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Who can deny that these things to come are not yet? Yet already there is in the mind an expectation Of things to come
St Augustine
Saturday 15 April 1989
In the spring of 1989 I was in my final year at Southampton University, studying English and philosophy and living with friends in a rented house on an estate on which all the roads were named after flowers. Our house was on Honeysuckle Road, and was a three-bedroom, brick-built, semi-detached former council property owned by an Iranian businessman named Ali Mohammad. He had once been a science teacher in Tehran and had come to live in England to escape the terror of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution - that was how he told it - only to embrace another kind of revolution: the Thatcher revolution. He had become a property entrepreneur and now owned numerous houses in Southampton, most of which were rented out to students. In rudimentary English he told us that although we were paying 'bad rent' (a weekly £13, negotiated down from about £20), we were 'good students' - presumably because we always paid on time. We paid on time because three of us in the house received housing benefit, which took care of most of the rent. This was the high noon of Thatcherite free market fundamentalism, when taxes were being reduced (at the 1987 budget the top rate of income tax was cut from sixty to forty per cent) and the old nationalised utilities were being privatised as the Tories sought to break from the quasi-socialist consensus politics of the postwar decades. There were widespread and punitive cuts in public spending and services as Britain moved towards becoming a 'market economy'. In spite of the so-called rolling back of the welfare state, students still received housing benefit and government maintenance grants as well as being able to claim unemployment benefit during vacations, even the short five-week Easter break. We were indulged by the state in ways that must seem grotesquely unfair to today's harassed and debt-burdened students with their loans and tuition fees.
It felt like a good time to be a student but I often wondered if I was really making the best of it. I certainly didn't feel much like doing any work that weekend, though I was soon to begin my final exams. So I took the train to London and went to see a football match instead: Arsenal versus Newcastle at Highbury. No forward planning, no ticket required; you just turned up, paid at the gate and stood on the terraces in the place where you always tried to stand.
The crowd of 38,000 that afternoon was smaller than I'd expected: Highbury's capacity before the advent of all-seater stadiums was 55,000 and at this point, after more than a decade and a half of drift, Arsenal were in contention to win the First Division title for the first time since 1971. But perhaps the crowd was actually better than it should have been: it's hard for people who don't know what English football was like in the late seventies or much of the eighties to understand not only how different it seemed then but also how intractable, indeed insoluble, its problems were believed to be. English football wasn't exactly a dying game, but it was withered and sickly. It was, like the old pre-Blair Labour Party, riven by factionalism, in thrall to the past, especially unattractive to women, and urgently requiring a consensus-breaking transformation. But of what kind no one quite knew.
For the Newcastle game that afternoon there was space enough for our group - me, my close friend Matthew and my younger sister Victoria's boyfriend - to move freely on the North Bank terrace, and we all shared the same terrific sense of restless anticipation. The match of the day, however, was the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest being played more than 150 miles away at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield.
Not long into the game at Highbury it was announced over the public-address system that the match at Hillsborough had been abandoned because of 'crowd trouble'. The reply from the Highbury crowd was instantaneous: We hate Scousers/We hate Scousers, a chant with which I idiotically joined in. The announcer responded: there had been 'fatalities' at the game. This time there was no Highbury reply; only sudden silence then ripples of whispered unease. This being before mobile phones and the text message, before the Internet and the BlackBerry; we had only the public announcements and those few among the crowd with pocket transistor radios to communicate the news from Sheffield. We knew that the game had been abandoned and that people had died, but we had little idea as to exactly why or how.
Arsenal went on to win a subdued game 1-0 to remain well positioned for the title. We are top-o-th-league/We are top-o-th-league, we chanted as we left the stadium, but our usual happy conviction was seemingly absent. From Highbury I went back to see my younger sister at the family home in Hertfordshire, where I intended to spend the rest of the weekend.
Ninety-six people were crushed to death on the terraces at Hillsborough that afternoon; the American novelist Don DeLillo described their suffering in his novel Mao II as being like a scene from a great religious painting, 'a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it'. But that isn't right. The crush on the Leppings Lane terrace at Hillsborough followed the opening of an exit gate and the consequent surge of many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people into the stadium, some with tickets, some without, just before the start of the game. The fans who found themselves trapped were not rushing. How could they rush when they had nowhere to go, when they could scarcely put one foot in front of the other? Many died on their feet that day as the very breath of life was squeezed out of them.
The Hillsborough tragedy came at a critical moment in the history of English football. By 1989 the sport and its attitudes had become an embarrassment to a nation that had throughout the decade striven aggressively to remake itself, both economically and culturally. Through all the wider changes and convulsions of the long tumultuous years of the Thatcher government, as the prime minister sought to haul Britain from the path it had followed for sixty years, football had remained largely unreformed and unreconstructed, stubbornly apart. Mrs Thatcher and her advisors had little understanding of its culture and history and thus considered measures that would achieve little but the stigmatisation of the fans - the introduction of compulsory identity cards, for example. For a period it was even considered that matches might be played behind closed doors, without crowds.
In 1989 English football was as reviled and isolated as it has ever been, our club sides banned from European competitions. The ban was enacted after a rampage by Liverpool supporters before the start of the 1985 European Cup Final at the decrepit Heysel Stadium in Belgium led to the collapse of a wall inside. Thirty-nine Juventus fans died and many hundreds more were injured. The match was, astonishingly, still played, with dead bodies piled up at one end of the ground and rubble from the collapsed wall scattered across the running track that enclosed the pitch.
Yet, after Heysel, as millions of people turned in disgust away from football, I found myself turning towards it, being re-engaged by it. Attendances may have been dropping to record postwar lows, but I started going to games again, falling in love once more with a sport that had defined my boyhood and mid-teenage years. I'd become interested in music, fashion and politics in the early eighties, and it was around then that I'd stopped going to football. I'd accepted the false dichotomy between the so-called highbrow and lowbrow and had concluded that you couldn't be both a book man and a sports man - that the two cultures were separate, with no connecting bridge between them. A choice had to be made: books or games, music or sport, exercise or nightclubbing. And football was bound up in complicated ways with my Essex boyhood, from which I'd been in confused retreat, and with the East End heritage of my father, with which, in middle age, he was suddenly and quite bewilderingly seeking to reconnect.
The 1988-89 season was the Football League's centenary, but there was little to celebrate. Hillsborough was the final act in a decade of misfortune, the last in a chain of calamities and woes that included Heysel and the Bradford fire disaster, also in 1985, when a blaze which started during a Third Division match between Bradford City and Lincoln City devastated the home side's seventy-seven-year-old wooden main stand and killed fifty-six people.
The morning after Hillsborough, after I'd read the newspaper reports, studied the front-page photographs of those crushed against the fences - the sad, sickening, bloated faces of the dying - and watched and listened to the various news reports on TV and radio, I felt the need to speak to my father, who had introduced me to football many years before and who, in recent times, had inspired my reconnection with the game. The trouble was that I didn't know how to reach him in Hong Kong, where he was on business. Where he stayed while he was away, whom he saw: these details didn't matter to me then. In the event, he called me; it was early evening in Hong Kong and he wanted to know the mood in England. He and my mother had been at a dinner party together in Kowloon, he said; the game had been on in another room - the host was, like my father, a football fan. During the dinner party someone had gone to check the score and there it was, the tragedy of Hillsborough unfolding on the screen. Everyone left the table and gathered around the television. They watched the injured and dying being carried away on the advertising hoardings that were being used as emergency stretchers; watched people trying to scale the security fences to reach the safety of th...
