ooh vonky vonky
Well-Known Member
A little story from my youth.
Once the dust began to settle following THAT Luton defeat in '83, my older brother and few of his piss head mates started to see a silver lining in the relegation clouds.
The upcoming season(s) would give them a chance to rack up quite a few ‚new‘ away grounds to visit. The challenge was going to be how to get to the games, whilst continuing to consume impressive amounts of alcohol … and avoiding unwanted attention.
Football special trains were never going to be option, so an alternative was needed.
The answer was the good old British Rail family railcard. This allowed up to four adults to travel anywhere in the UK on weekends for half price. The only catch was that you had to be accompanied by at least 1 child. And that’s where I come in.
At the start of the 83/84 season I was a very shy and innocent 12 year old. I’d already been a season ticket holder for a couple of seasons, but my only ‚away‘ experience was Wembley 81. All that was about to change.
Over the course of the next two years, I was dragged (quite literally some weekends) all over the country. Early Saturday mornings standing on the platform at Stockport Edgeley station with an ever changing roster of ‚parents‘ accompanying me. Waiting to board the next train to god knows where.
My four ‚dads’ of the day usually each had a carrier bag full of tins of beer, which was to be consumed on the outward journey. Discretion was of course required, so I would be placed on ‚lookout‘ in case a conductor, or even worse, a plod entered the carriage. Despite being in a seemingly permanent half pissed state, my dads could still hide any traces of booze in the blink of an eye. Quite impressive.
We would arrive at the destination early enough, well before most other fans began to congregate. My dads would then find a suitable pub and stay there until there was barely enough time to make it to the turnstiles on time.
Of course I was much too young to be allowed in pubs myself, so I’d be left outside, hanging around sometimes for hours & hours on end. Remember there was no mobile phones in those days, so it was fucking boring!!! I did get supply visits from my older brother .. once an hour or so he’d bring me a coke and a packet crisps before heading back inside.
Thanks (not) to the joker who would buy me a pint of lager. Something that my stomach couldn’t handle. And a genuine thanks to the landlord at what I think was some kind of working mens club in Shrewsbury. He actually felt sorry for me and let me wait inside with my boozing dads. The smoke was so intense in there that I actually wished I had been left outside that day,
I don’t recall much about the matches themselves. Lots of being late, cold and having shit views. I was a small skinny kid so standing on the terraces wasn’t great for me.
One memory that does stick in my mind is as we were making our way from the pub to the Oxford Utd stadium. A black police van pulled up along side. The driver said we’d never make it in time for kickoff, and told us to jump in the back. We opened the back doors and there was a bench on each side full of coppers with truncheons and helmets at the ready.… They all budged up and made space for us. It was all quite surreal. Like a scene from Billy Elliott. Anyway, they dropped us off directly in front of the away turnstiles. I remember the looks on the other fans faces as we clambered out of the back of that police van.
My most important role on match day would be getting my four dads back to the railway station after the game. By now I would be the only one of the ‚family‘ remotely sober, so navigation was solely down to me. I had the London tube map imprinted in by brain.
Generally speaking the trips home were uneventful, apart from occasional trains getting bricked by rival fans at level crossings (like on the way back from Grimsby), and the time I got whacked by a coppers truncheon whilst boarding a train in Carlisle.
Can you image the shit storm that sort of thing would cause in the media these days ;-)
___
A final thought … The more I think back to those days, the more I just see the booze, what it did to people and how I was essentially used by them. People who, at the time, I thought I actually liked.
I’m not saying don’t drink (or whatever the pleasure is these days), but please keep the kids out of it.
CTID
Once the dust began to settle following THAT Luton defeat in '83, my older brother and few of his piss head mates started to see a silver lining in the relegation clouds.
The upcoming season(s) would give them a chance to rack up quite a few ‚new‘ away grounds to visit. The challenge was going to be how to get to the games, whilst continuing to consume impressive amounts of alcohol … and avoiding unwanted attention.
Football special trains were never going to be option, so an alternative was needed.
The answer was the good old British Rail family railcard. This allowed up to four adults to travel anywhere in the UK on weekends for half price. The only catch was that you had to be accompanied by at least 1 child. And that’s where I come in.
At the start of the 83/84 season I was a very shy and innocent 12 year old. I’d already been a season ticket holder for a couple of seasons, but my only ‚away‘ experience was Wembley 81. All that was about to change.
Over the course of the next two years, I was dragged (quite literally some weekends) all over the country. Early Saturday mornings standing on the platform at Stockport Edgeley station with an ever changing roster of ‚parents‘ accompanying me. Waiting to board the next train to god knows where.
My four ‚dads’ of the day usually each had a carrier bag full of tins of beer, which was to be consumed on the outward journey. Discretion was of course required, so I would be placed on ‚lookout‘ in case a conductor, or even worse, a plod entered the carriage. Despite being in a seemingly permanent half pissed state, my dads could still hide any traces of booze in the blink of an eye. Quite impressive.
We would arrive at the destination early enough, well before most other fans began to congregate. My dads would then find a suitable pub and stay there until there was barely enough time to make it to the turnstiles on time.
Of course I was much too young to be allowed in pubs myself, so I’d be left outside, hanging around sometimes for hours & hours on end. Remember there was no mobile phones in those days, so it was fucking boring!!! I did get supply visits from my older brother .. once an hour or so he’d bring me a coke and a packet crisps before heading back inside.
Thanks (not) to the joker who would buy me a pint of lager. Something that my stomach couldn’t handle. And a genuine thanks to the landlord at what I think was some kind of working mens club in Shrewsbury. He actually felt sorry for me and let me wait inside with my boozing dads. The smoke was so intense in there that I actually wished I had been left outside that day,
I don’t recall much about the matches themselves. Lots of being late, cold and having shit views. I was a small skinny kid so standing on the terraces wasn’t great for me.
One memory that does stick in my mind is as we were making our way from the pub to the Oxford Utd stadium. A black police van pulled up along side. The driver said we’d never make it in time for kickoff, and told us to jump in the back. We opened the back doors and there was a bench on each side full of coppers with truncheons and helmets at the ready.… They all budged up and made space for us. It was all quite surreal. Like a scene from Billy Elliott. Anyway, they dropped us off directly in front of the away turnstiles. I remember the looks on the other fans faces as we clambered out of the back of that police van.
My most important role on match day would be getting my four dads back to the railway station after the game. By now I would be the only one of the ‚family‘ remotely sober, so navigation was solely down to me. I had the London tube map imprinted in by brain.
Generally speaking the trips home were uneventful, apart from occasional trains getting bricked by rival fans at level crossings (like on the way back from Grimsby), and the time I got whacked by a coppers truncheon whilst boarding a train in Carlisle.
Can you image the shit storm that sort of thing would cause in the media these days ;-)
___
A final thought … The more I think back to those days, the more I just see the booze, what it did to people and how I was essentially used by them. People who, at the time, I thought I actually liked.
I’m not saying don’t drink (or whatever the pleasure is these days), but please keep the kids out of it.
CTID