(don’t know). At least he could tell the time. It was ten past six.
I started jogging back, paranoid about the result and missing me lift. When I got to the car park, the jog slowed to a concerned trot, then a sickly stroll. Coaches were still pulling away, mostly full of jubilant Mancs. It cut me in half. A bizzie confirmed the score. I felt me stomach drop, then that sickly feeling. The Treble dream was over, I’d missed my lift home and me bandaged hand was throbbing more than me head. I managed to thumb a lift on the North Circular road – off a Manc! He turned out to be a dead sound fella. We stopped for a pint and a nosebag in Walsall, then he went miles out of his way down the East Lancs and dropped me at the lights at Kirkby. There’s Mancs and there’s Mancs … you know the score. I got in about midnight and told me ma that I’d got me hand caught in the van door.
Next morning she woke me up, concerned that our kid still wasn’t back. The others had stopped for a pint in London and ended up in a club full of Man U cockney Reds. There were a few arrests for drunk and disorderly. One of them was the driver, so the lads had to kip in the transit van overnight.
The sun was blazing again that Sunday. The only sound in the house was Rod Stewart playing low on the kitchen radio. It felt like he was taking the piss, singing about how he didn’t wanna talk about it, how somebody had broken his heart. The song was number one at the time. Me da switched it off. ‘Jammy bastards,’ was all he said. It was like a wake. Me ma said that me younger brother had locked himself in the bathroom for hours after the match and his mate had gone home in tears. It made me glad that I’d slept through it.
The Brookhire van finally turned up, and the lads emerged like a gang of spud pickers. Big Dave had done the same as me and slept through the match in the back of the van. Of the others just two had managed to bunk in. It had been a bad trip, especially for the poor bastard who’d tagged along. He’d ended up ripping his jeans on the fence, losing his watch, getting locked out the ground and being charged with drunk and disorderly. ‘I shouldn’t be here, your honour,’ was one shout.
By mid-afternoon the gloom was beginning to lift. If the FA Cup final had been the usual end-of-season showcase, then the stench of defeat would have clung for weeks. But the phone went a couple of times … all Rome talk. ‘What time are yer going?’ ‘Have yer changed your money?’
Later on I lifted me mattress and looked at me Rome gear. It was all there: sterling, lire, passport and that superb ticket. Just eyeballing it was enough to exorcise the red devils from the day before. They’d managed to steal the Cup with a lucky smash-and-grab raid, but opportunist thieves can never steal pride, passion or pedigree. By Sunday night nobody in Liverpool gave a fuck about the FA Cup. Small platoons of Scousers were already on their way to Italy. The train legions, including me, were due to follow on the Monday. That Sunday night I was like a kid on Christmas Eve, too excited to sleep, not realising at the time that Santa was coming three days later – dressed in red with a gift that I’d treasure for life.
The Leaving of Liverpool
If I was going on a five-day trip abroad next week, I’d pack a small case or a hefty sports bag with five pairs of undies and socks, a few changes of clobber, toothbrush, paste, shampoo, razor, foam, a bit of aftershave and some books to read … you know the score. At around half three on Monday 23rd May, me and our kid left me ma’s carrying two little plastic Co-Op bags with six sarnies and an apple each … and that was it. Honest to fuck, not even a comb. And the only reason we took apples is because our kid said, ‘They’ll clean our teeth.’
When we met the others, they had similar bags. Peter, the lad on the dole, only had crisps and Coke. It was a mixture of foreign-trip inexperience and couldn’t-give-a-shit attitude. Our kid summed it up: ‘It’ll do till we get to the boat.’
Standing at the bus stop outside the Park Brow pub in Kirkby was special. I really felt like somebody. We were all decked out in scarves and hats, and our kid and Peter had flags draped around them. Every car that passed blew their horn. On the bus we were treated like royalty. The driver didn’t charge us, and people on the top deck offered us ciggies and talked about the mass exodus. One fella said that his brother-in-law raised his trip money by selling his Ford Capri then telling his bird that the car had been robbed. There were all sorts of stories like that. Peter sold his entire record collection – about forty LPs and sixty singles. Our kid’s mate funded his trip by packing in his job as a sheet-metal worker so he could get his hands on the severance pay. The pawn shops got absolutely battered with hocked jewellery … in many cases unbeknown to the wives or girlfriends. Odd-job men were at an all-time high. Everywhere you looked, there were houses getting painted and gardens being mown.
I remember a Kopite who was always in Church Street playing a classical acoustic version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, with a bucket that said ‘Busking for Rome’. The Echo ran a story about a lad from Speke who did a sponsored run dressed as a Roman gladiator, with all monies (after his fare) going to charity.
There were also more dodgy ways. Scrapyards put the price of copper down after hundreds of empty houses and flats around the city were stripped clean. A few Reds I knew from Huyton financed their trip by travelling round the north-west blowing water into fruit machines with a straw till the machines went haywire and paid out for any sequence. They also mastered the art of taping up ten-pence pieces with electricians’ tape then using them as fifty-pence pieces in ciggy machines.
Two brothers who drank in the Kingfisher in Kirkby got their trip sorted in one weekend after going to Blackpool and snaffling sets of chrome wheel trims from parked coaches (sixty quid per set). They’d never stolen a thing before that and have never done since. A well-known Kopite from Netherley got his fare together by going round putting people’s electricity metres on the fiddle for a pound a time. Then there were the famous Scottie Road shop hoisters who, in the spring of ’77, were lifting more shirts than Freddie Mercury and Elton John put together. It was a case of getting to Rome by any means without harming anyone. Everyone seemed to rally round and help each other out. I gave a lot of my diesel money away. I didn’t want it back; that’s just the way it was. Don’t get me wrong, there were a few no-marks and arseholes in the city, like everywhere else. But they were few and far between. There weren’t so many people with ‘I’m all right, Jack’ or ‘fuck-thy-neighbour’-type attitudes. These were the days before rag-heads, bag-heads, scag-heads and fuckin’ Thatcher. Harmless scallywags, yeah; scumbags, no … you know the score.
When we got to town, it was bouncing. The streets and bars around the station were wall to wall. Some of the costumes were fantastic: ten-gallon hats, top hats, bowler hats, red jumpsuits, white boiler suits, rosettes as big as sunflowers. The excitement and buzz was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Fellas were getting off buses and out of taxis then punching the air through gritted teeth before shaking hands with anybody. Some even hugged like the Reds had just scored a goal. It was obvious that this was something special. All together, 5000 of us were making the journey on twelve specials. One left early afternoon; the rest of us were due out in the evening.
Flags were draped inside pub windows – mostly home-made. There wasn’t enough room to roll a ciggy in the Crown, the Yankee bar and the Big House. Round in Casey Street a giant conga was snaking up and down singing ‘Let’s all go to Roma, let’s all go to Roma, na na na na’.
The ‘Arrivederci, Roma’ song had lads stopping women in the street and dancing slowies with them – all the birds happily obliged. A bearded tramp wearing a red and white plastic bowler hat was dancing around singing ‘Ee ay addio, we won the Cup’. I don’t know if he’d had a premonition or if he was just blagging it, but it did the trick – loads poured ale in his glass and filled his hat with loose change.
One of me mates, Vinnie, was gonna try and bunk the train. He was meeting us in the Star
