guest Post by LongTimeLurker
My guess is that many if not most of us have a ‘West Ham Hero’, and I don’t mean someone who played for the team, I’m talking about the important people in our lives who nurtured us and our interest. My Grandad was my West Ham Hero.
The first evidence of it comes from Christmas 1973. That bloody cassette recorder that Grandad got as a present that year. If it had been 1993 or 2003 he would have filmed Christmas day, but it was 1973 and so he recorded it in all of its glory on a C90.
We had it in our bedroom. He would record bedtime stories for us, always stories he had made up, and always ending with “right… Karan… Trisha – go to sleep. Ian – stop picking your nose….” and then finally in his quiet voice he would sing it. I am quite sure it was the first song that I ever learned. We found those cassettes years ago. Among the bedtime stories was the Christmas 1973 edition, and among the Slade, and the laughter, and the simmering gravy, and the simmering family tension was the unmistakeable sound of three year old me singing it.
In 2012 it was sung at his funeral. He was West Ham ‘Till He Died. He was cremated in full kit. Everyone at the service wore a West Ham shirt– even my Brother-in-law, who is as devout a Spurs fan as you get.
I’m forever blowing bubbles.
And it’s funny, the game after he died was the first time in years that I could sing it – and now I love to sing it more than ever. The previous five years I mourned for him, as dementia took its toll. We would visit. I would go with Dad, and we would spend thirty minutes sitting with him. He would be wearing his West Ham cap and reading the Daily Mirror sport pages. Over and over again he would read an article aloud, each time surprised by the news he had read just moments before. We searched for some trace of recognition. Dad mentioned Bobby Moore – but nothing. The fact he couldn’t remember us was one thing, but Bobby Moore?
I’ll tell you what he did remember. There is something strange about that miserable disease that takes so much, yet leaves some things perfectly intact. We would sing it, together, even in his last year, just like we had the previous forty. I’m sure he didn’t know why he was singing it, or what he was singing, but he liked it. He joined in and not out of politeness. He didn’t remember me, but that wasn’t the point.
I remembered him.
The sound of the 70’s in Dunedin Road, Rainham, was the thud… thud… thud of the grey plastic football against the garden wall. He would throw for me to head it – “Use your neck boy!” – nominating a point on the wall that my header was to hit. Always the stories… Noel Cantwell, John Bond, Ernie Gregory… it’s funny that we were in what is now considered a golden age – the Greenwood / Lyall years – yet as a fifty-something he would lionise his pre and post war heroes, reserving his scorn for the current crop of overpaid underachievers.
Every header, every shot, he would shout the name of a club, and I would reply with the name of their ground. Sometimes a position, for me to reply with the name of the current West Ham incumbent (although even by then I’m quite sure no-one but Grandad used terms such as ‘Left Half’). He would be there when he could when I played for school and club. He would tell me of his schoolboy days as a nippy inside forward, right up to his Army days when he played for the Royal Engineers. He had vicious scars on his legs, which he told me were the legacy of his playing days with agricultural studs on medieval boots and never a shinpad.
It was very rare for us to go together. He worked at Ford, on shift, and so it was common that he worked or slept on a Saturday. As I got older I saw less of him as the civil war that blights our family took its casualties. We went together more in my student days. He was the most incredible pessimist. So there we are together – we are 3-0 up against West Brom. Surely we can’t blow this? I think that the reason for pessimism is that you are never disappointed. There is only an upside. He wasn’t disappointed that day – it was a case of ‘same old West Ham’. I would go with him a few times a year in to his early 80’s, by which time he found the steps hard going on his knees.
Reader, thanks for getting this far. I’d written this story several months ago. At the time I was thinking about how he would tell me that Trevor Brooking ate all his greens up, and that was why I should too. Such a funny little fib that he told a wide-eyed boy, who certainly eats his greens now. I was remembering those days in my childhood when he would tell me about the old football boots when I saw the scars on his legs, when I realised something.
Grandad was taken prisoner in Singapore in 1942. Beyond teaching me to count in Japanese, and like so many, he never said anything about it. My middle-aged memory sees once again through child’s eyes. I can see now that those hideous scars are a legacy of tropical ulcers, and who knows what else, yet this lovely man made a wonderful story for a curious boy.
I think I love him even more.