The Goalkeeper's History of Britain (text only) by Peter Chapman

Author:Peter Chapman [Chapman, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-007-39111-0
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2000-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

My dad and I joined the reverent shuffle to see Churchill lying in state at about ten o’clock on the evening before his funeral. My mum had taken my sister. The line went back from Westminster, across Lambeth Bridge to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace and towards St Thomas’s hospital. It moved over the river slowly, the wind freezing your right ear. At the Salvation Army’s tea-wagons, people flapped their arms about themselves. When they got their cups they grimaced, as if to say, ‘This tastes like boiled cat’s piss’, then smiled. One said: ‘At least it’s wet and warm.’ With 200 yards to go, the line stopped. When someone finally thought it might not be disrespectful to inquire, we were told the soldiers were having a dress rehearsal. My dad and I gave up at four in the morning.

The symbol of an old world passing when the new one was showing obvious moral weakness did little to reduce the stiffness of punishments in the football bribes trial. Dick Beattie was sentenced to nine months and, like all the others charged, banned from football for life. At Brisbane Road, Orient scraped out of the Second Division relegation zone. Liverpool went out of the European Cup in the semi-final to Inter-Milan. Keeper Tommy Lawrence was criticised for not getting to grips with the ever more outlandish balls bouncing around on the continent. White, with black diamonds, they spun patterns which seemed designed to deceive. However, some tenacious investigative reporting suggested it wasn’t the ball, but the Spanish ref who was bent, and who’d enjoyed lavish gifts from his Italian hosts. Bobby Moore lifted the Cup Winners’ Cup trophy for West Ham at Wembley and, as he did so, Kenneth Wolstenholme wondered if he’d do the same with the World Cup next year. He was in television, by extension show business, and could be forgiven for saying things like this. Ramsey had no such excuse but muttered on in the same vein as madly as ever.

Our patch of Islington acquired its first fully-fledged celebrity, Paul Jones, the lead singer of Manfred Mann, whose face in close-up on ‘Ready Steady Go’ promised all boys a life after acne. He moved into a house with his wife and child, across the other side of what had been the stretch of waste ground, a couple of doors from the Catholic church. They puta rocking horse in the parlour window. My sister went to babysit for a designer and his wife just down the street from us and found them waiting for her with Paul McCartney and Jane Asher. She said hello and otherwise pretended not to notice. The wild cats and bombsite at 8 to 10 were replaced by a block of apartments. These were considerably more ‘luxury’ than those where the two guys lived with their library-book murals. The architect cheekily turned their backside on the street, and their ‘front’ to overlook the canal. Twiggy came to view, wrapped into a bulky, mini-length, brown-and-white fur coat, looked miserable and went.

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