if the young buck drunk enough or stupid enough to fancy a date with the pole was wearing designer underwear, off came the skiddies.

The Yankee was that sort of place.

In this bar, preconceptions about Liverpool, the city, are often reaffirmed and subverted in single acts. At one time, under former ownership, a home-made poster adorned the dingy back-room area. It had a photograph of a large group of young men and, underneath, the legend: ‘The Yankee Bar on tour. As seen on Crimewatch.’

Dotted around the periphery of the montage were clumsily-snipped cutouts of desirable consumer goods: a watch, a fridge, a television, a video recorder... Irony or a glorification of criminality? A bit of both.

It was almost empty at 7.30pm on Thursday May 19, a full six days before the European Cup final. A sign over the bar said: ‘In the interests of health and safety, please keep your shoes on.’ Only three people were drinking and they appeared fully shod.

If you’re going to set out for a trip to Istanbul for a big match, this is the place to start. More than Anfield, more than the Cavern, this is the heart of the city for some of us. Here, the mythology of Liverpool away travel has been embellished and sung about - and events that never even happened happily remembered.

Pubs close to railway stations often draw the rootless, the unstable, the dangerous and the plainly mad. There are plenty like that always hanging around in the Yankee, giving it the atmosphere of a frontier bar.

It always feels like you are going abroad from here, because when you’re Scouse abroad is pretty close. Even Halewood and Huyton seem like colonised areas about to slip out of the city’s grasp, with the Lancashire accent and people creeping back in. You hit alien land before you hit the Runcorn Bridge and once across the Mersey you’re deep in a different country - England.

But don’t go and try to find the Yankee. That is not the bar’s official name. Taking Scouse voices at face value can be confusing for outsiders. Like the Flat Iron, another favoured drinking place of the extremist wing of Liverpool fans, the Yankee will not be located by a pub sign.

Conversely, ask for these places by their real names and even some of the locals will be confused. Anyway, it’s a place to start a journey, not a destination. A last pint there and the adventure begins.

* * *

Even in the age of easyJet, the train is still – at least in the football fan’s imagination – the classic mode of travel. The whole concept of large numbers of away fans started in the 1950s when young men began to have enough disposable income to make journeys across the country to watch matches.

Liverpool and Everton led the way, the exuberant and sometimes unacceptable behaviour of the fans earning them the tag ‘Mersey maniacs’.

Travelling support was born at Lime Street.

Even for trips abroad, the train has its legends. Foremost is the excursion to Rome in 1977 for the European Cup final against Borussia Monchengladbach. The special trains left Liverpool on Monday morning, dropped their passengers for less than 12 hours in Rome for the match, and arrived back at Lime Street in the early hours of Saturday morning. No food and water were provided in the carriages but those who made this dreadful journey have heroic status in the annals of Kopite legend. One middle-aged supporter said that he’d been captured by the Germans at Anzio in 1944 and conditions leaving Italy were considerably worse in 1977. He did, however, note that it felt better this time: at least the Germans had been beaten and he was going home.

When the trains from Rome arrived at Lime Street all those years ago, the passengers hung out of the windows waving chequered flags acquired in Italy and sang joyfully. To hear them, it had been a relaxing trip back. Closer inspection told a different tale.

A large number of travellers had chosen to wear white flared trousers to complement the obligatory red shirt. This unisex legwear invariably proved unrealistic for the short hop to Wembley. For the long haul to Italy, with the toilets blocked and coughing up their contents into the carriages early in the journey, they were an outright mistake. The sound of chanting arrived at the waiting crowds only slightly ahead of the odour. So this was the smell of victory.

There was no buffet car on those trains to Rome and no water available for 24 hours on the way back as the carriages sat in a siding in Switzerland for an entire day with unexplained problems.

The train my mother and younger brother were on limped back into Liverpool after 2am on Saturday and, by then, the nightclubs had disgorged and there were no taxis to be found in the city centre. Grubby and exhausted, most of those who had got off the train faced a long walk home. It was the final trial of an epic journey.

Some of us had no sympathy. Tales of filth, hunger and thirst only generated envy. Those of us who had been left behind to watch the match on television harboured deep resentments.

In the 1980s, Alexei Sayle wrote a novel based on this trip called Train To Hell. In it, he described Liverpool as ‘Beirut with job centres’. By May 2005, the unemployment rates of two decades earlier had fallen considerably and the botched facelift of superficial regeneration gives the impression that all is well – at least in the centre. But Merseyside is not a rich area. The cost of getting to Istanbul caused considerable grief and tore families apart. Fathers were separated from their children – they couldn’t afford to take the kids to Turkey – causing rifts that may never be healed. In 20 years’ time, bitter middle-aged men will be telling their children: ‘No I wasn’t there. Him, your Granddad, didn’t take me. Because of money.’

In 1977, the excuse to leave me at home was different. Exams were used to justify the decision. Now, it seems inconceivable that anyone could believe that a commerce ‘O’ level was a fair trade-off for Liverpool’s first European Cup final. In truth, the reasons were probably fiscal at heart. There was just not enough cash to get three people in our family to Rome. It took a visit to the pawnshop to get two on that train.

It is different these days. Credit cards have changed everything. And because of this, the autumn of 2005 will long be remembered by debt collecting firms as ‘the great Liverpool boom’. Those who could got to Istanbul by any means possible and raised the money any way they could manage. In early May, a psychotic episode was under way on the Lancashire bank of the Mersey.

Flight prices were unreasonably high, hotel accommodation nearly impossible to attain but the desperation to get to the game was palpable. This was not just any old match. So many conflicting emotions and memories had been exposed by the route to the final that it felt like a sort of redemption – as if a form of healing beckoned.

Mulling all this over, it was time to finish the pint, take a last look at the Yankee and go and take a seat on the train to Euston to begin the long trip across Europe.

Read Chapter 2: They all laugh at us, they all mock us

Order Far Foreign Land here: Cost £10 UK, £15 Europe, £18 Rest Of World. All including postage

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