No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader by Mark Hodkinson (Canongate 2022)

 

We had about four Caspers in my school class alone, lads from ‘broken’ homes dressed in hand-me-downs, not sure from where their next meal would come, dodging bullies, irate neighbours or members of their own family. These were shadow boys, a few yards behind the rest of us, unwilling to join in. They often played alone on the margins, down by the river near the chemical factory or on a piece of oily scrubland between the road and railway. Gerald Swanson was typical. We’d often ask him to join us but it was like trying to tame a feral cat; he didn’t trust us enough to draw close. He was always yawning and sometimes fell asleep in class, his forearm a pillow for his head. During the summer holidays we found him sleeping on a pallet near the canal, curled up tight. His face was mucky and looked to be tear-smeared.

‘Swanny.’

Gerald opened his eyes, blinked and scanned our faces. In an instant, he was off. He charged through the shrubs and bushes and was on the towpath within seconds.

‘What’s up with you? We’re not going to beat you up or owt.’

‘Fuck off,’ he yelled and jogged away.

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.

Life at the Top by Mark Hodkinson (Queen Anne Press 1998)

Tuesday 23 September 1997

Wimbledon 4 Barnsley 1

The lowest Premiership crowd of the season, just 7,668, saw Barnsley defend gallantly for 65 minutes before conceding four goals in the final 25 minutes. Michael Hughes, Carl Cort, Robbie Earle and Efan Ekoku scored for Wimbledon, after Eric Tinkler had given Barnsley the lead. The defeat was put down to a 'lack of professionalism and failure to take responsibility' by Wilson. 'It is happening too many times and I am sick of it. It has to stop,' he warned.

The goal proved to be Tinkler's last in a season where he struggled to find fitness and and form. Better Red Than Dead was particularly uncharitable in its critique of Tinkler: 'His performances on the field have been absolutely abysmal; he can't tackle, can't pass, gets brushed off the ball like he isn't there and for a bloke built like a brick shithouse is about as hard as a marshmallow toasted over an open fire. Yet he struts his stuff as if he's the best player we've ever seen . . . I'd rather play Lars Leese in midfield than this streak of cow's piss.'

Spotland: The Sun Also Rises (And Other Football Stories) by Mark Hodkinson (Pomona 2010)

August 2009

A summer barely worthy of the name passes us by. At least the rain was a bit warmer than usual. The three-month break from football and Rochdale AFC hadn’t reinvigorated me. I was tired, still in last season's clothes. This was my 36th year as a Rochdale fan; I’d learned not to dance across the carpet when the calendar struck August. We had made the League Two Playoff final two years before at Wembley, losing 3-2 to Stockport County. And in 2008/09 we lost to Gillingham in the Play-off semi-final. There you go, then: final to semi-final and all set to start a new season with practically the same squad of players — clear, indisputable evidence that we were slipping back to staying put.

Most of us had believed that appearing at Wembley would be the apogee of our support; it was downhill from here. One Dale fanatic who had followed them passionately for 40 years was so convinced of this that he made it the catalyst to end his support. He broke the tie and moved on. I was envious of his resolve. I wanted to be him, living a life divorced from the fortunes of this cruel club. I became lost to reverie: for how long would you still check the scores? What did you do when the team was playing—how did you displace your thoughts, the longing to be at the ground? When did you forget to remember that they were actually playing on a certain day? What did you do with your life? I was told he had moved to a rural area far from Spotland. I saw him walking down dirt tracks, among dry stone walls, throwing rocks into streams. This solitary figure, lost. How heavy was his heart? And while I was imagining all this, I then thought how daft it was to feel this way, about a daft team playing a daft opening match of the season at Port Vale. What did it matter? Nothing and everything: that was the problem.

Football fans place far too much emphasis on the first game of the season. In it they are convinced they see the rest of their season distilled. I didn’t go to Port Vale because I was still sulking about losing out to Gillingham in the play-offs. And I’d been to Port Vale the previous season when we had lost 2—1 three days after Christmas, conceding a late goal. Unhappy Christmas. I didn’t like returning so soon to places where I had been made to feel miserable, annoyed. The journey home afterwards was too fresh in my mind, that irritable feeling in the stomach. There was no point in going there again and jabbing at an old wound.

I listened to updates from the match on the radio. We took the lead through Joe Thompson. I always like it when Joe scores because it confounds supporters. You can tell within seconds of seeing Joe on a football pitch that he is a nice lad. He’s even- tempered, plays the game fairly. Many fans want him to get stuck in more, growl at the full back. But Joe has this easy, almost lackadaisical manner about him. He plays as if he’s having a kick-about with his young nephews on the park. Such is his demeanour, it can pass you by that he’s actually working hard, covering runs, playing simple but effective passes. Some of the Main Stand moaners around me have an almost pathological hatred and holler for him to be taken off almost as soon as he's sighted in his kit. (If they got to the ground early enough, they'd probably shoo him away as he walked across the car park.) The pro-Joes tell them to shut it, give the lad a chance. The anti-Joes tell them no they should shut it; he's had his bloody chance. But when Joe scores we all stand up, cheer and love him as we would a perfect son.

The Last Mad Surge of Youth by Mark Hodkinson (Pomona 2009)

Woody was one of the few who lived with his real dad. Barrett had christened him 'Luigi' after calling round one day and finding him wearing the coolest sunglasses he'd ever seen. The rest of his apparel was strictly dads' stuff of corduroy trousers, patterned cardigan and Hush Puppies. The glasses, though, were straight out of The Godfather.

Carey recalled that Luigi had driven them to their first proper concert - Hawkwind at a large concert hall. On the way there Luigi spoke gravely as though they were preparing for war: don't talk to anyone; keep a good grip on your tickets; go two at a time to the toilets; leave a few minutes before the end to avoid the rush; if anyone steals your seats, tell the usherettes. Woody told him they didn't have usherettes at gigs, unless that was the name of the support band.

"Well, you know what I mean, whoever's in charge."

Woody sad no one was in charge. His dad told him to stop being a clever arse.

Soon after they entered the hall, a skinny bloke ambled on to the stage carrying an acoustic guitar. He began singing caustic songs about pregnant teenagers and getting beaten up on council estates. The crowd was in uproar. People left their seats and moved down the aisles to get closer:

"Fuck off."

"Twat."

"Get off."

Barrett, Carey and Woody went to the toilet. While they were standing at the urinal they saw a dishevelled longhaired lad turned slightly to the side, fiddling with himself. Woody wasn't shy:

"What you doing?"

He turned around.

"I'm trying to piss in this bag."

He had a crisp bag, half full of piss. He was drunk and struggling to hold it, splashing the floor and his shoes.

"What are you going to do with that?"

"Wuzz it at that bastard on stage. He's lucky it's just piss."

He turned back to the job in hand before looking over again.

"How old are you lot?"

"You look about nine."

Carey and Barrett noted the name of the bloke with the acoustic guitar billed as a 'punk-poet' on the posters: Patrik Fitzgerald. They were going to buy his record, the one about having a safety pin stuck in my heart, for you, for you.

Believe in the Sign by Mark Hodkinson (Pomona 2007)

Back then mums and dads didn't go in for quality time or anything so fey with their kids. They lived their lives (whatever that involved) and you were left to yours. You could play football in the street. Or lie flat on a railway sleeper floating through a culvert on the canal. Or you could follow the motorway for miles on the other side of the fence, passing through factory units and farm yards. Or you could see who could jump furthest down concrete steps on the stairwells at Ashfield Valley flats, carrying the whimpering victor home later. Or you could get out your bike and ride to Hollingworth Lake where the tougher kids, knees knocking, chins trembling, waded out into the icy blue, fearful of gigantic child-eating pikes.