front of its giant screen on Friday night if I wanted to have any chance of a seat for the match on Saturday afternoon. Robert and I arrived 90 minutes before the match, and the bar with the TV was already crowded with professional layabouts ordering beer in enormous pitchers and crisps by the box. All the seats were taken, and most of the floor space was taken, too. It was hard to see the attraction of watching footie in a pub - especially when the match was being broadcast on terrestrial television and therefore available in one’s own home. The only interesting novelty in the experience, as far as I could tell, was the stickiness of the floor, which meant that, however roughly one was barged from the side, one could always regain the vertical. The screen was dreadful - a blurry, washed-out picture; meanwhile the half-light was a pickpockets’ charter, the crowding was ghastly, the air was full of cigarette smoke, people were already quite rowdy, and worst of all, you couldn’t hear the telly. How was I supposed to take detailed notes in these conditions? Someone really hadn’t thought this through.
But there was something behind my grumbling, I realised. Something unexpected. I was tense about the football. A match was about to take place, the outcome of which might be decisive for England’s progress through the tournament. Suddenly the previous Saturday’s 1-1 result against Switzerland looked like a wasted opportunity: why hadn’t England played better, tried harder, got more goals? Hadn’t they understood what was at stake? Hadn’t they had a couple of years to prepare for that match? With an hour to go before England v Scotland, I felt sick. The pager had sent me a message on the Friday with, ‘Pressure on England and Scotland to win tomorrow’, and I had thought this a bit superfluous, but now, as I waited grimly for kick-off at 3 p.m., I hated the fact that, yes, both teams really needed to win this if they were to survive the group stage of the competition. Scotland had only one point; England had only one point; The Netherlands had three. England was to meet The Netherlands the following Thursday at Wembley, and that was the last of the group matches. In less than a week’s time, before the knockout stage started, England might actually be out. ‘Come on, England!’ someone shouted across the pub - and this was half an hour before the match, you understand. But it didn’t seem such a banal thing to say, all of a sudden. ‘Come on, England!’ does sum up one’s feelings in this situation pretty well. I tried to unclench my jaw, but it was hopeless. I tried to take an inhalation of breath without choking, but that was hopeless, too.
It turned out to be truly a game of two halves, that Scotland game. The first half, watched from that ghastly pub, was pure, goal-less misery; by the end of the 45 minutes, I’d had enough, and so had Robert. At half time we made a dash along the sea-front - all ozone, seagulls, energy and sunlight - and threw ourselves into a light, colonially decorated bar in one of the big hotels where the screens were of a normal TV size, and awkwardly bolted to the ceiling, but at least we could sit in upholstered white wicker chairs and hear the commentary. It was here that we saw the England team score its two goals against Scotland - and David Seaman save the penalty from Gary McAllister, don’t forget, which was just as momentous (they said it was the first penalty saved by an English goalkeeper at Wembley since 1959). Gascoigne’s tremendous, genius clincher - flipping the ball over Colin Hendry’s head, dodging round him, and then volleying from some distance into the net - is one of the greatest ever moments of three-dimensional football, only slightly ruined by the way it’s followed by him lying on the ground with his mouth open for the ‘dentist’s chair’ goal celebration (a highly contrived reference to the England team’s recent drinking excesses while on tour in the Far East). I’m always disappointed by that rush of Gazza’s to assume the dentist’s chair position. All that beauty and spontaneity followed immediately by something so yobby. It perfectly encapsulated Gazza’s tragic misfortune: that the downside to having a foot like a brain is that you get a brain like a foot, to go with it.
The following Thursday, it was England v The Netherlands, the last of England’s group games. The championships had been going for only 10 days. Against all expectations (and precedent), England beat The Netherlands 4-1. It was a historic night for English football. I watched the match from an airship circling Wembley Stadium. No one ever believes me when I tell them this. They think I am making it up.
It does sound suspicious, I admit. Why did the Fuji airship people offer The Times a place on board that evening? Well, who cares? My orders were to arrive in the early afternoon at a field near Woking, bringing a fearless friend if I wanted to. My friend Susan brought a straw hat and a pair of binoculars (clever). I brought the pager and some chocolate cake. A freelance photographer joined our party - but, aside from the pilot, that was it. Nice men from Fuji’s German publicity operation met us and showed us the silvery airship as it rested in long, parched grass. A warm breeze rippled the tops of trees. All was peaceful. Susan and I asked intelligent questions about how the airship had flown here from Germany, what was its exact length, weight, age, mix of gases, pet name, number of flights, and so on - and basically tried ever so, ever so hard not to mention the Hindenburg.
In the end, sensing our English reticence, they mentioned it themselves. All thoughts of the Hindenburg were to be banished from our minds, they said; the canopy of a modern airship was emphatically non-flammable. The worst that could happen with a damaged modern airship was a very, very gentle descent, landing with a soft bump, probably somewhere open and safe and absolutely lovely like the middle of Richmond Park. Our American pilot, whose name was Corky (how marvellous), had flown airships round Superbowls hundreds of times; and so confident was he of the non-flammability of the vast, gas-filled canopy that he actually chain-smoked at the controls. The only thing we had to be prepared for, Corky said, was that being in an airship gondola was less like flying; more like sailing. Thermals made the ship both pitch and roll, especially in the full heat of a June day. He didn’t add that, at the same time, there is a deafening noise from the propeller, and no bathroom. (We would find these things out soon enough.)
At 4.30 in the afternoon, a small team of German men in white boiler suits, four on each side, shouldered the nose ropes and solemnly walked our lighter-than-air dirigible to its launch position. It was a heart-stoppingly dignified operation. I felt there should be some Bach playing, and that they should be wearing powdered wigs. Then they let go of the ropes, Corky started the engine, and we lifted off. The instruments of an airship turn out to resemble those of H.G. Wells’s time machine - a bicycle wheel for a rudder; cotton reels on bits of string for adjusting the mixture of gases; pedals for something or other (presumably not brakes). Reassuringly, however, Corky had state-of-the-art headphones with radio contact to air traffic control, and at no point took them off in order to change into a Phileas Fogg top hat.
‘Move about if you like!’ he shouted to us over the engine noise. ‘Open windows!’ I discovered that I felt instant nausea if I looked at the ropes hanging from the unseen canopy’s nose in the middle distance - so I sensibly stopped doing it. The aforementioned pitching and rolling, as we made our way north-east, then north above such landmarks as Epsom, Croydon and Wimbledon, made moving about quite difficult, but we survived quite well in the circumstances, with our stomachs knocking against our ribs. An astonishing number of houses had identically-shaped swimming pools, by the way: if you were a swimming-pool salesman with the Surrey concession, the view would have made you very proud. Anyway, Susan firmly declined the chocky cake, but was otherwise OK, as was the photographer (who found the chocky cake very acceptable). Evidently a TV puppet called Otis the Aardvark had been copiously sick on a previous flight, which we all found completely hilarious.
We could see Wembley from miles away. There is a wonderful Dickensian passage at the beginning of Patrick Hamilton’s novel The Slaves of Solitude describing wartime London as a great, breathing monster, sucking thousands of tiny people in through all the train terminals in the morning, and breathing them out again at the end of the day. This passage came to mind as we arrived over the great white stadium, which was drawing people towards it from far and wide on this light summer evening. Why doesn’t TV use more aerial shots? It’s such a missed opportunity. Of course, such shots would be easier to achieve if the airships could be stationary - which they can’t: they have to keep circling, circling, circling, circling, otherwise they die, like sharks. But the view is phenomenal: 75,000 people assembling in one place
