Stalag 7 - with meat pies!
I sniffed the air, thick with anticiption,
and then turned the car sadly in the direction of Holly Park, the home of South
Liverpool Football Club - a sort of Stalag 7 with meat pies.
Outside, a whole policeman was on
duty as Matlock Town fans, already half-crazed on tepid Bovril, poured out from
a ten-year-old Vauxhall Victor.
This was my Saturday afternoon. Two
hours there, two hours back and two hours spent fighting for a phone so that
my live dispatches via Radio Derby, would bring joy to the multitudes as they
cleaned their cars or painted the back bedroom. I loved every minute of it.
The sensual pleasures of Worksop
one week - the erotic atmosphere of Goole the next. At Gainsborough, a press
box set high in the stand. Here at Holly Park, a phone strung halfway up the
wall of a concrete bunker outside the dressing rooms. The cord not quite long
enough to enable the commentator actually to see the match as he talked.
The enemy on these occasions were
the local newspaper reporters, who treated the phone as though they had built
it themselves out of milk bottle tops. Often, as many as six of us fought over
one phone.
At first, I had been polite and hesitant
- now I was as ignorant as the rest of them. Here at South Liverpool, the local
newspapermen and I had an arrangement. I could use the phone whenever I wanted
- otherwise I broke his neck!