120, rue de la Gare by Léo Malet (Pan Books 1943)

 

Prologue:

Germany 1940-1941

Ushering people in was just the job for Baptiste Cormier. He had the soul of a flunkey as well as a name like a butler.

But he’d lost some of his starch since he left his last situation, and at present he was lolling in the doorway, gazing dolefully at the ceiling and picking at a tooth with a spent match. Then suddenly he abandoned the mopping-up operation and straightened up.

‘Achtung!' he shouted.

We all stopped talking, and with a scraping of benches and clatter of boots stood up and clicked our heels. The Aufnahme officer had just come on duty.

‘At ease!’ he said with a strong German accent, saluting and sitting down at the table that served him as a desk. We sat down too and went on with our conversations. There was still a good quarter of an hour till work was due to begin.

But after a few minutes spent sorting out papers the reception officer got up again and blew a loud blast on a whistle, indicating he had something to say to us. We stopped talking and turned to listen.

This time he spoke in German, then sat down again while the interpreter translated.

First came the usual instructions about the work, plus thanks for our efforts the previous day, when we’d registered a particularly large intake. He hoped that at this rate we’d be finished by tomorrow at the latest. As a reward each man was to be issued with a packet of tobacco. 

Some awkward Danke schons and stifled laughter greets this pleasantry: we were to get what had earlier been confiscated from the chaps we were about to register.

At a sign from the interpreter, Cormier abandoned his teeth and opened the door.

‘First twenty,' he called.

With a rattle of hobnailed boots a group detached itself from the crowd lined up in the hut and the day’s work began.

The entry consisted of men who’d arrived from France a couple of days before. My job was to sit at one end of a table, extract certain information from each of the newcomers, put it down on a sheet of paper, then pass it along to the other eight Schreibers. When the paper and the person it referred to reached the other end of the table, the POW officiating there completed the form and appended a print of the subject’s forefinger.

The dabs-taker was a young Belgian, and his task was lengthier if not more difficult than mine. At one point he asked me to slow down because he was getting submerged.

So I told Cormier not to send anyone to our table for a bit, and went outside to stretch my legs on the not-so-good earth.

It was July. The weather was fine. A warm sun shone on the barren landscape and a gentle southerly breeze was blowing. A sentry paced back and forth on his watchtower, his rifle barrel glinting in the sun.

I lit my pipe, and after a while went back to my table, puffing pleasantly. The Belgian had emerged from his traffic jam and we could get on.

A Season in Sinji by J. L. Carr (The Quince Tree Press 1967)

I particularly remember one evening at Blackfen. Wakerly and I hadn’t money left for the flicks and were pretending to drink W.V.S. tea, sitting in the bay window of a decaying vicarage dragged back to life for the Duration. It was lashing down—more even than its Lancashire usual—when down the drive, between the sooty laurels, marched this blonde, page-boy hair styling down to her shoulders, lack jumper moulded round a really promising bust, grey slacks and an open scarlet mac flapping around her thighs. She glittered.

Then, in this weather for wellingtons, I saw that she wasn’t wearing shoes. Only sodden silk stockings. She homed straight in over the gravel and through the pools and puddles and, after her, a private soldier paddled at a half-trot. She crossed the canteen in long strides, leaving heel and ball prints on the brown lino, glanced scornfully at us (she must have noticed Wakerly hopefully whip off his steel-rimmed spectacles) and shook the rain from her hair. She was a marvellous looker, officer fodder, and, when she spoke, it was like an aristocrat. Not like the female aboriginees of Blackfen & District.

The man padded humbly in after her and bought two teas. Even in his thick-soled boots the top of his head only came up to her nose. Then she began to slang the slosh in a very loud voice, describing it (rightly) as disgusting dishwater. Everybody stopped talking and the W.V.S. women (doing their bit for the boys) smouldered (but didn’t wither her). And her little man obediently nodded his head (but drank it). Then she shoved her cup back at him and stalked off into the downpour, leaving him to shuffle guiltily to the counter and, then, after her.

Like a film trailer, it had no ending. And no meaning. No, that’s untrue: it was a detail from a bigger picture, a flurry in the crowd watching a game. (And, anyway, I did see her just once more . . . in Africa, glaring insolently at me from a bundle of yellowing Daily Mirrors.) Put it like this— you’re fielding in the deep, the boundary’s edge, and, for a moment and for no reason at all, you catch the glance of someone you’ll never see again. But, for that brief moment, you’re part of each other’s life. This whole business, from start to end, was like that, like a game of cricket, the issue never sure, who’d win, who’d lose, and there were some, like these, who watched momentarily and went away. And others who prodded around, doing what they could but not really knowing what it was all about; I mean not understanding what was at stake as will was pitted against will, as we waited for the change of luck that always comes, watched for a grip to slacken as the game turned . . . That spectator, the one in the red mac, disappeared into the rain.

The Nation’s Favourite – The True Adventures of Radio 1 by Simon Garfield (Faber and Faber 1999)

 

Chapter 2

The Weeping Truckdrivers

Steven Armstrong (Broadcasting Journalist): I remember a character in what I think was a Douglas Adams book, an American woman who comes to London, and the two things she notices most of all are that pizzas don't deliver - this was in the mid-eighties, before Domino's - and how bad the radio is here. She's listening to Radio 1 in her hotel room, and she's waiting for this comedy voice to stop talking and the DJ to return. But gradually it dawns on her - that was the DJ's normal voice.

I first listened to Radio 1 with my brother, taping the charts on Sunday evening. Recently I discovered a tape that I'd made at the time - Paul Nicholas's 'Grandma's Party' was in the charts. I have a mental picture of me and my brother crouching down holding a microphone to the radio speaker. We listened, of course, but Radio 1 in the eighties was just ridiculous. One incident that stands out was when there was all this tabloid furore about the Beastie Boys, and Simon Bates played a Run DMC track and then 'No Sleep 'til Brooklyn'. The impression he gave you was that he had done something that was so dangerous and so frightening, that it was tantamount to punching the prime minister.

All the daytime people were laughable characters, even Simon Mayo on the breakfast show'. Gary Davies with all these terrible single-entendres about his boxer shorts and his bit in the middle... It was as if the radio had been taken over by the people who were the guides on Club 18-30. Dave Lee Travis - the self-named Hairy Cornflake - he physically made me choke when I heard his voice. He had this stupid snooker game - I can't find the words to describe it. In the early nineties I had a long argument with the programme controller at Piccadilly Radio in Manchester, who was convinced that Dave Lee Travis was the greatest presenter in British radio. I was stunned into silence.

Dave Lee Travis (Disc Jockey - on air, 23 August 1986): Today we have the final of the current tournament of Give Us a Break, snooker on the radio. Contestants from Bath, Romford, Sheffield and Droitwich Spa. We'll have the tranogram, the dreaded cringe of course at twelve o'clock, and two featured albums, the new one from Daryl Hall, and the recent classic from Kid Creole and de Coconuts. So keep it here, as somebody once said. We have three hours of mayhem for you! [Plays Kid Creole.]

['Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy' fades out.] Methinks he doth protest too much! To get it out the way, I've been away. Between last week's show and this week's show 1 thought I'd take the only opportunity I had for a break, and I went over to Corfu, which is a bad place to go in the middle of August when it's extremely hot and the hotels don't have air-conditioning. So for some reason I've got a bit of laryngitis and I do apologize for that. [Plays a Eurythmics record.] That's the Eurythmics. Even after all these years I can't help being amused by the name. The Eurythmics! Wonderful.

Now then, last week you may recall that we set you up with a special clue for a two-word tranogram, and we referred to the behaviour of one Bruno Brookes at Alton Towers, saying he was having a go on all the dodgy rides and everything, and that this could well be a good description of him. Two words. We played 'Rip It Up', 'It's Over', 'Sundown', ‘Killer Queen', ‘Johnny Be Good', 'Our House', 'Call Me', 'Kissing With Confidence', 'Eyes Without a Face' and 'You Might Need Somebody', Put that all together, perfect description of Bruno Brookes Risk Jockey. A Risk Jockey! Wasn't that brilliant? We loved it. The first three out the bag were Pat Butler from Alton in Hampshire - oh dear, I don't like the name of your road, Spittlehatch, you've got to move, Pat, you've got to move out of there! David Walsh from South Shore, Blackpool, that's a big address. And Sue Coe, from Leamington Spa. Prizes on the way to you.

Harry Enfield (Comedian): Smashie and Nicey are in my opinion the best characters Paul and I have done together ...  It seemed odd to me that, although millions of people listened to Radio 1 every day, no comedian had ever taken off their DJs before us. It had always struck Paul and me that there were two main types of DJs - those who loved music like John Peel and Alan Freeman, and those who loved the sound of their own voices, like DLT.

Radio 1 also struck us as a funny old place because, in 1990, when we started doing the DJs, the whole youth culture was ultra-modern, with the take-off of dance music and fashion-conscious, music-based magazines like Q, but Radio 1 was still dominated by DJs with seventies haircuts and cuddly cardigans, whose idea of a good record was Rolf Harris's Tie Me Kangaroo Down'.

It's Not a Runner Bean...: Confessions of a Slightly Successful Comedian by Mark Steel (The Do-Not Press 1996)

Geordie

'This is Mark, he's a comedian,' the man who'd set up the comedy night in Newcastle told his four mates. They looked like the four people you would choose from thousands if you wanted extras for a film set in a Newcastle pub.

'Ar, so yoor the comedian, well ah hoop yoor funna mairt,' they chipped in. We all went to the bar and ordered a round of drinks, and the stockiest among them decided to tell me a joke.

Ay, what do yer chuck a Paki when he's drooning? His wife and kids.' The others laughed.

What to do? Walk away and they'd have just thought I was weird, whereas anything that might have ended in violence was hardly an option.

The tough part of these situations is that when bigotry hides behind a joke, it's so much trickier to deal with. Launching into a tirade about racism would have only made them think, 'What a stuck-up, miserable bastard’. 'All right, it's only a joke,' they'd have said. And gone off muttering, 'He's not much of a comedian.' Besides it was quite possible that he wasn't a serious racist but had never come across the idea that jokes like that are just appalling.

The one thing I decided in the two seconds after he'd finished was that I'd say something. 'What's the matter?' he said, perturbed that I wasn't laughing. 'Doon't yer get it?’

’Na.he's a comadian,' said his mate. 'He's hewered it before.'

There's probably one time in most people's lives when, instead of thinking of the perfect answer the day after the event, it comes out at the time. I don’t remember thinking it but from somewhere came, 'Yeah, I have heard it before. But I heard the funnier version. What do you chuck a Geordie when he's drowning?'

There was another silence and for a moment I was expecting to end up lying on the floor, clutching my ribs, with blood pouring from my nose, mumbling, 'I was only making a point.'

But at the end of this tense three seconds he burst out laughing and said, 'Ya can see wha he's a comadian.'

With any luck he'll now be the Equal Opportunities Officer for the Anglo-Asian Community Relations Department on Tyneside Council.

Murphy's Mob by Michael Saunders (Puffin Books 1982)

Dunmore United was a lousy football club. They were bottom of the fourth division, and they had almost lost their place in that last season, but when Mac Murphy saw they were looking for a new manager he was in no position to be choosy. He'd been demoted himself, sacked by the first division club he'd been managing when they were relegated last season. His wife, Elaine, was all in favour when he mentioned Dunmore United. And so the two of them drove down to the Midlands one drizzly summer's afternoon to keep an appointment with Dunsmore's new owner, Rasputin Jones.

Up The Junction by Nell Dunn (MacGibbon & Kee 1963)

 

Out with the girls

We stand, the three of us, me, Sylvie and Rube, pressed up against the saloon door, brown ales clutched in our hands. Rube, neck stiff so as not to shake her beehive, stares sultrily round the packed pub. Sylvie eyes the boy hunched over the mike and shifts her gaze down to her breasts snug in her new pink jumper. 'Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!' he screams. Three blokes beckon us over to their table.

'Fancy 'em?'

Rube doubles up with laughter. 'Come on, then. They can buy us some beer/

'Hey, look out, yer steppin' on me winkle!'

Dignified, the three of us squeeze between tables and sit ourselves, knees tight together, daintily on the chairs.

‘Three browns, please,' says Sylvie before we've been asked.

'I’ve seen you in here before, ain’t I?' A boy leans luxuriously against the leather jacket slung over the back of his chair.

‘Might 'ave done.'

‘You come from Battersea, don't yer?'

‘Yeah, me and Sylvie do. She don't though. She's an heiress from Chelsea.’

‘Really? You really an heiress?' Jimmy Dean moves his chair closer to mine, sliding his arm along the back.

‘Are yer married?'

‘Course she is. What do yer think that is? Scotch mist?' Rube points to my wedding ring.

Sylvie says, ‘Bet they're all married, dirty ginks!'

‘Like to dance?'

Rube moves onto the floor. She hunches up her shoulders round her cars, sticks out her lower lip and swings in time to the shattering music.

‘What's it like havin' a ton of money?'

‘You can't buy love.'

‘No, but you can buy a bit of the other.' Sylvie chokes, spewing out brown ale.

‘I’d get a milk-white electric guitar.'

‘Yeah and a milk-white Cadillac convertible—walk in the shop and peel off the notes. Bang ’em down on the counter and drive out—that's what yer dad does, I bet . . .'

We were crushed in the toilets. All round girls smeared on pan-stick.

‘I can't go with him, he’s too short.'

‘All the grey glitter I put on me hair come off on his cheek and I hadn't the heart to tell him.'

‘I wouldn't mind goin’ with a married man 'cept I couldn't abear him goin' home and gettin' into bed with his wife.'

‘Me hair all right?’

‘Yeah, lend us yer lacquer.'

‘Now don't get pissin' off and leavin’ me.' Rube pulled at her mauve skirt so it clung to her haunches and stopped short of her round knees.

Outside revving bikes were splitting the night.

‘Where we going?'

‘Let's go swimmin’ up the Common.'

‘We ain't got no swim-suits with us.'

‘We’ll swim down one end and you down the other. It’s dark, ain't it?'

‘Who do yer think's going to see yer? The man in the moon?'

‘Yeah and what's to stop yer hands wandering?'

‘We’ll tie 'em behind our backs.'

‘Here, I’ll never git on there I can't get me knees apart.'

‘Hitch yer skirt up under yer coat.'

‘Help, me grandmother’ll catch cold!'

The three of us climb onto the bikes, each behind a boy. We bum up Tooting Broadway and streak round a corner.

‘I did this bend at eighty once,' he shouts over my shoulder.

‘Ninety-two people bin decapitated on them iron girders, taking it too fast.’ We race across the common, then shudder to a halt under some trees. He wears jeans, black boots with double gold buckles and a fine lawn shirt beneath his unzipped jacket.

‘There are two things I'd like to be—a racing driver or a pilot. But you've gotta have money for that.'

Only A Game? by Eamon Dunphy (Penguin Books 1976)

3 August

My birthday. I am twenty-eight; getting on, getting a tiny bit worried. This is going to be the big season. It has to be: there may not be many more. Twenty-eight — the age when insecurity like a slowly descending fog appears on the horizon. One is conscious of little things — the apprentices begin to seem absurdly young, you call them ‘son’ now, and yet it doesn’t seem so long since older players addressed you the same way. Players you played with or against are getting jobs as managers, or retiring. The manager begins to consult you more often. ‘What do you think of this and that?' It’s flattering, of course — you have grown up, but you are growing old, too, at least in football terms.

You talk more of babies, and not so much of birds. You begin to wonder what is coming from the Provident Fund, about a testimonial, sometimes at night about retirement — the end. How much longer will you spend your summers in this idyllic way, dreaming of glory? Of course, you reassure yourself that this is your prime. It’s a shock to realize how rapid the descent is from pinnacle to valley.

I have from time to time pondered on all of those fears, hut today I watched Harry Cripps, at thirty-two the oldest player on the staff, exuberant as ever and enjoying it all as if he was fifteen again. Harry is a unique yet strangely reassuring figure. A truly great professional, not particularly gifted, except for boundless enthusiasm and love for football and the life we lead. A seemingly simple, yet I find a tantalizing, complex figure. He is at once selfish, good-natured, devious and honest — but always lovable.

Repossessed by Julian Cope (Thorsons 1999)

A Safe House of Sorts

For a few weeks there, the phone would not stop ringing. Our break up was big news and there was a lot of shit to wade through. I wouldn’t leave Tamworth because too many people needed things from me, so Dorian and I reclused out. If I went to London now they’d all be persuading me to finish the dreadful third/turd album and tie up all the loose ends. I knew that I was safe up here in Tamworth, safe from a culture which was currently buying the hated Blancmange LP in droves, the same crap that currently hung transfixed on our wall by a 6" nail, vinyl and album sleeve alike. Underneath the blistered spiral bum marks from our electric hob, cartoon kittens squirmed with horror as they all stood listening to music on headphones — from the faces they were making, it was clear they themselves were listening to the Blancmange LP. “Never mind,” said Dorian. “Americans don’t have the dessert and pronounce the name ‘Blank Man’.” Nuff Said.

The Mill Lane house was a three-storey fortress which had been part of a quiet terrace until the development of recent years. But 70s council planning had gouged out the heart of these turn-of-the-20th-century houses and left no. 1 teetering on a small and ugly ring-road through the town. Its frontage was ultra-narrow and unprepossessing, but fell back to a considerable depth, creating inside a cell structure of small dimly lit rooms.

For a while, we lived on toast and tea in the bedroom. All my records and the stereo and my atrociously-finished flight case of cassettes were piled up in there. I was so used to hotels that I couldn’t learn to spread out. We answered the door to no-one. I was so paranoid that I’d dive behind the kitchen counter if there was even a knock at the door.

Eventually, some time in early December, Paul King decided that it was time to sort out our finances. Our meagre £35 per week mysteriously rose to £100 despite our mounting debts. Dave Balfe made it clear that he had no desire to split up the group, as we were in debt. I told the bastard in no uncertain terms that the group did not exist to make money, that was a secondary inevitable part of the quest. The quest, Balfe. You remember that?

We will be remembered for our strength and foresight. We were not money-heads who insisted on releasing a shitty third album just to fulfil a contract. I’d felt like I’d already seen half of my favourite rock’n’roll groups in history fizzle out with a final album that bore no resemblance to the spirit of the original group.

The Speakers by Heathcote Williams (Grove Press 1964)

The Park

The large group under the trees have not noticed that there is no one speaking at the centre, until two pairs of policemen enter the park and start to break up the meetings.

Lomas observes that they travel in pairs because they are neurotic. If they travelled alone, they would start talking to themselves.

Freddie Kilennen walks up to a pair and asks them whether they would like to take part in the premiére trial run of his pneumatometer, which is a machine for measuring how much of the Holy Ghost there's left in a man's soul, and he belches.

One of the policemen says: Shut your mouth and clear out of the park . . . because I say so; and Cafferty observes that if you have a hat shaped like a bomb, egocentricity is rather out of place.

The police close Cumberland Gate and herd the people towards the other. Harry, Norman and the man with feathers in his hair wander about the tarmac unconsciously repeating themselves: the unconscious repetition which leads to neurosis. The neuroses will be sold to the tourists the next day.

The man with the silent message has left his platform, on which he stands saying nothing at all, and sits in the mirrored section of Fortes studying form: . . . to spot a winner, he says, demands a rare constriction in the mind, a constriction in the colours in the street, a constriction in the typography of the Sporting Life, a constriction in the air you breathe . . .  never change your mind once you have, through your training, lapsed into this constriction, and you'll win . . . you'll surely win.

Lomas comes over to him and observes that Saturday night in winter in the park, when only the regulars are there, is like the service of compline in preparation for communion next day.

The man with the silent message says: As Aristotle, the great Italian sculptor said, a man is a man for all that.

Harry goes back to Chiswick, Norman goes back to Shepherd's Bush, Lil goes back to Stepney, Aggie wanders through the streets buttonholing people until she comes to the tea stand at the end of Hungerford Lane, Solly Sachs takes his dog back to Notting Hill; a man helps the woman from the Catholic Evidence Guild to fit her platform into the platform rack behind the New Inn, the man with the silent message goes back alone to the North End Road, and Lomas, Cafferty and Freddie Kilennen walk back to Kilburn.

Surviving Sting by Paul McDonald (Tindal Street Press 2001)

The Start of Something

Joolz and I got together at the Walsall Town Hall disco in 1979. She'd been going out with a mate of mine, Brainy Kev, for some time but had recently put an end to the relationship.

'I've put an end to the relationship,' Joolz screamed, trying to make herself heard over the thundering funk rhythms of James Brown. 'I've chucked the bastard!'

'Why?' I shouted, watching in dismay as a fleck of my saliva flew from my mouth and landed with a silent splick in her tequila sunrise.

Knackers, I thought.

'He changed when he bought his new coat,' she bawled.

I knew she was referring to Brainy Kev's duffel coat. It was a charcoal duffel with a tartan lining purchased in preparation for his first term at university. He was going to read theoretical physics at Manchester. The coat was a symbol of his new life and status as an 'intellectual'. He deserved to be chucked.

We were sitting next to one another in the bar, a little way from the dance floor. Joolz had been dancing and her bare shoulders glistened with sweat. So did her cleavage. Trying not to stare at it was like having a plastic cup in your hand and trying not to do a Jimmy Durante impression. In those days my TNT testosterone kept me in a permanent state of arousal. My eyes followed girls like helpless puppies.

The Chinese Detective by Michael Hardwick (BBC Books 1981)

It was the main hall of one of the East End of London's Victorian-built breweries. The big ones - Charrington's, Watney's, Truman's - still prospered, almost the only remaining relics left of East End industry. This smaller one, on the corner of Milsom Street and Warner Street, would produce no more sustenance for the workers and solace for the unemployed. It was as deserted as the docks nearby, the brewing towers already partly dismantled, the rest of the building to go soon.

The young man's body was slight, but when he moved again there was a hint of great energy and purpose about him. His short hair was dark and his features boyish. An onlooker from down the length of the hall would have thought he was a local kid, looking for something to nick or smash.

They would have been only partly right. He was local. At twenty-two he was little more than a youth. A closer inspection of his good-looking features would have revealed them to be of Chinese cast. But a look at the identification card he carried would have revealed him to be Detective Sergeant John Ho, Metropolitan Police.

Do I Love You? by Paul McDonald (Tindal Street Press 2008)

Birmingham University 1985

A Naked Billy Goat

It was 2 a.m. and Warren was busy burgling the research laboratories of Birmingham University. He was looking for drugs, amphetamines preferably, and he’d already filled three carrier bags with stuff: powders, capsules, pills; anything that looked promising in the orange flare of his fag lighter. He’d never burgled a university laboratory before. He’d burgled everywhere else — chemists, doctor and dentist’s surgeries, the houses of fat ladies who he knew were prescribed amphetamine for slimming purposes. But this was his first laboratory — and it was full of chemicals. Thousands of them.

But he hadn’t expected a billy goat, let alone a naked one. And yet there it was, standing alone in a pen made of plywood and chicken wire. Naked. Nude. Bare-beamed and obscenely starkers.

In the ordinary course of things the word naked isn’t one you associate with billy goats. They’re always naked, aren’t they? Except for the ones that dress up as mascots for marching bands. But few words could better describe the billy goat that Warren Clackett observed.

Warren screamed.

It was a proper scream too: almost prepubescent in its shrillness. He hadn't screamed that way since the day he saw his pet pit-bull, Panzer, lose a fight with a squirrel. His assumptions about how the universe works were undermined that day and it was happening again.

Blue Moon: Down Among the Dead Men with Manchester City by Mark Hodkinson (Mainstream Publishing 1999)

Introduction

A Summer Birdcage

Back then, I didn’t properly understand how you got from here to there. The world was confused and disconnected. It was streets and streetlights, cars and buses, fields and houses, and suddenly you were there. We made it to Maine Road, somehow.

City drew 1-1 with Sheffield United. It was 1971 and I was six years old. A bus ride, and we were back home. I don’t remember the game, only the noise, the overcoats, the rich green of the pitch, the overwhelming magnitude of the event — that people gathered together like this and sang and cheered and created something so much bigger than themselves.

Twenty-five years later. My first match report commissioned by a national newspaper. It could have been at any ground between Derby and Newcastle, such is the approximate patch of a northern football correspondent. It was Maine Road, obviously. It rained. The sky was thick with clouds, the match was dire. City drew 1-1 with Coventry City. Alan Ball, City’s manager, provided the ‘line’ without really trying. At the after-match press conference he almost drowned in his own peculiarly random agitation. He coloured a grey day red, and we were all rather grateful he had. The report is included in this book, since it preceded City’s downfall.

Thereafter, I did not return to Maine Road until the beginning of the 1998-99 season. I had spent the previous season as The Times quasi writer-in-residence at Oakwell, Barnsley, from where I had filed a weekly bulletin. Barnsley, after 110 years in footballs backwater, had been promoted to the FA Carling Premiership. In short, it was a small club suddenly thrust into the big-time. Adopting reverse logic, The Times asked me to take on City in 1998-99, and relate the fortunes of a big club in the small time. This famous club — with two League Championships, four FA Cup wins, two Football League Cup wins, one European Cup-winners cup win — was at its lowest point ever, the third tier of English football.

Shoestring's Finest Hour by Paul Ableman (BBC Books 1980)

I put my ear to the door and listened. Not a sound. I'd already noted that there was no light showing under the door. Was it safe? I had to take that chance. I reached forwards for the door handle and grasped it without making any noise. Slowly, with infinite caution, I turned it and eased the door open. Mercifully, it didn't creak. I knew just were to find what I was after.But would I be caught? The consequences could be serious. I peered into the dark room. As far as I could tell it was empty. It had better be. I started across the floor. It was carpeted but the boards beneath the carpet creaked slightly. I froze. I listened. Not a sound. I took another two steps. This time there were no creaks. I paused again and listened. Safe to continue. I took four light but quick steps. Only the hint of a creak. One more advance and I should have it. I estimated it would take another three steps. I took a deep breath and then took those three steps.

Yes! I had it. It was in my grasp —

The light came on and Erica said:

'Put the whisky down, Eddie.'

'Hm? Whisky? What whisky?'

'That whisky - the whisky in the bottle that you're holding. My whisky.'

'I gave you this whisky.'

'Which is what it mine, Shoestring.'

While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Paul Breeze (Futura Books 1979)

It all ended for me just when it should have begun. And if that sounds dramatic it’s because that’s how it’s supposed to sound. I feel sick inside every time I think about it, so sick that I feel like crying, and in the end often do. But it gets me nowhere, there’s no relief afterwards, not even a long time afterwards, when the tears have dried on my blotchy cheeks and there’s not a drop of salt solution left in my body. It’s always there, this sickness, always drying the back of my throat so that I can hardly speak at times, and tying great big knots inside my guts as though some runny-nosed boy scout were in there practising on me, tugging and pulling at my intestines like nobody’s business. Why me? I sometimes think, only just being able to stop myself screaming it out the window. Why the fucking hell did it have to be me? Of all the bands I’ve known, all the guitarists, drummers (though a drummer could have coped, I suppose), why me? But what’s the use in asking pathetic questions, questions with no answers — no answers that I know of at any rate. That’s what I feel like half the time: a walking question-mark. No future, no present, just a past that I can’t forget, that haunts me, leaves me lying awake at nights, staring into blackness until the dazzling headlights of nightshift lorry drivers flash across the ceiling to break my morbid reminiscences, reminding me that I need sleep to face another tomorrow that might bring — what? Hope? Don’t make me laugh. I had hope once, ambition even. No, more than ambition, more than confidence. It was certainty: we all shared it, even in the bad times. I knew we’d make it, had to come one day. It was like evolution, if you like, followed on from one thing to another — naturally. 

Bellies and Bullseyes: The Outrageous True Story of Darts by Sid Waddell (Ebury Press 2007)

In mid-February I went up to Newcastle from my home in Leeds for the England/Scotland clash. I attended the pre-match banquet and had a drink with some of the players before the meal. Alan Glazier, a star exhibition player like Evans, was courteous and shy. Tony Brown, also of England, looked like Desperate Dan and was drinking gin fast. Charlie Ellix, a small Cockney, also seemed to have a mighty thirst. Across the way, nineteen-year-old Eric Bristow toyed with a pint of lager. Later he told me that the Indoor League had inspired him. ‘When I was sixteen me dad was teaching me darts and I used to sit on the settee watching Indoor League. I said to me mum and dad “I want to go on that”.’ He did, and he won it.

Next day the action and atmosphere at the City Hall lived up to expectation. The last time I’d been there was to see PJ Proby, and the support was a band called Nero and the Gladiators. The darts was gladiatorial and the Geordie crowd loved every minute. Two images live in my memory. Firstly, Bristow saluting the crowd after a 16-dart leg and going on to win. Secondly, a stocky mop-headed little bloke from Kirkcaldy who bounced around the stage in tartan trews and did a number on Charlie Ellix. He was described in the programme as ‘Jocky’ Wilson – ‘one of the unemployed’.

The In Between Time by Alexander Baron (Panther 1971)

And so he listened to all the street-corner politicians. He was most drawn to the saddest of them all, the Independent Labour Party, the diehard remnant of a force once great in Britain. He had a mind split without discomfort between commonsense and fantasy, and he knew that they talked nonsense. But their nonsense set him on fire because it corresponded with his fantasies. He knew they were a hopeless little sect but they appealed to a quixotic streak in him. They were the most fiery, dirty and hairy among an array of groups by no mean deficient in these qualities, and he, the neat schoolboy, was a secret romantic who knew Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème almost by heart. 

Yet he did not join them. For the real force that impelled him to the meetings, of which he was at least vaguely aware, must be revealed. Among the I.L.P. fanatics he saw only one woman, and she was of advanced years: at least thirty-five. She wore a sort of floral nightgown, very dirty, down to her ankles and sandals upon dirty feet. She looked out from a tangle of tarnished, unshorn hair that spread upon her shoulders. There was no place for her in Victor's dreams. The truth was that although his frowning attention to social problems was sincere, he was looking for something more attainable than the millennium. He was looking for girls.

In this there was nothing remarkable. It has been true for the last hundred years, and it applies as much to the notoriously wild youth of today as it did in Victor's time, that the most powerful of all the magnets drawing young men to radical politics is not the Oedipus Complex but the idea of radical girls.

Goalkeepers Are Different by Brian Glanville (Crown Publishers 1972)

Now and again he played in the games himself, like Charlie Macintosh, and you couldn't have had two more different players. His control was lovely, Billy's, he could do anything with a soccer ball, juggle it from foot to foot until you got tired of watching him, flick it over his shoulder with his heel, pull it back with the sole of his boot then go on again, in the same movement; he was lovely to watch. "Two stone more," the Boss used to say, "two inches more, and Billy would have been the greatest." One day Billy looked at him, deadpan, and said, "No, I wouldn't. I'd have been a player like you."

"Rising Damp": A Celebration by Richard Webber (Boxtree 2001)

Eric Chappell's storytelling skills were honed in the playground through necessity. 'I started telling stories at school as a way of avoiding being bullied,' he says. 'The school I attended in Grantham was tough and if you aren't popular for something people tended to pick on you. I was quick with my tongue so kept out of trouble by being entertaining.’

Born in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham in 1933, Eric grew up in an environment not particularly conducive to budding writers. ‘I come from a working-class background and my mother didn’t really approve of writing; she thought it unwise to put something on paper in case it was held against you at a later date,’ explains Eric. ‘Being a discreet lady, my wanting to write worried her a bit.’

However lacking the household was in terms of literature, Eric had a happy and caring upbringing and adopted his father’s enthusiasm for sport ‘Dad was sports-mad and that’s where he got his drama from — he didn’t need books.’ It was Eric’s teacher back in the 1940s who helped him explore and develop his interest in story writing. ‘We had to stand up in class and tell stories, and the first time I did it I spoke for an hour — I couldn’t stop; all these words just poured out of me. I based my story on all the different books I’d borrowed from the library, although I added some ideas of my own. All the other kids enjoyed my stories so much I was asked to do it on a weekly basis.’

As the school years passed and Eric moved on to secondary education, other interests took priority. ‘Sport took over as time went on,’ he admits, 'and we did little serious English at secondary school, so any thought of writing took a back seat for awhile.’ It wasn’t until Eric had left school and started working for the East Midlands Electricity Board that he returned to his stories. 'I was in my mid-twenties and studying accountancy, which was pretty soul destroying. I wasn't a good bookkeeper. I was fine with the essays on law and economics, things like that, but struggled with my maths and accountancy. I got very depressed and failed my finals, so I thought, "Sod this! I'll do what I want to do with my life." '

Auf Wiedershen, Pet by Fred Taylor (Sphere Books 1983)

Oz's '68 Zephyr had looked pretty down even before the three of them left Newcastle. By the time they reached the queue of traffic at the Dutch border, it was at the stage of needing terminal care. Not that Oz would admit anything that didn't suit whatever his momentary view of reality demanded.

'Afraid we're losin' Radio One,' he muttered darkly, fiddling with the car's studio. The material the knobs were made of looked suspiciously like bakelite.

Dennis grunted, took a drag on his newly-lit duty-free. 'We never had it in this wreck.'

'Canny car, this kid,' said Oz for the dozenth time.

There was no answer to that, or leastways none that didn't stray into the realms of fantasy or insult. Dennis's square, well-fleshed face creased into a frown. He decided to change the subject.

'Here,' he said. 'Why've you got a Sunderland sticker on the back? I never knew you supported them.'

'I don't. Bloke I bought it off did.' Oz stared down at the radio, gave it a final thump and treated his mates to a gap-toothed grin. 'I was goin' to scrape it off, but I was afraid I'd lose the bumper . . .'