A Walk Down White Hart Memory Lane…

For the first time ever, Tottenham Hotspur face Morecambe FC on a football pitch on Sunday.

Indulge me – please – as I make an admission to you which I am truly ashamed of.

When I was young and knew no better, if anyone had asked me which football team I supported, I would have answered “Tottenham and Morecambe”. Yes – two – and in that order.

I supported Spurs – as many people of my generation did – because the Bill Nicholson team of the 1960s played the Beautiful Game and were good on the eye. (I was also determined not to support Manchester United – which so many of my contemporaries in northern England did at the time.)

I saw Spurs in the flesh at White Hart Lane as long ago as 1959 – when I was five. My Mother’s sister lived in relatively nearby Leyton and we were visiting her for Christmas. So my dad took me along to see one of the best-known teams in Britain at the time.

But he also occasionally dragged me along to Deepdale to see a Preston North End which still featured the great Tom Finney and I never had my head turned by them.

He also regularly took me to watch Morecambe at a rapidly-developing Christie Park in the Lancashire Combination. I remember the Main Stand when it was new; the first floodlights; the cinder banks in the South (later Umbro) Stand and what became known as the Car Wash Terrace. I even remember walking across the foundations for the Auxiliary Supporters Club on Lancaster Road after one particular match. But every season, I would manage to watch Tottenham as well.

At Everton. At Old Trafford several times. At Stoke City’s old Victoria Ground once. Blackpool. Anfield – and occasionally in London as well. Turf Moor was a regular trip as I went with my class-mates Peter Watson and John Houston in Peter’s dad’s blue Austin Cambridge (or was it a Morris Oxford? Watson Senior was a fireman who drove us to Burnley to worship our heroes, bless him, on no less than three occasions).

By this time – as a teenager – I usually watched Morecambe on my own. It was a regular pilgrimage as I rode Walter – my knackered old Raleigh bike – all the way from my parents’ house in Bolton-le-Sands to Christie Park. Then back again, occasionally in the rain and frequently in pitch blackness stuck in fourth gear as I ground my weary way up Hasty Brow Lane over the canal bridge towards Slyne on a Tuesday night.

That all changed when I moved to London in 1973. I took the bike with me.

I was living in a hovel in pre-yuppy-fied Islington in Norf London before long. There, I would get on Walter and grind through the imaginary gears again as I cycled through places like Stamford Hill up the A10 towards Tottenham High Road and the White Hart Lane stadium.

It was a very different experience to cycling through the leafy lanes of North Lancashire, as you can probably imagine. Traffic. Noise. People everywhere.

I had very long hair at the time (I had moved to London in an ill-fated bid to become a professional bass player in some rock band somewhere and the mullet was part of the package).

One of my clearest memories of going to White Hart Lane was when I had just about peaked the top of Stamford Hill (Gasp! – yes, it was still stuck in fourth gear) only to be spat at by about four teenage Skinheads – little white Cockney geezers clad in denim and Doc Martins who suggested that I was `a fackin’ ‘ippy!”.

I don’t think even one of them missed.

Coming away again, I remember being directed back into the heavy two lanes of traffic near Seven Sisters by a female policewoman – a Sow, I supposed at the time partially because of the way she looked. If it wasn’t for her enormous bust, this would have been a real-life embodiment of a Rugby League Prop Forward with a pink face like a bag of spanners and a uniform. And she stopped me trying to avoid the perennially angry London motorists and murderous taxi drivers by cycling down a bus lane instead.

Thankyou Madam. Come to think of it, she probably didn’t like Hippies either…

I fitted a horn – you know, one with a round rubber thing to squeeze – to the bike precisely in order to navigate the crowds leaving White Hart Lane. And soon took it off again. It was really loud but I only used it once – and I swear the guy I was honking at nearly had a heart attack as he virtually swooned right in front of me: “Fort you was a bleedin’ truck, mate!”

In the ground, things were little better. At Christie Park – even with only two hundred other sad people with nothing better to do like myself in the ground – there was always a good atmosphere. And – win, lose or draw – I always had a good laugh. Not so at White Hot Lane. The home crowd were nasty – and angry.  England star Martin Chivers was their Centre Forward at the time. But if he didn’t score after about ten minutes, the Park Lane End (where I usually stood) would yell “Chivers is a Fairy” at him en masse. (Nobody would dream of shouting anything like that at dear old Charlie Wroth back home at Christie Park…)

They hated regular substitute John Pratt – probably just because of his surname.

Local derbies were like wars – West Ham Skinheads versus Spurs Bovver Boys, for instance.

I remember when Crowd Control measures and the segregation we all take for granted these days were first being introduced. To get around it, visiting fans bought Spurs scarves outside the ground in order to get in with the home fans. Then the trouble would start.

Before a game against Chelsea, the violence on the terraces was so intense that the Public Address announcer threatened to have the game abandoned if it didn’t stop. This was at a point just before kick-off when little girl Majorettes who had already been subjected to the lewdest imaginable comments from the delightful Cockneys who filled all corners of the ground were marching across the middle of the pitch.

Suddenly, a wall of blue-clad Chelsea supporters was charging towards them from the away Paxton Road end as the visiting hordes invaded the playing surface to be confronted by home-grown hooligans charging towards them from the opposite direction.

They must be scarred for life, poor kids.

I saw a bloke get genuinely scarred for life – or possibly worse – as he was stabbed in the free-for-all which ensued. I still have a memory of him laid out – covered in blood – in the home goalmouth before he was finally stretchered away.

Down the road at Highbury, an indelible memory of an Arsenal-Spurs match is imprinted on my brain. I was standing in the Paddock at the front of the Art Deco main stand. Behind me, sitting in the interior, was the Metropolitan Police Brass Band. A big copper who really did look like a Pig was wearing full dress uniform and conducting. This was bizarre enough in itself. But at a certain point, he picked-up a microphone and started to sing!

I had to pinch myself.

I pinched myself even harder when I realised that what he was singing was a hymn!: Ave Maria. I looked towards the North Bank, where World War Three had already started as the two local tribes were kicking hell out of each other as the heavenly words floated in the ether above them. Beam me up, Scotty!

So I started to get a bit disillusioned. It didn’t help when the morons around me yelled `You dirty Northern Bastards` at any visiting team which was to be found on the wrong side of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel otherwise known as Watford.

One day, I saw Spurs beat Aston Villa five-nil. I remember two things about the match.

First of all – at half time – I bought a cup of tea.

I used to have loads of sugar in any hot drink but during the 1970s there was a period in London when you couldn’t get any. So I had to give it up.

But at White Hart Lane, the crisis had passed and the large, scary women behind the counter automatically added sugar to the tea whether you wanted it or not. I couldn’t drink it: it tasted like two separate drinks: something vaguely tea-like and a cloyingly syrupy instant tooth-rot additive. I’ve never used sugar in drinks since.

Later – and I cringe now to think that I used to wear a blue and white Tottenham scarf to their home games – I was leaving the ground to find Walter the bike. As I did so, a big, burly Villa supporter stopped me.

“Do you support Spurs?” he asked in a very strong – and quite threatening – Black Country accent.

(I thought about trying to get out of what I expected to be a difficult situation by replying: “No – I actually support Morecambe but I am on a spying mission on behalf of a match which will happen almost a half a century from now!” – but then thought that might not be such a good idea.) So I told him the shameful – the actually very shameful – truth: “Yes”.

At which point, he took his grubby scarf off and wrapped it around my neck and said: “Take this my dear fellow – our team are a bunch of overpaid chaps who are not terribly good and with whom I am much displeased!” Well – it was a variation on this phrase which I’m sure you can imagine.

(Later, I actually wore this thing occasionally even though it shrunk by about a third when I first washed it. I was cycling home from work in Very Agreeable Hampstead along the Heath road towards Highgate – where I lived in a poky bedsit at the time – one day in the winter when a car passed. Voices yelled from within it: “Up the ‘Ammers!” when they saw the scarf I was wearing. I stuck my fist in the air and yelled “Burnley for ever!” All because of a Claret & Blue Aston Villa accessory – my, what a twisted road life can take us down – even on a clapped-out old bike – says he very philosophically…)

But talking about Burnley, I was at Shite Fart Lane (as my Arsenal-supporting drummer in the last band I played with in London always referred to it) one day when the team from East Lancashire were the visitors. This must have been in about 1976 or 1977 and Spurs were struggling to stay in the old First Division as some of their star players – Mike England; Alan Mullery and Alan Gilzean for instance – were already beyond their Sell-By dates. (This may well have been the year that outstanding Spurs Goalkeeper Pat Jennings won the First Division Player of the Year award. Asked how he managed this, he replied: “With a defence like ours, I didn’t have much choice!”)

This was Back In The Day when only a single substitute was allowed in football matches. So Tottenham crippled Burnley’s star player (either Ralphy Coates – who they signed later on – or Welsh international and later Morecambe legend Leighton James – I can’t remember which). This was at a time when Burnley had already brought-on their only substitute and whoever Spurs had nobbled spent the rest of the match literally limping up and down the touchline, just to keep up the numbers. Despite effectively only having ten men, Burnley took the lead. But Spurs kicked their way back into the match and won it with a goal near the end 2-1. Boo!!! Despite the fact that their brave lads were losing, a group of visiting fans somewhere in the ground started chanting: “Lancashire La La La!; Lancashire La La La!”

 I felt – as someone actually born in Morecambe – like Judas.

Coming away from the game, I shoved my Spurs scarf in a bin and decided that enough was enough.

Hell, we are told, hath no fury like a woman scorned. Well – I have an update on that: Hell Has no Fury like a football fan scorned. I still love Morecambe but I positively hateTottenham these days.

I was delighted when they were relegated to Division Two back in the day and even more thrilled when Liverpool beat them in the European Cup Final a couple of seasons ago. I’m not keen on Chelsea either – but I was at least subconsciously egging them on as they won 2-0 in their first leg semi-final League Cup win last Tuesday at Stamford Bridge.  Tee-hee…

So for me personally, attending a Spurs’ home game for the very first time as a committed away supporter will be a truly weird experience on Sunday. Morecambe may well end-up getting Totten-hammered.

But on the other hand – who knows? Stranger things have happened, after all…