The Boys From The Mersey by Nicholas Allt

Author:Nicholas Allt [Allt, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: hooligan, football, scally, liverpool
Published: 2011-05-11T22:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Europe

CHAPTER TEN

DHSS: Dustin Hoffman

Sips ‘Shampagne’

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING that Liverpool and the North in general got the shitty end of the stick under the Thatcher-led Government from 1979 onwards, but I’m saying it again. My God did we get the shitty end of the stick. There you go. Thatcher’s Employment Secretary, Norman Tebbit (Baron von Tithead Tebbit to us) told anybody who was listening and who was on the bones of his arse that he’d better get his bony arse on a bike if there was no work to be found where he lived. Well Norman, me oul flower I, like thousands of other young Scousers, understood this statement to be aimed directly at me. Now the thing is, in 1981 when you made your famous quote, I was still the proud owner of a rusty orange Raleigh Chopper; it’s bound to be fucking hard to pedal from Liverpool to Chingford on that. Plus, the lolly-ice stick that the kids used to place in the wheel spokes just to get that cool clicking noise would drive you absolutely mental by about Spaghetti Junction . . . no, forget that . . . Knutsford . . . err . . . Warrington . . . ah forget it.

Most Liverpudlians learned from an early age that if you didn’t pull yourself up by your own Kicker laces, nobody was going to give you a labouring job in a factory like Fords, or down at the Docks like your da and granda. Nah, those days were well gone, and by the time Tithead Tebbit made his speech, loads of us were already up and running anyway. If you’re on the job scrapheap by the age of twenty, what it gives you is the time to think, plot and then travel. So whereas most people were in full-time employment from an early age, a lot of northern kids, Scousers in particular, had the time to gallivant all over Europe following their football team, if they so desired. The question was, if the desire was there, were you ready to face up to the challenge of getting out there, as in, how do you go from A to B without a brass farthing to your name? Some lads locked their doors, plugged in a guitar or a hi-fi and seeing as they were stony broke, they got stoned, but other young doleites would see this giro-life as a challenge; it was a challenge many took up.

By the time the Number 10 latch was getting locked by Thatch the Snatch, Liverpool sailors had been crossing the seas for donkey’s years. They’d arrive home laden with exotic gifts and new inventions, so most of their homes already had state of the art electronic goods, modern clothing and the latest perfumes, long before anybody else. Those huge Betamax video machines were brought back from foreign ports like Kobe in Japan, to sit proudly under hundreds of Scouse tellies, years before Barry from Rochdale had one. Snazzy cameras

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