The Ned Wood Archive

There are changes

Lying ahead in every road

Max Frost and the Troopers

Anyway I didn’t stay home long that Easter holiday.  Just long enough to keep the old dears happy.  Just long enough to laze around over Easter.  Just long enough to get some good meals inside me.  We were playing Chelsea away the week after Elsa’s birthday, the week after the County game.  I decided to slip down to London for the weekend and watch the match.  We were third and Chelsea were second, so it was an important game.  There were about six or seven clubs that could have gone up that year, so every game counted.  The really cool thing was that the Jam were playing the Roundhouse with the Stranglers on the Sunday, so I could catch that too.

Well, we lost to Chelsea after leading at half time.  I sat in the stand cos I was scared of going on the terraces.  Chelsea had a bad reputation in those days.  On the Monday before, after they’d lost 4-0 at Charlton, the Chelsea hoolies had trashed the Valley.  Now there’s a white riot for you.  How can something so ugly be associated with something so beautiful as football?  

There was a lot of trouble at grounds in those days.  Man United supporters were banned from a lot of away grounds.  There was talk of extending the ban to other nutters like Chelsea, Millwall, and the like.  It was all self-perpetuating.  People expected football supporters to riot.  I mean, they expected the people who went to football games to riot.  And they thought that those people were football supporters.  That’s how we got a bad name.  We had arseholes hanging round with us, so folk thought we were arseholes.

Trouble was that nobody in football had a clue what to do.  Now if I was running some organisation and a bunch of thugs came round and wrecked my place every other Saturday, I’d pretty quickly want to know why nobody in the government was doing anything about it.  In fact I’d ask the government to keep their hooligans out of my ground.  Then, I might also ask them why they were letting a whole stratum of society grow up without anything to look forward to or anything to do except break a few heads.  I might even try and give these kids something to do, something to look forward to, make them feel part of something.  I might even have put me arm around their shoulders, tried to make them feel wanted and part of something and said – next time you come round to my place, flash this card and you can meet some of the players, maybe have a kick around on the park, take penalties at the Trent End, but if you mess up, I’m taking your card away from you, and you can go and stand on the Bridgford in the rain.

But of course nobody in football did.  They just waited until too many kids had been murdered and then they stopped us from playing the game.  They waited until some witch told them to keep their hooligans out of society and then they locked us up in the ground.  They waited until football got fashionable and they could sell the game to respectable folk.  The sort that course hares and hunt foxes and sell guns to Arab dictators.  And they put the price up every year until we just couldn’t afford it any more.

But that was much, much later.

So I spent the Saturday afternoon sitting with Chelsea supporters watching the Trickies lose, wanting to shout to encourage the Forest on, but only able to shout inside.  And when Chelsea scored their two goals in the second half, I stayed seated while everyone else jumped up, so I knew then that many of them had guessed I wasn’t a Chelsea supporter.  And after the game, I had to walk back to the tube with them singing and laughing all around me.   

And on the Sunday afternoon, I queued for the Jam and the Stranglers outside the Roundhouse for about two hours with hundreds of other folk until we got turned away without getting in when the gig sold out, so the day after the game wasn’t any better.

I’d driven down in Mom’s car and was staying with my mate Lil out in Ealing where he lodged in this great old house run by a divorcee called Billy and her two teenage girls.  John Lilbourne, who had to go by the name of Lil right from our first day at secondary school, always had Billy put me up when I came to London.  He thought it was a great laugh that I’d wasted me time that Sunday afternoon, especially after I’d driven from Ealing into town and back, and he knew this was the first time I’d driven in London and I was worried, even though there was no-one around, it being Sunday, so he made sure the whole household knew I’d had a nervous journey for nothing.

Paulie and Susie, Billy’s kids, thought it was great fun too and told me that I’d really missed a great band in the Jam who they’d seen at some pub in Hammersmith.  They even said they were better than the Stranglers, but I didn’t know whether that was just meant to wind me up.

I was jealous of Lil, cos he’d found a family to live with.  He had Billy around to cook up some wonderful Saturday dinner and make it feel like a big occasion.  He had the soap opera of their daily life to take his mind off his work.  He was much closer to living in the world than we were in our student-only hall.  I loved staying in that big old house watching Paulie and Susie dress up for their teenage kicks.  I loved listening to Billy tell her stories about her ex old man and how she used to get even with him.  I loved eating her exotic food when all I ever got at home was meat and veg.  I loved the fact that we could all stay up late listening to Lil’s albums, although Billy’s albums were from the sixties and were better.

But Monday came and I drove across to Southampton.  I went along the A3 and stopped in to see Sonia at her old dears’ farm just the other side of Guildford.  We chatted for an hour or so while she made me a cuppa.  The contrast from the city was enormous.  So relaxed, so peaceful, so green.  Her Dad’s place was down a dirt road with fields on one side and woods on the other.  I had all the time in the world, so when she suggested I go walk with her, I agreed.  She asked me about Mary and I realised this was the first time I’d seen Sonia since I’d finally put Mary on the spot and forced her to spell out exactly what she thought of me.  You know all of that stuff about Mary, so I won’t go into it here.  It was behind me anyway.  I realised at that moment how much I valued Sonia as a friend, or maybe as the older sister I never had.  She’d worked for a couple of years before college.  She was about four years older than me, twenty-three or so, and every so often she would say or do something which would strike me as really grown up.   

Mary seemed so long ago.  Me and Sonia sat on a fence and gazed across the rolling fields fringed with trees, each at a different stage of development.  The heavy, solid chestnuts ready and fully clothed in bright luscious green, and the big, lumbering skeletal oaks taking their time to break into leaf.  It was mid April, just when spring really starts to get going.  When trees all over the land start to grow a fuzzy down of new bright-green leaves.  It was a beautiful sight.  Everything seemed fresh and untouched.  It’s one of those pictures you keep filed away in your mind forever to remind you of England when you are away. 

I felt so good and I tried to tell Son what I was thinking.  How spring comes out so inevitably, and yet takes your breath away each time.  The best metaphor I could come up with was Patti Smith’s version of Gloria.  No, I’m serious.  The way it builds up and builds up, growing in intensity until finally the band explodes.  They do that on Land of a thousand dances too. That moment when they really catch fire and go over the top is like when spring suddenly bursts forth in an avalanche of green.  You know it’s going to happen whenever you listen to it, but even though you’re expecting it, it gets you every time.

And the funny thing was that Sonia knew what I was talking about, because she said she knew some more stuff like that and played me Beethoven’s fifth symphony.  Not the first bit which everyone knows, but the last bit.  The bit that works in the same way as Gloria, building and building and then bursting with joy.  Then she played me Pictures at an Exhibition.  Not the Emerson, Lake, and Palmer version that my brother always played and not the orchestra version that everyone else played.  This was just a piano.  She played the last bit, The Great Gates of Kiev.  When the first chord of the Great Gates riff is played, it’s understated.  If you’re used to the powerful full orchestra version or the Keith Emerson version, the heavenly gentility of the single piano chord seems even more beautiful in its subtlety.  Sonia said, sometimes spring comes in like an explosion like the Fifth.  Sometimes it comes in more calmly like the Great Gates.  Either way, she loves it.  

Sonia is like that piano version.  Cultured, cultivated, tender, and sympathetic.  She said, talking about Mary, “I always remember you saying that she had wonderful black hair.  You used to say it was so black it shone blue.” 

“Starless and Strangler Black,” I said, remembering Mary.

“You know, Son,” I said.  “I’ll look back on my second year at Southampton as the year when I finally grew up.  Mary will be part of that, an important part of it, but she won’t be the whole story.  She taught me a lot about life, about what’s right and wrong, about how to treat your fellow man and all that jazz, but you know, I can’t really see her going to see Forest play Chelsea, or queuing outside the Roundhouse for two hours to see a band of punks.  She’s a wonderful person, but you need to have a little more fun in your life.”

“You are growing up,” she said and she sounded exactly like someone who’d been through it all.  She sounded exactly like someone who was telling her younger brother that he was still too young.  “But,” she said, “I don’t think you’re being totally fair on Mary.  She knows how to have fun, it’s just that it’s a different fun from yours.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, getting off the fence.  But you couldn’t look backwards on a day like that.  Not with trees erupting greenery all around, not with the April sun coaxing the spring along.  I wanted the future to happen quickly.  Here’s to promotion and the new Stranglers album.

And here’s to Annie…