Alex Steine
My Mum and Dad worked really hard raising my younger brother and myself, as do many nowadays. Whatever happened to that golden age we were promised way back when? Still, with just a few farthings on occasions, growing up in the grubby backstreets of London in the 50s gave me an edge. At least I like to think it did. Those were the days of the London pea-soupers. How wondrous was the Clean Air Act?
One magical Christmas '56 or '57, I opened my main present, always got a main one and a number of smaller; I opened the box, finding myself shell-shocked as I gazed in wonder at what I held in my hands. It was an Arsenal kit! How my parents managed to eke enough coppers sideways to buy this is still astounding to me. My brother retained parity in some way gift-wise, so a double achievement. I never thanked my Mum and Dad enough. Oh that they were here for me to just hold and kiss my gratitude to them. No, I'd never get the words out. My sobs would rule the day. Anyway this little lad wore it all Christmas Day, and slept in it. From then on, when I went down to the square, or on the clay pitch a distance away I wore my kit. I was king of the world. Those uniquely distinctive blue and white hooped stockings (as they were known then), and the white-sleeved shirt, no red cuffs, a buttoned white lapel collar, but, most appealing of all, those unique white sleeves!
This was an age of Subbuteo, the plastic football-figured flicking game. I was quite good at this, but knew my pecking order well. I played with a lot of bigger kids as my footballing prowess opened gateways into the older boys’ sets, so when I played Subbuteo against lesser lights I was the Arsenal. Against those more adept I swallowed that insistence happily. I could not be a party to Arsenal losing, even at table football. I remember a new-fangled telly shop on the high street advertising a 'win a football' competition. You just went inside, and I did, quite alone and brash, (there's evidence of that edge, I suppose), and scribbled my forecast for the upcoming FA Cup Final, Bolton against Manchester United, on a card and dropped it into a cardboard shoe box. Ah, the fineries of early advertising and promotions!
Well, I got the score half right, Bolton did score twice, but without reply, and I had said 2-3. I remember on my school notice-board the following Monday the newspaper clippings being pinned up. The emblazoned headlines announced, “Two Natty Goals”. This was in celebration of the England centre-forward, Nat Lofthouse, known as the “Lion of Vienna”, delivering the cup to Bolton by virtue of his two goals. One, he bundled the 'keeper, Harry Greg and the ball over the line. The goal stood.
Around this time I moved into the sticks - leaving behind the first parking-meters -around seventy miles from London. I might as well have been on a moon orbiting Mars. I'd experienced time travel in that protracted, but relatively short distance, between the centre of the universe, London, and this backwater. Still, its innocence helped. I went to a co-ed school, which was a new concept for me, as I'd previously attended an all-boys school in London. As that first playtime approached I'd been asked if I played football, and had nodded. I was carried along by the enthusiasm of a group to the corner of a playground, where bitumen-lined joins in the wall acted as a set of goalposts.
One lad did me an immense service. Chatting to me as the straggling band threaded their way through the skipping ropes and five-stones, he repeated my softly spoken answers a few decibels above normal to the attendant group trailing along. ‘He comes from London!’ he exclaimed with astonishment, and the most richly rewarding of all, “He's been to the Arsenal!” which was almost screeched to the rest of the crew. I was the king of the world. That playtime, playing with a nap-free tennis ball, and despite the ten-minute interlude being a frenetic, scuffling, elbowing affair, I did enough with a few passes, tackles and goals to cement my position in the alpha male group. Arsenal were still the Rolls Royce of the footballing fraternity, and by association I felt elevated by my peers to a position of royalty.
A year on and I'd gone to my senior school now and my first morning saw me nervously gazing around with fidgety fingers stuffed deep into grey flannel trousers. I remember seeing a poignant chalked inscription on a wall, hidden from the elements. It starkly said ”Peggy Sue is dead”, alluding to the earlier death of Buddy Holly. That touched me; it must have done, I am still thinking of it fifty five years on. It was around this time that a new item hit the market - the Frido ball, an inflated, red, hard plastic football. It had nodules on it, which left dents in your forehead when you headed it, and stung like crazy when it whacked your bare legs - everyone wore short trousers in those days.
How bizarrely conservative England was in those days. Freezing weather but, unless you were a big boy, your legs froze. I remember the annual chapped-leg syndrome so well. This was an age of street football, grazed knees and endlessly running around, puffing and panting. Still, the Frido ball was upgraded frequently, as plastics improved. A softer more pliant version hit the market, though they remained hopelessly liable to puncture. Then, a year or so later, a thing of majesty appeared in a shop window, a white football on a plinth which captured my imagination. It was described as being Permaglazed. It kept the water out, as long as the plastic coating remained intact, and it was white!
Prior to this date, around 1960 all footballs were brown leather. You had to winkle out the bladder’s nozzle, blow it up, then - without releasing your grip - perform a surgery-like operation of folding and tying it securely, before popping it back inside the casing. Then those murderous laces were tugged together and knotted. Laces was a good name, because when you headed the ball it often lacerated your head! Of course, that ball took in water like a sponge, despite the dubbin worked into it. On a wet day, the ball became water-logged and weighed about thirty pounds more by the end of a match, so that when it hit you on the head it momentarily stunned you. Like heading a medicine ball. There was a plus to this though, as the only boots available were brown leather, high-ankled ones, equipped with long leather studs. It helped as us kids were like those Weeble toys that would come later, you know - “Weebles wobble but they don't fall down”. So a sodden heavy ball would strike you on the dome, possibly cutting you with the knotted lace; you would see stars, stagger around a bit, go to fall down, but the boots would hold you upright.
This was the age when Donald Campbell broke the world water speed-record and we all bought into the Great Britain superiority belief. Meanwhile, Bertrand Russell formed CND - he would change that view for me. Those days marked a slide into a form of oblivion for Arsenal. They'd traded off the recent past of the 1953 championship win, and had begun a head-bowed seventeen-year passage of barren football, and, for perhaps the first fourteen of them, a ride of despair without hope, unlike the recent absence of honours, which only amounts to half that duration. Gone are the floppy rosettes, so too the genuflecting to those more worthy. The Beatles were coming, and the page was fast turning on yesterday. Now in its place a new breed struts, demands and dismisses. It had to be thus, yet just a little of me misses those imagined Good Old Days. With all the changes wrought, though, that dust-covered respect for Arsenal remains constant.
