the entrance stairs to the bar. Our plastic carrier bags were a nuisance. It was all ‘Hold that while I go the bar’, or ‘Mind that for us while I go for a piss’. Ninety per cent of Reds had one.
Some lad had it sussed. He’d threaded and tied his carrier-bag handles through a belt-loop on the front of his jeans while he pretended to play the guitar solo in the Liverpool FC team song ‘We Can Do It’, which blasted from the jukebox. Soon everyone was walking round with plastic bags bouncing off the front of their kecks. Most sounds on the jukebox were drowned out by LFC songs, apart from one hilarious five minutes when everyone sang along and did the bump to Joe Tex’s ‘Ain’t Gonna Bump No More With No Big Fat Woman’. There was definitely a few squashed sarnies after that one.
For someone who had to look inconspicuous to bunk a train, Vinnie was as loud as fuck. He turned up in a white Liverpool hat, white T-shirt and white jeans. Peter was right on it. ‘Where’s your paintbrush?’ he said. The choice of outfit seemed even crazier when Vinnie said he was gonna buy a platform ticket then run across the lines and board a Rome special. All’s he had with him was a bag of sarnies and a tenner – no passport, no match ticket and no Italian lire. We didn’t believe him, but he was serious. ‘I don’t care. I’m having a go,’ he said.
By the time we walked over to the Crown on Lime Street, we were all half-gassed. There were just as many people outside the boozer as in it, mostly drinking their own gear. Davey and Eddie Mac from Breck Road passed me a bottle of Strongbow cider. Like a beaut I necked most of it – big mistake! It was the start of one of those phases where a simple trip to the shithouse becomes a major expedition. The occasional flashbacks I get are of me in the Yankee bar rabbiting to a gang of fellas from Park Road. Fuck knows why I went there or how long I was gone, but when I got back to the Crown I couldn’t see the lads. I looked inside: no sign. Star and Garter: no sign. It was no big deal. Getting split up from your mates was a massive and totally accepted part of footy culture then. If ten of you went the game, you’d be lucky to see eight of them till after the match at a prearranged meeting point – usually a pub. That’s why I wasn’t arsed when I couldn’t find them, especially in the atmosphere that was around Lime Street. The word ‘stranger’ doesn’t exist when you’re travelling to your first European Cup final. I had 5000 mates that night. Every bastard was talking to any bastard … you know the score.
We all had an itinerary with designated train numbers and times, but loads were just getting on any. About half eight I walked up past the Punch and Judy cafe with three dead funny lads from Halewood. One of them had a Roman laurel on his head made from privets, and a T-shirt that said ‘Julius Scouser’. There were some great T-shirts knocking about. A few I remember are ‘Tommy Smith is Spartacus’, ‘The Pope is from Gerard Gardens’ and ‘Is Hadrian taking brickies on?’.
The singing inside the station had a Pied Piper effect. I followed it to the side of platform nine, where hundreds were queuing up. I bumped into Vinnie. He told me that our kid and the others thought I’d jumped on a train, so they’d done the same. ‘Your Mick said if I see yer, to tell yer they’ll see yer at Folkestone.’
Vinnie’s platform-ticket plan had gone pear-shaped. Platform tickets were just tuppence each and were for waving goodbye only. He said there were about twenty-five Scousers trying the same thing. They were all smiling and waving to strangers on the London train as it pulled away. ‘They must’ve thought we were all on a day out from the fuckin’ loony bin,’ he said. Bizzies and train guards were well onto it and moved in. There were still a few specials due to leave, but the odds of him bunking on one looked impossible. ‘I’m gonna try the ladder,’ he said, meaning coming in via a fixed metal fire-escape ladder that led into the station from Skelhorne Street – a known bunker’s route that brought you out further down platform nine. His parting words were ‘God loves a trier’, then he passed me his sarnie bag. I watched him go, knowing deep down that he had no chance.
The next half-hour in the queue was heart-pumping stuff. I joined in the singing: ‘Tell me ma, me ma, I don’t want no tea, no tea, we’re goin’ to Italy, tell me ma, me ma’. Adrenalin diluted the ale inside me and replaced it with nervous butterflies. This was it. Five weeks of scrimping, saving, stealing, fiddling and dreaming was within touching distance, and the way I felt at that moment every single second of worry and struggle had been worth it. Passing through those gates onto platforms eight and nine was like being liberated.
I boarded the train and right away bumped into three Kirkby pissheads: Mick and Gilly Stewart and Ged Wainwright. They were all wearing white jeans, which were bang in fashion for the trip; hundreds had them on. Mick pulled a piece of coal out of his jeans pocket … the others did the same. I was snookered till they told me the score. Years ago, during the War, it was tradition for loved ones to pass coal to soldiers before they set off for battle – ‘Keep the home fires burning for a safe return’ – so Mick’s nan had given them a piece each.
It sort of captured the feeling and spirit of the whole thing. It was as if we were all going on a war crusade to some foreign land and the people had come in their droves to see us off. The scenes as we pulled out of Lime Street still give me goosebumps. Bodies and flags waved from every window to the deafening sound of cheers and applause from women, kids and well-wishers in the station. I’ve never felt as proud or as much a part of something in my whole life. It was a touching and unique Scouse send-off.
Train and Boats and Pains
Anyone who ever travelled on a footy special in the 1970s will understand the meaning of the word ‘rough’ – and boy am I talking rough. They carried 400–500 people in conditions that nowadays wouldn’t be fit for a robber’s dog to travel in. The carriages were ramshackle – some with compartments, some with tables, all with the kind of seats that had your arse begging and pleading for a cushion. Most of the time they were laid up, festering in the sidings at Edge Hill station, skulking in the shadows, hiding from the scrap-man before being dragged out screaming every Saturday to transport footy fans around the country with all the grace and comfort you’d expect from being pulled over cobblestones for hundreds of miles in a rickshaw.
The one I boarded was the table type: four seats facing each other with a table in the middle, similar to today’s trains. But let’s get this right: similar only in design. I wandered through it in case our kid and the lads were on board. The buzz inside the carriages drowned out the eardrum-bursting racket of the moving train. It looked and sounded like the wine lodge on a Saturday night: people standing up, loads of laughter and loud talking. It was supposed to be a dry train, but everyone seemed to have a drink in their hand. We hadn’t passed Edge Hill when some fella in his mid-50s handed me a can of McKeown’s Export. ‘Wet your whistle, son,’ he said. I stayed with him and his mate while I drank the can. They were both Shankly fanatics who’d seen action at Anzio during the War. One had been shot and injured. ‘Last time I was in Italy, the Germans battered us. It’ll be the other way round on Wednesday,’ he said.
They were great to listen to. Anyone their age on a footy train nowadays could only reminisce about battles at away games. But those old Shankly boys were the real deal. The likes of them made the trip possible. They were the reason why the train guards weren’t wearing jackboots or the trains themselves weren’t gonna be shelled or blitzed in Europe – although, saying that, I think by the time we got to Rome it looked like they had been.
In every carriage, plastic bags were stacked up on tables alongside jumpers, cardies, scarves and rolled up flags. More gear was stuffed underneath. It took ages to weave my way through. I was surprised how many women were on board, mainly older ones dressed in red fancy-dress costumes and hats, singing their heads off in that whining old pensioner’s voice – the type that’d shatter a glass from fifty yards. The whole train was rammed. The only empty spaces were in the no-man’s-land between carriages where the bogs and train doors were situated, and where the racket of the train
