Nobbut Laiking, by Ross Brewster
Thank heaven today’s post-Covid generation of kids never had to live through the war.
We had a lot of evacuees in the Lake District. My parents took in a head teacher and two young girls who had to leave their homes in the North East due to the risk of bombing raids.
Kids from most of the bigger towns and cities were uprooted, often moved from urban homes to an unfamiliar countryside. They just got on with it. It would not have been easy. Not all would fit into cosy homes with caring, good people like my mum.
There was no time for the weeping and wailing that afflicts Covid kids. The mental health problems caused by addiction to their computers, the lost schooling, the lockdowns that turned children into what one leading educationist terms “empty shells”.
I always wondered if we’d come through Covid better people, more able to handle life’s exigencies. I suspect the answer is no. We’ve lost some of the old normal, but is the new normal any better?
Where there were fights over toilet rolls in supermarket car parks there’s now much gnashing of teeth over a few days when tomatoes are in short supply.
Town centres are buzzing again, where during lockdown they looked like the Wild West, empty and with tumbleweed blowing down the main streets. But does it make people happy? I don’t think so.
We were kind during Covid. We helped our neighbours and clapped for nurses. Now it’s strikes, folk seem dis-satisfied and don’t give me the sad tale of broken-hearted kids.
The day we went for our first jabs it was like a party. Where did the newfound spirit go?
Rhyme and reason
If football is the beautiful game then it’s no surprise that there are a few football poets around.
Ian McMillan, for example, the Bard of Barnsley, is official poet in residence at Barnsley Football Club and frequently references his local team.
I once interviewed him. He was rather gruff, very Yorkshire, just as authentic as he sounds on his Radio 3 and 4 poetry programmes. A sort of grittier male Pam Ayres, though I would never have dared suggest it to him.
A poem, Preston North End, was aired on another radio programme which I came across quite by chance this week. It is by George Szurtiz, a poet of Hungarian extraction hence the spelling of his name, which is pronounced Surtees.
In it he recalls being taken to see Tom Finney in the final game of his distinguished career. With decidedly unpoetic ruthlessness, Preston’s legendary player is chopped down unceremoniously by Tottenham hard-man Dave Mackay.
It’s a poem that captures the essence of the time. The long baggy shorts, the heavy boots, the muddy pitch. A heavy defeat for Preston and a sad conclusion to a footballing legend’s career.
I once won a football poetry prize. Was it really 59 years ago? It, too, was about a match at Preston. An FA Cup tie against Carlisle United. It ended in disappointment as well. Carlisle lost 1-0.
My poem was a juvenile, over-emotional reaction. It would embarrass me now. However, it won me some much-needed cash.
Several years later an old chap stopped me in the street, asking humbly if I had a moment to spare. Ratching through his wallet he pulled out a yellowing cutting. My poem. He’d kept it all that time.
He was a retired English teacher and had, he said, used it many times in class to show unpoetic kids that an ordinary football fan could be inspired to write about his team. He’d been at that same match, probably standing not far from me and my pal William.
Willie’s dad gave us a fiver for our lunches at the Kardomah — a 1960s equivalent of Costa Coffee, “now almost defunct” says Wikipedia — plus a pie and Bovril at the ground and a programme. I remember we missed the last bus home and had to drag his dad out to pick us up from Windermere railway station.
Football clubs no longer getting with the programme
Like the Sporting Pinks and Greens and the sports paper we bought after the match, that basic staple of a live football match, the official programme, may soon be an anachronism of the past.
Kids don’t buy ’em any more. It’s all on their phones. Rumour has it Carlisle United will next season join the growing band of clubs who, rather than print a programme, will put the information online.
To be honest, programmes aren’t much use these days. Lists of up 30 players. What happened to the old centre pages, teams set out numbered 1 to 11 in a 2-3-5 formation? The plum advert was the one in the centre circle.
I learnt more British geography from collecting programmes than ever permeated my brain at school. I knew where Albion Rovers played, which is more than my teachers ever did.
As a schoolboy my pocket money was spent on 2/6d bumper bundles from a programme shop which advertised in Football Monthly. Oh the joy when I heard the postman call out “parcel”.
It was, one might say, almost poetic.
