As far as I was concerned, anything to do with games at school was the big
dread. In the 1950s there were hearty games periods every single afternoon,
unless the pitches were three feet deep in snow, and this prospect induced
in me, from late morning onwards, a daily dose of sickening funk.
Running about – hockey and tennis – left me purple in the face with misted-up
(NHS) specs and exasperated teammates. Faced with the gym or the athletics
field, my body (5ft 9in by the age of 12) behaved like a broken umbrella
stuck in a tree, all angles, stiffness and panic.
I was full of awe and envy for the supple little ponytailed girls who spun and
sprang so effortlessly and landed neatly on their feet, like nonchalant
cats. Ineptitude and fear decided me, by my early teens, Against Games For
Ever.
And so it was, for almost half a century. Occasionally, some intrepid soul
would attempt conversion – my first husband, for instance, tried to teach me
golf – or I would feel that I really ought to join the rest of the sensible
human race and at least show willing, hence alarming skiing lessons
(fortified by cognac for breakfast) or hopeless tennis ones (fortified by my
extremely funny late friend Fiona).
No doubt because I was so talent-less, and certain of it, I declined to watch
sport as well, avoiding jolly conviviality round the boat race or the cup
final, and studiously looking the other way during Wimbledon fortnight.
And then – well, then I got older. One of the truly liberating joys of growing
older is that some aspects of life that used to cripple one with some form
of distress just mellow peacefully into simply not mattering. I discovered
that running about badly and humiliatingly at 12 had somehow segued into
running about (in much the same way) rather well at 62 as I played in goal
for my football-mad, eager-to-score five-year-old grandson.
Wishing to play with – and please – Alexander led quietly, to my surprise, to
an interest in what held this bright and original little boy so in thrall
that his bedroom walls were completely covered with pictures of footballers,
mostly from Liverpool FC, torn out of Match! magazine and stuck up
enthusiastically and haphazardly with Blu-Tack.
Looking round, I also noticed that a great many of my cleverer friends were
not only seriously interested in football but had been so all their lives,
and that this was no cult affectation since these were people much keener on
displaying intellectual and creative prowess than anything remotely social
or even athletic.
I started to look at the sports pages of newspapers, and I realised that much
of the writing was not just extremely good but also – right up my street –
psychological. And I began to think that if I was going to lay claim to
writing fiction that really reflected contemporary life, I was going to
have, to some degree anyway, to include football.
I have always researched my novels – a habit, I suppose, left over from
writing historical fiction. For the current book, Friday Nights, which is
primarily about modern female friendship, I spent a wet Sunday two years ago
walking the streets of Fulham, in west London, looking for the right houses
and settings for my characters; and on my way westwards, I passed Stamford
Bridge, the home of Chelsea FC.
I must have passed it hundreds of times in my life, without really taking it
in. That day, however, I stood on the immense forecourt, under my umbrella,
and gazed at it, and it came to me that one of my male characters, in his
pursuit of one of the single mothers in the book, might well seek to
ingratiate himself with her by taking her eight-year-old son to a football
game. And if he was going to do that, then I had to do it too.
Lady Luck was on duty. Bradley Rose, driver supreme for my paper-back
publisher, Transworld, has been going to Stamford Bridge since he was seven.
He was sent, in the care of his older brother, to stand at the Shed end,
since their father considered the family’s local ground, Highbury, where
Arsenal used to play, too dangerously violent then for a small boy.
I applied to Brad. Would he take me, just the once, for the sake of fictional
accuracy? I envisaged an interesting afternoon with my notebook, which would
neatly provide me with the authentic details I needed for chapter eight, all
done and dusted in a few hours.
Brad was admirable. He agreed, gave me just enough guidance to make sure I
behaved properly in a football situation and then left me to it. I had been
given a seat normally occupied by his brother David – thank you, David – in
the Mat-thew Harding stand, and was going to be surrounded by a gang of the
Rose brothers’ football mates. “You might”, Brad said calmly, “find the
language a bit fresh.” He bought me a chicken pie and a lime and soda and
led me up a series of sternly stewarded staircases and passages, on and on,
higher and higher and out – into the stadium.
I could not believe it. Even now, writing about it, I can feel that first
surge of excitement and amazement at the size of the thing, the space, the
greenness, the number of people. Apart from some concerts at Wem-bley, I’ve
never been with so many organised people, 42,000 of them, already braying
and bellowing away in all those crude, seductive chants that give you, in
these complicated cultural days, such a glorious, simple feeling of
belonging.
The game itself was eye-opening. Seeing a whole pitch (not just televi-sion
camera slices), witnessing the speed and deftness of the players, the
atmosphere – all of that has been described so often and so well by so many
that all I need to say is that I was bowled over. I couldn’t believe how
gripped I was, nor how dismayed I was when it was over, even though we (yes,
I was an instant convert to Chelsea) won (2-1 against Portsmouth).
I went home on the kind of high remembered from really good exam results, and
lay in bed reading the programme, detail by detail. I thought of Alexander’s
bedroom walls with absolute empathy.
It isn’t fashionable, I know, to champion Chelsea. The chic teams to support
are Arsenal and Liverpool, or else, slightly defiantly, somewhere like
Leices-ter or Southampton. But Chelsea is where it began for me, and
football loyalty, I have discovered, is a visceral, not a rational, matter,
and is only strengthened by unpopularity or periodic failure. So Chelsea it
is for me. Period. And to prove it, I have applied for a season ticket.
In any case, Chelsea have been extremely good to me, putting me on their
website and in their fan magazine and – an invitation that has aroused
exactly the awe and envy in my friends that I used to feel in that long-ago
school gym – asked me down to Cobham to see their training facilities and
meet some of the players.
I know. I will pause here to acknowledge that I was very privileged, and that
for someone whose research is inevitably and frequently rather sobering it
was a marvellously fresh and invigorating thing to do.
Roman Abramovich, whatever he is or isn’t, has built his team a palace at
Cobham. And before you sneer, it’s my opinion that every serious team should
have such a palace. I arrived early on a December morning – the players have
to be in for breakfast by 10am – and was shown over the whole gleaming
building, with its pools and gyms and therapy suites, its press offices and
meeting rooms, its enormous, beautiful canteen, complete with pool table,
overlooking the huge green spaces of the training pitches, backed by the
tidy houses of residential Cobham.
Of course it’s glamorous. Of course it’s luxurious and splendidly equipped.
But as I walked round it, with only the administrative and press staff yet
at work, the overriding sense was of an immense and professional business, a
well-oiled and well-functioning machine with a vital but unpredictable human
element at its heart – not unlike the feeling you get backstage at the Royal
Opera House, where dancers and singers provide precisely the same crucial
cocktail of magic, caprice and fragility that these physically talented
young men give to football. And I’m sure that it’s the tension between the
two – the business and the performers – that gives the place, and the game,
its unique and beguiling energy.
At about 9.30, the players began to amble in, dressed in Chelsea training
strip, garnished with scarves and beanies. Several of them were smaller than
I was expecting, and slighter, and some of them were accompanied by their
little boys – it was the Christmas holidays – who skirmished happily about
from man to man, completely and endearingly unaware that there was anything
remotely unusual in having a world-class footballer for a father.
I noticed that as each player came in – John Terry still on crutches, Frank
Lampard bigger than I’d expected – they went round the room high-fiveing or
thumping one another on the shoulder by way of greeting, and in most cases
they came over to shake my hand as well. Gosh, I said, I’m impressed. Well,
they said, it’s Didier (Drogba, otherwise known as Chelsea’s goal machine),
really, brought up in France the formal way, with bon-jours and bonsoirs all
round at the beginning and end of every day, and he kind of started it when
he came three years ago, and now it’s a habit; we all do it. And very pretty
to see it is too.
So was watching them have breakfast. I expected them to have manly platefuls
of eggs and bacon, but mostly they ate what their little sons ate: rice pops
with milk, and Mar-mite toast fingers, with English going on at one table
and the French of francophone Africa at another, and Avram Grant (the
Chelsea manager) wandering round the edges, eyeing his boys but not talking
to them, not interrupting.
The atmosphere was friendly and easy and undramatic. Drogba obligingly signed
a poster of himself for my Alexander, and for his older sister Maria, who
shares my feelings for Chelsea, and Frank Lampard, refilling his tea mug,
asked if he was really in my novel.
“Certainly you are.” “Mentioned by name?” “And your father. I describe a photo
of you both – you standing behind your father with your arms round his
shoulders.”
Lampard (Maria’s hero) gave me a wide, white smile.
“Wow,” he said. Then out we all went, into the bright, bitter morning, onto
the training pitches. And there all the sleekness, the stardom, the evidence
of limitless oil money vanished from the picture. I stood in the wind beside
a smallish square of muddy turf, inside which Henk ten Cate (the assistant
manager and coach) – not an approachable-looking man – had half a dozen
players passing the ball in short, sharp movements, over and over and over
again, constantly changing angles, yelling, contradicting, yelling again. I
was there for 20 minutes and none of them stopped moving – fast – or glanced
up for a single second. Only practice makes perfect.
Now that the book is out (with a boy in a Chelsea shirt included on the
jacket) I’ve had plenty of time to realise that this enthusiasm for football
is here to stay, and to consider what it is about football that has had such
an effect on me.
I suppose that the first reason is that I am at last free to appreciate sport
because nobody expects me to participate in it – except small and forgiving
grandchildren – and so I can, for the first time in my life, sink into
enjoying it. I can be deeply interested in it from my mental and physical
armchair; there is nothing, praise be, to be proved athletically any more.
As with most things, I can probably achieve much more with my head than with
the rest of me – for example, I now find I read the football press almost
every day, and miss it during the summer holiday.
The second reason goes back to that first dose of football chanting two years
ago. We live – often for excellent reasons – in a world of insisted-upon
tolerance and verbal restraint, and although this is commendable in many (if
slightly priggish) ways, it is a wonderful relief to have an area of life
where it is permissible, even encouraged, to be intensely, unashamedly
partisan.
A third reason is the human connection. There is no other arena that I can
think of where you can, so naturally and safely and unaffectedly, be with
such a vast body of other people, of every class and caste, of every age and
type, all united by enthusiasm for something that, although it is immensely
subtle and skilful, offers no opportunity for the intellectual snobbery that
can afflict, say, music or the theatre. And it’s not sexist, either. I’ve
noticed a lot of women, of all ages, at games, looking both involved and
perfectly at home.
And then there is the game itself, played by beautifully athletic, supremely
fit young men – you’d have to be the most chronic of old misanthropes not to
rejoice in that. Yet – and this just adds to the depth of football’s allure
– even the fittest and the best can’t play for ever. Football is for young
men, and thus there is a poignancy and an intensity in watching them play in
their physical prime.
I wouldn’t have felt all this, younger. Nor, before the horror of
Hillsborough, would I have had the opportunity – a football stadium was no
place to take your child or your girlfriend or your granny.
There is often a – regrettable – tendency to think that the past offered life
in a purer, less debased form; but in this instance, I couldn’t disagree
more. Football and I just had to be ready for each other. It may have taken
nearly 50 years – but it was worth the wait.
Friday Nights by Joanna Trollope is published by Bloomsbury, priced £18.99.
Copies can be ordered for £17.09, including postage, from The Sunday Times
BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
