Middlesbrough, Sheffield, Luton. All complex, all noisy. The former’s sad and deafeningly silent spaces plagued me, the latter’s disharmony induced upset and anger. Sheffield stooped and thrilled, but even subtle hedonism is unsustainable when you’re a miserable sod. I needed peace, most of all from my thoughts. So many versions of England speeding through my head and shouting for attention. It was time to find Quiet England. Suffolk called.
In my head, Ipswich whispered along softly. On Saturdays it was populated by country squires and farm labourers, all up in the big town to return library books and buy stationery. Errands were run in my mind’s Ipswich, its spacious streets pounded by friendly, ruddy faces. If you are going to imagine a place, you might as well ramp up the stereotyping.
This imagining extended to, or was perhaps caused by, Ipswich Town Football Club. They had always been gentle, nice, dispassionate. For the neutral they were a club who neither whipped-up fervour nor raised hateful hackles: the tinned tomato soup of football. Town hushed their way through, occasionally flickering but mostly toiling. Always they were there, a sturdy rung of England’s ladder.
I had a vague notion, too, that Ipswich was a ‘family club’. This had nothing to do with foam hands and face paints, and everything to do with who, in their past, had governed them. Ipswich’s origins have a familial, cosy feel. They were established by patrician aristocrats as another resource to enrich the town. Into the big town from the country came the Cobbold family with errands to run; football clubs to found. A brewing dynasty, a land-owning machine, good Suffolk stock quietly improving the locale – that was the Cobbolds. For over a century, their Etonian Lords, Ladies, Knights, Right Honourables and dishonourables ran the show. In the 1870s, Thomas Clement Cobbold started the Ipswich Association Football Club. In the 1980s, the Cobbolds were still there. What fun they had, in from the country to run the Town. ‘You ask what constitutes a crisis here,’ said chairman Patrick Cobbold in 1982, ‘Well, if we run out of wine in the boardroom.’
Cobboldian eccentricities seeped through to their club, many with an agrarian tint. In the 1920s, they employed a groundsman who kept chickens, goats and sheep in a Portman Road stand. One match was abandoned due to a pitch-invading plague of rats. This was no knockabout Wurzel Gummidge FC, though: Town were a finely supported force of the amateur game. In 1936 chairman Captain Ivan Cobbold led them to belated professionalism, aristocratic sensibilities of fair play and no wages giving way decades after they did in Middlesbrough, Sheffield and Luton. Their first game in the Third Division (South) saw them take on Tunbridge Wells FC. Their last saw them crowned champions.
Captain Cobbold closed his club down during the Second World War. Respect for conflict returned no reverence for life: in 1944, he was killed when a bomb struck the chapel in which he prayed. His seventeen-year-old son John became the man of their houses, and then Town chairman when only twenty-nine years old.
John Cobbold, the man who put the ‘port’ in ‘sport’, is the Cobbold most remembered and revered. Hilarious, charismatic and secretly, allegedly gay (imagine Suffolk whispering), for a long time ‘Mr John’ was the boozy oxygen of Ipswich Town FC. His organism, the club, breathed in everything Mr John (‘Sir’ was too stuffy, he felt, ‘Mr Cobbold’ too deferent) had to offer. The mindset was straightforward (‘One’s object in life should be to make people happy and have a good laugh’), the philosophy sharply egalitarian: ‘The most important thing for a director is to have a really good rapport with every single member of staff at the club, from the manager all the way down to the person who sweeps out the gutters.’ Presiding über alles was the grand matriarch, John’s mother, Lady Blanche, daughter to the Duke of Devonshire. His brother Patrick was always there, always pouring the drinks and plotting the way. This context made Ipswich into a family as tightly effective as a mafiosi version of the Waltons.
Perhaps Mr John’s Ipswich family success came from classic and clichéd English notions of fair play and upper class paternalism. His stewardship went beyond sport. More likely though, I think, it came down to this fact: he didn’t actually like football. ‘I will confess I am not particularly keen on the game,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘Indeed, I remember saying that I would not cross the road to watch a football match – unless, of course, Ipswich Town were playing.’ As such, Mr John was removed from impassioned engagement and all the reactionary decisions it can provoke. Not once did Cobbold presume to know better and interfere with signings, selection or tactics, and Ipswich did not sack a manager until 1987. Indeed, on the one occasion Mr John was given a scouting brief, he availed himself of copious boardroom whisky and filed a full report on an absent player.
Somehow, wilful indifference bred an uncanny knack for spotting great managers. Once he had blooded them, Cobbold nurtured close relationships with his coaches, half a father, half a brother, fully avuncular. In 1957 the youngest chairman in football appointed the newly retired player Alfred Ramsey as his manager. Ramsey quickly won Division Three. At a celebratory party, Sir John found him under a table singing ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’. After three years’ patience and persistence, Ramsey produced another title, Division Two, and a superlative follow-up: the 1962 Division One championship. They had conquered England. After the last ball had been thumped, crowd and players danced, delighted and disappeared. Ramsey stayed behind and walked a solo lap of honour, Portman Road empty, but for an applauding Mr John.
When England called for Ramsey, Wor Jackie Milburn stepped in, but walked away again, fortune always hiding. A few years on, the north-east sent another missionary: Bobby Robson, Mr John’s soulmate. The two guided one another over stony ground with steady hands. Fruitless years soon gave way to bounty. At the 1978 FA Cup final, Town’s Roger Osborne socked a left-footer beyond Arsenal and promptly fainted. Still though, the trophy was dressed in blue. Mr John, Bobby and the boys sang all the way home. Next stop, greatness.
Bobby’s team played champagne football for their champagne chairman. You drink it, Mr John, we’ll play it. Dutch sorcerers Arnold Mühren and Frans Thijssen plied the team with zippy passes and twisted opponent blood into a curdle. Young Terry Butcher refused all entry, and Johnny Wark prompted and picked, a midfield drumbeat. The bonhomie of Mr John masked a ruthless winning machine of a club. In the tunnel at Highbury, an Arsenal chaplain remarked ‘May the best team win’. ‘Fuck that, Reverend, we want to win’ retorted our John. Ipswich were sticklers for the Top Five and European football. Mr John filled his boots and embraced the bright green liqueurs of continental destinations. His club crept under the Iron Curtain, to Lodz with its food shortages and Leipzig, where Mr John sat among thick-coated Soviet generals, each of them a Town fan for the day. When Cologne visited Suffolk, he invited their wigs to the stately family home and plied them with booze. By midnight, they were blindfolded and bashing one another with a folded-up newspaper. The playful club was a successful one, snaring the UEFA Cup in 1981. Ten thousand East Anglians flocked to Amsterdam for the final, opening their own blue light district. They charmed the city with their impeccable ways, doing the family proud. Where English fans usually elicited batons from European law keepers, the children of Town induced a letter of congratulation from Amsterdam’s finest.
As I was being born, though, the Football Association was eyeing up the family silver. When another vintage season, 1981-82, ended Bobby Robson left for Wembley. Mr John had once more sent a son to fight for England. Cracks appeared in the family. They expanded into chasms when, a year later, Mr John suddenly died. ‘He was too young and too good to die and it is a sad and heavy blow to me,’ said grieving Bobby Robson. ‘His death is also a dreadful loss to the club. He could turn disappointment and disaster into humour and laughter. There was always tomorrow as far as Mr John was concerned.’
And so to Town I go, to trace a crayon across the bark of the family club. The alarm wakes me early, before even Suffolk farmers have stirred. At the airport – to get to Ipswich from Scotland on a train requires a problematic change at Bratislava Parkway – sore eyes squint at neon screens. Dixons is packed with the kind of man who needs to buy a scart lead at 5.45 a.m., while prohibitive queues in WHSmiths lead me to pay for my newspaper in the honesty box. When I worked in WHSmiths as a teenager, one of my jobs was to empty this vessel of change. The floor staff knew it as the ‘IOU jar’ so frequently did we find scrawled notes bearing the acronym. Other payment methods included Deutschmarks, McDonald’s vouchers and a safety pin.
‘Oh my God, my, my God, oh my God’ cry the girls in the security queue. They are wonderfully archetypal trust fund students. Rosy-cheeked and Ugg-booted, all have a luscious and scruffy surfeit of mousy blond hair, and hoodies sheathed by gillets. ‘It’s so not funny being up this early,’ says one. I am sure the others agree but nodding would take too much effort and involve breaking their ridged stoops. I would like to pass comment here on the continuing importance of social class in England, but there is every chance that these are the daughters of Highland lairdship or the united sisters of Harris Tweed. I like them. Their caricatures perk up the 100ml maximum process.
The flight peaks early on when an air stewardess scolds two French garçons for talking through the safety mimes, even if they are frequent fliers. After that, I am left to luxuriate in the hills, dales, streams and retail parks of England sliding into view beneath me, and the pilot’s voice. This begins at a high pitch, but decreases to a low one as his sentences progress, much like a balloon being let go.
At Stansted, I board the coach for Ipswich. Whitney Houston has recently died, but her caterwauling is immortalised on Heart FM’s ‘Whitney Day’, streaming from National Express speakers. By the end of the journey I emphatically do not want to dance with somebody, unless the foxtrot brings deafness.
We pass through Braintree, a pretty hive of cottage terraces topped by a dome-headed library. At its centre is the Essex American Hall. We are close, of course, to the border with Suffolk, where 80,000 American troops were stationed during the Second World War. They brought their ruptured society with them. Fights between troops resulted in designated ‘white nights’ and ‘black nights’. In Ipswich, some pubs were declared ‘exclusively for coloured troops’.
Braintree’s outskirts field small factories that are still clearly in use and add to the feeling that this is a model railway town. Colchester is stirring bonnily too, its circular castle a postcard-perfect English relic. Garden St George flags quiver as we whoosh along, signs for Colchester’s new Weston Homes Community Stadium in blurry brown. Wherefore art thou, Layer Road where Leeds United were slain?
There are signs too for Copdock and Spiral as we approach Ipswich. Suffolk is the county of Snape, Shimpling and Rishangles, of Boulge, Iken and Eye. These place names conjure a whispered poetry perfect for the tranquil England I am seeking. After a tantalising striptease view of Portman Road the coach drops me at the Cattle Market Bus Station. It is immediately serene. When a lady trundles by on a mobility scooter it seems like a raucous, unnecessary intrusion.
At the Tourist Information Centre, housed among the fairy tale beams of an old church, two helpful ladies try and remember the name of a pub I’ve asked about. ‘Has its own brewery, does it? Oh. I think I know. Paula, what’s that pub down the docks where they have the beer and such?’ I am never to find the pub. I continue along narrow, quiet streets. There is no traffic here, just the clops of feet and murmuring voices. I sit on a tomb behind a church requisitioned as a cafe and inhale the tranquillity. The sounds here are sounds that have gratified the air for centuries: feet and voices and even, when the hour strikes, church bells. Ipswich feels like a permanent, constant and confident England.
Crooked buildings of bright colour and groaning beams culminate in Ancient House. The plasterwork beneath each window depicts the continents of the world, fifteenth-century style: Europe is an elegant lady with an open book, Asia a palm tree with a lady lying beneath, Africa a naked man on a tree stump and America the same in a headdress.
By H&M a dad stops his teenage son and points at the man bearing a ‘McDonald’s This Way’ placard. ‘If you don’t start trying at school that’s what you’ll end up doing,’ says the dad within earshot of the sign man. This tale is played out on the site of the Chaucer family boozer. In the thirteenth and fourteenth century the writer’s family ran a tavern here. He would later satirise the port of Ipswich’s ‘fork-bearded’ merchants, placing them on horses defending the River Orwell. Chaucer’s relationship with Ipswich numbers one of its many insistently English credentials. No town has been lived in by English-speaking inhabitants for a longer continuous period than this one. It was here that two great pushers of an idealised England, John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough, lived and worked. Even Lord Nelson bought himself a house in Ipswich. It is also the home of the world’s first motorised lawnmower, and what is more English than a Sunday spent with a Flymo? From the quiet contentedness of its aged streets to these heritage yarns, it is the most English place I have been to so far. That does not necessarily make it the one that most embodies what England is.
I walk by the Admiral’s House, former home of Wellington’s naval friend Benjamin Page. My guidebook teaches me that after an illustrious career at sea Admiral Page retired here. The peace of Ipswich that he craved was frequently interrupted by a rowdy watercress salesman nicknamed ‘Must-Go’. Page paid him a ‘pension’ not to sell outside his home. Along from the Admiral’s House is the Ipswich and Suffolk Club, a protracted and ancient maroon building, part-stately home, part-egregiously Mock Tudor golf club. I have always found the world of private members’ clubs intriguing, and not only because I am convinced that they are fronts for Masonic Lodges or sex clubs or Masonic Sex Clubs. Judging by its website this version does sound vaguely welcoming though one wonders how much to the denizens of the building opposite, which houses the Bangladeshi Support and the Zimbabwean Women’s Resource centres. So many Englands, and this just on Tower Street, Ipswich.
Around the corner P. J. McGinty’s pub is home to one of the town’s most celebrated ghosts, a monk who enjoys walking through the fireplace. From its earliest days Ipswich was home to various breeds of friar. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries mendicant monks walked the local streets begging for money in return for prayers (it beats ‘50p for a cup of tea’, I suppose). When they left, the Franciscans became dominant. As disciples of St Francis they embraced the rule of poverty, excluding all else. This was especially hard on their feet, for the rejection of shoes meant everything became caked in what is euphemistically referred to in history books as ‘street waste’ (trans shite).
By a sign that promises Ipswich Polish Club is ‘coming soon’, I cross to the former Packhorse Inn. This heroically leaning and blisteringly elegant old house is now a solicitors’. It had the same use in 1936 when Wallis Simpson bobbed in to confirm her divorce. Papers signed in this typically quiet Ipswich street changed England. There is no time to ponder the magnitude of what took place here as I am drawn to a poster over the road. It is a noticeably bright advert for ‘An evening with Tough Talk’. ‘Tough Talk’ is apparently ‘made up of a group of men with backgrounds of ex-bouncers, ex-football hooligans and ex-East End hard men who have turned their backs on the past.’ Instead, ‘The group have found the message of hope in Jesus Christ’ and now travel around ‘performing power lifting demonstrations as a backdrop to telling their amazing stories.’ It is very much what He would have wanted.
I carry on and am duly stung by the unexpected beauty of Christchurch Mansion and park. This, an open, council-owned stately home lolling amongst stunning communal land, lifts Ipswich from ‘pleasant’ to ‘ace’. When England takes its heritage assets and makes them public like this, it too is ace. The mansion itself is imperfectly beautiful, chiselled together in bricks of various shades of cerise and charmingly asymmetrical having been built in the sixteenth century and often beavered away at since. In front of it is an oval lawn on which this morning kids race about. Beyond them, giant oaks perform a guard of honour around a sweeping and bumpy park of hills and ponds. The park is home to the town’s war memorials and gives them the reverence of space and silence. In Ipswich, war memorial England is of the more traditional, weeping type.
A curator heaves Christchurch Mansion ajar and welcomes me inside. The scent is overwhelmingly evocative – fusty books, thick varnish and Worcester sauce. Perhaps the shop is burning Olde England-scented joss sticks. I read how Christchurch is another part of the Cobbold family silver, polished on behalf of the town. In 1895 it was due to be demolished. Felix Cobbold, a banker, stepped in and bought the place under the proviso that it opened its hefty doors to the public. Christchurch, the wet dock, swimming baths and Ipswich Town, all fed by Cobbold money sent from civic duty. Nowadays, English sons of money cart their spoils from this country to the tax vaults of others.
Upstairs the corridor floors groan and are angular enough to make me feel drunk, which is an added bonus. The walls of one room are covered entirely in panels that bear Latin slogans and surrealist fairy-tale illustrations. Another, The Chamber, is so full of varnished wooden items it looks as if a class of Jacobean CDT pupils has just left.
I leave this deeply special, garishly English place and walk back by bumfluff trees towards town. On an adjacent road the Friends Meeting House seems to double as a taxi rank, unless cab drivers here are chiefly Quaker and so instead of boring you with their opinions sit in silent contemplation for the length of your journey. The houses are large in this neighbourhood, withdrawn from the road behind generous gardens. I imagine that the illustrious of Ipswich once lived on this street, men like a doctor I read about. I remember the doctor because he once caught a man stealing vegetables from his garden. The local version of law and order back then – the nineteenth century – seems to have been a ‘wise man’ named Old Winter, so the doctor sent for him. Old Winter used white magic to punish miscreants and bewitched the thief into spending the night sitting in a cabbage patch. Elsewhere, he coerced one man into walking in circles for hours on end, carrying the firewood he had stolen.
Eventually, I come to a columned archway and hear the busy voices of market traders beyond. The archway unfolds into a compelling scene. Beneath blue and white canopies stallholders bawl about bargainous fruit and veg, about leggings and tights, about fuses and drills. Customers peruse and chatter (‘Oh look, Mary, thems got those slippers you liked’) while a man in fluorescents snaps litter from beneath their feet. One stall proffers a surfeit of oval, circular and oblong breads and pastries that my nana would have called ‘right fancy’. It is run by two urbanite young men, members of a growing population who see bread and brewing as art forms, and charge accordingly. Food in England has become middle-class pornography. More traditionally there is Billy’s Meats, a butcher’s van from which a man in a red and white-striped apron calls out deals from a headset microphone. The van is festooned in boards proclaiming deals and tailed by a sizeable queue of customers. Billy has his patter and he is going to use it. ‘You ask I serve, you don’t, it serves you right. Who wants a dozen sirloins for twenty quid? No, how about thirty quid then, your call. Look at this, my love. Marbled, caressed, a specimen, a fine specimen.’ The scene is flanked by Ipswich’s Town Hall. It is impressive but neatly proportioned; there is no call for ostentation here. No one would ever think to burn it down. As its modest clock is ticking on I decide to head from the town to the Town.
At Portman Road they are unfurling match day. The PA man is testing his apparatus, and grills sizzle as raw patties hit the burger street stalls. With their teeth, programme sellers remove the plastic taping around their bundles and apply their fingerless gloves. Stewards are briefed and distributed to their four corners of the ground.
From town, you first see Portman Road poking out between two saddening office buildings over a roundabout, and it lifts the soul. Its curving yet jutting angles resemble a dexterous cat’s arm. Floodlights rise from its roofs on iron tripods. It consists of two older stands and two newer, the former wearing the words ‘Ipswich Town FC’ in a classic and proud typeface. I loiter by the Cobbold Stand, whose rib-caged and organised 1970s appearance reminds me of the more artistic elements of Communist architecture. That sounds sarcastic, but is meant as a compliment. The early risers start to trickle in, ambling towards informal meeting places where semi-strangers gossip about full-backs. Many congregate by the statue of Sir Bobby, others twenty metres along from him by Sir Alf. I wonder if these reflect Tractor Boy Ultra factions, and in north-eastern solidarity perch by the iron Robert Robson. His right hand is aloft, pointing to the position in between the front two, pointing to glory. Men who should know better but happily don’t and boys who never saw him but feel they did queue up and offer a kissed hand to his solid feet.
I hear the Town Crier before I see him. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Portman Road for today’s match with Cardiff City Football Club,’ he says through a megaphone. ‘Hooray, here ’e is!’ whoops one of the burger men, familiar warmth in his voice. When I turn I see that he is a gentleman in his fifties wearing a white Town T-shirt, a beanie hat on top of a deerstalker, tracksuit bottoms and snow-white trainers. The megaphone he holds is small in size and plays bursts of calypso music in between his proclamations. He scuttles up and down the length of the Cobbold Stand for at least half an hour, welcoming those present, giving an update on Town’s form and belting out homemade topical chants. Of the thousands that walk past him few are surprised. Most smile and some wave at him. This Town Crier is patently part of the furniture, part of the matchday carnival of ritual.
Behind the Sir Bobby Stand, I pause by Sir Alf of Sir Alf Ramsey Way. Above him a giant mural of Bobby in his pomp grins down. Standing beside Alf at a certain angle it appears as if the two are in conversation, talking Town, talking times in the sun. Some say English management’s finest sons did not get on. I say they would now; they would now with Town and time to heal them. Alf died here, Bobby died with here wedged in his heart.
A fried onion perfume hangs as I pass a twenty-something lad distributing tickets to his mates (‘You get them and I’ll square you up on Saturday’). I heave my Cobbold Stand turnstile and enter the 1970s. Beyond concrete stairs men in suede and fur jackets stand by corrugated Perspex. This is a time-warped concourse, untouched since Bobby. I buy a bottle of Aspall’s cider and marvel at a price list that includes whisky and brandy, surely tip-of-the-hat tipples to Mr John. A couple in their sixties kiss and embrace with an exhibitionist passion that screams ‘affair’; very shocking at the family club, but the guts of Portman Road are a fine place to hide. There are ruddy-faced men with shovel hands wearing cords and Barbours. They stand reading attendances from the programme’s statistics page, always my favourite feature.
When ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ ends and the Cardiff City fans begin to sing, I turn a corner and climb some stairs into the light. The Lincoln green in front of me is fresh and stirring, the people in their stands a theatre of intrigue. May nothing stop the feeling a first visit to a new ground gives. The rain swishes and bounces as the groundsman stabs a last-ditch pitchfork into his turf. After a medley of stadium classics (‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, ‘Simply the Best’ ...) and a club song that begins ‘I’ve never felt more like singing the Blues/When Ipswich win and Norwich lose’, Town and City players trudge on to the field. It is regrettable that they enter the fray in this way. Long gone are the Saturdays of teams galloping into the coliseum, revved up and sky high on nervous energy. Departed is the anarchy of them blazing kamikaze warm-up shots into the huddling masses behind the goal. As befits the mollycoddled game these days, their entry now is organised and functionary. The spontaneity and the jubilance of expectancy have departed. It has been replaced by a stage-managed handshake parade, probably on the advice of sports scientists and crass marketing men. The choreographing of pre-match fan behaviour is transposed on to the players. Everywhere, breathless excitement has been turned into stale air. ‘I remember when they used to sprint on,’ says the man in the seat behind mine. ‘Of course, it’s all about political correctness now.’
With the coin spun both teams retreat to their halves and embrace in eleven-man huddles. I think the purpose is to impart last-minute words of inspiration and share shouts of ‘grrrrrrr’. It is more interesting to imagine that the footballers are debating Hegelian dialectics. Once the game has kicked-off a disappointing hush envelops the stands. Everything – the rain, the setting, the clacking of wooden seats – is in place for noise. All that can be heard are the barks of growly Welsh voices and the occasional clap of gloved hands. For a change I am by far the youngest person in my seating block, and one of only a few not wearing a waxy jacket. Many are still living in a past from long ago. Two seats along from me a nasal Suffolk voice says, ‘I wish we could find another Bobby Robson, another Johnny Wark.’
Down on the pitch Cardiff spark. They are due at Wembley next week for a League Cup final tryst with Liverpool and play with chutzpah. Their busy right-back raids forward incessantly and I am surely not the only person in the ground wondering when they last saw a grey-haired player. His left-back teammate struts around like a Siamese cat based on Liam Gallagher. When he is forced to run it appears as though he is hopping among fire. At times he seems to fly in an upright position, like a Tomy Supercup Football figure. On the front-line a skin-heided Scot jerks in and out of the home offside trap. When not snared and flagged he is a nippy whippet. His style of play and bareback aggression invites fouls as snow invites footprints. At one point he wins a free-kick and then daggers the ball with his eyes, as if it has offered him outside.
As the first half motors on, Town craft matches City efficiency. Where skin-heid wishes death upon the ball, the home side smother it in kisses. Passes are tip-tapped together, and gentle feet dribble softly. Important in this is their centre-forward, a lanky doodle-do-er with a persistent side parting. He ensures that Town’s caressing is not just foreplay, busily directing proceedings and irritating Cardiff with ceaseless running. His speedy partner up top is addicted to blood-curdling challenges on opponent defenders. It’s the kind of nastiness and immediacy that Town, the nice club too often stuck in yore, need.
Beneath the mossy roof of their characterful main stand, Town’s heavily Liverpudlian manager folds his arms and thinks something very, very Scouse. As he peddles backwards to the dugout Ipswich burst free from a Cardiff attack and score. Inevitably, the brash chirp of ‘Chelsea Dagger’ drowns at birth any long-awaited din from the home crowd. When the game renews Town become commanding, their crisp pushing of the ball occasionally mesmeric. Still home crowd smiles do not come, and nor are voices raised. What finally gets them going is a thudded, studded ground-based contretemps between forward and foe, followed by a City middleman running the ball out of play. In their thousands the people of Suffolk rise and jeer. While England and Ipswich roar for minor violence and opposition mistakes, we will never be sickly purists like Spain and Barcelona. I like that. Sheffield still rules.
The visiting Welsh are forced to respond with a constipated ‘Que Sera Sera ...’ and prolonged barracking of Town’s winger (‘One lazy bastard/there’s only one lazy bastard’), a former Cardiff loanee. With gallant strides the high-rise No. 9 responds by repeated drifts through the City defence. Towards half-time things dampen down. Player shouts can now be heard, a hollow thrill. When a crisp packet tries to make a tackle the referee purses his lips and blows for tea.
Epic rain shatters the half-time ceasefire and I take shelter by a pie stand that has run out of pies. The second-half, we hear, is to be delayed as a linesman is injured. ‘Must’ve got a tooth stuck in a biscuit’ offers a steward, his bright orange sleeves pulled long over frozen hands. The Ipswich team emerge and slop about in the mush for a full five minutes before Cardiff join them and the game breathes again.
Bolshy and buxom, Town’s choppy striker cares not about the weather. He thunders in Ipswich’s second goal, the net sploshing on impact. The Cardiff fans turn poisonous on a man once the hero of the Taff. ‘Wanka, Wanka, Wanka’ goes their war chant. Despite the pleasantry of Portman Road, the game’s poisonousness breaches and pervades.
The family members in the stand now react to their brethren on the pitch. Each pass is cheered, a football fiesta in the rain. Portman Road at long last imitates a degree of the exuberant days of Mr John. Half the problem though is that all todays are measured against yesterdays. That is the thing with families. Always harking back. Always sharing the same old jokes and the same old regrets.
Town’s busy side-parted forward does not respect the past. He is an irreverent little brother. With a quarter of an hour left he squeezes the cheekiest of goals into a mousehole spot. Town three, Welsh nil. In the flecky Suffolk rain people drift away to their Saturday evenings. Home from the football, the win will spur their night and make the weekend. Tomorrow, the papers will make congenial reading. The pleasure of victory lingers.
By the Sir Alf Ramsey Stand, Chunkys and Moustaches wait for autographs. Despite all its distortions, I feel part of something permanent. This small glimpse of England makes for happiness in sodden Suffolk. After much ado I am on to something.
I cross the Sir Bobby Robson Bridge and check in to my chain hotel. The production-line room is smart, but as with all of these places it can feel like sitting in a furnished storage unit. I head downstairs for a pint and bamboozle the barman with my Scottish tenner. For a while he stares at it disbelievingly, as if I have just passed him a human foot. Then he accepts it anyhow. Supping up I do a strange raising of the eyebrows at the barman which I instantly regret and leave. He doesn’t mind, though; with my strange illegal tender I have glossed his shift with surrealism.
From a dim street by the River Orwell Portman Road can be seen. Her floodlights close down: one, two, three, four, as I look. They leave behind them the tasteful ‘Ipswich Town FC’ yoke neons. This is one artful arena. I turn a dingy corner and am pleasantly affronted by moody lights shining high on a disused dock building. Every ten seconds they alternate in colour: blue, white, red, blue, white, red goes the rhythm of the night. I approach and read that this is an art installation named ‘Light Waves’, and runs every night from dusk until midnight. It is funded by the local council. For all the tutted grief councils get, it seems that in the Englands I have seen so far they propel much character and culture, even if it is sometimes forced or miscalculated.
Light Waves marks the start of The Waterfront, Ipswich’s placid and wistful dock area. Sailing boats gently bob as the Orwell ripples, moonlight showcasing raindrops. There is a faint angina beat from the surrounding bars, doosh, doosh, doosh, none of which I will be entering. I scuttle over tired train tracks that once carted lime from Casablanca, timber from Canada, wheat from Philadelphia. Lights draw me to a glass cupboard where a building’s window should be. This, it seems, houses an ingenious mini-museum. The window museum has been set up, I read, by Ipswich Maritime Trust, and is England’s only such portal. Its orderly objects represent a 1,300 year-old port that made Ipswich matter from Domesday to D-Day. This wide-open slew of water invited invasion from Romans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Normans ... anyone with an atlas. Of all brutal incomers my favourites are the Wuffingas because they sound like hairy characters from children’s television. The port was advantageous too – the ease of building and accessing the Thames made it ‘the shipyard of London’ by the seventeenth century, and in the Second World War sloops, minesweepers and trawlers were refreshed here and sent back into battle.
As night-out heels clip clop towards Jägerbombs, I drift by the University of Suffolk’s ample glass temple and towards the town centre. The Spread Eagle glows golden on the corner of pretty and dead streets. In its window is a poster with mugshots of twenty or so people who are barred from all pubs in Ipswich. I enter just as a man is reproaching the barmaid with the sentence, ‘Since I went to the loo my stool has been removed’. ‘We always clear the bar when there’s a band on,’ she contests, fighting a smirk. The band – two midlife men – approach the stage. Both have limps. Their first number ends abruptly when the drummer/singer hits a duff note, but the covers soon flow. Smokie. Check. Journey. Check. Robert Palmer. Check. Pocketing my notepad and pen I walk in front of them in order to leave, slightly worried that they think I am an unimpressed A&R man.
After visiting in 1722, Daniel Defoe wrote that provisions in Ipswich were so reasonable ‘that a family may live cheaper here than in any town in England for its bigness.’ It is pretty obvious to me that he must have been referring to the 90p Store (‘Everything 90p’), which I spy shortly after leaving the Spread Eagle. I continue down Dogs Head Road and pause to survey an Ipswich pub on a Saturday night. This corner bar can be seen in profile, yellow light from the street, Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’ in Suffolk. In a side-room two men sit silently on separate tables. Both have an arm outstretched cuddling their pint, and an eye on the boxing contest blaring from the room’s corner television. The main bar hosts a dozen or so people, most of whom are staring fixedly at another covers band as they plough through Cameo’s ‘Word Up’. A bunch of link-armed women with Hellraiser hair slow down, glance in, and move on. Their big laughs warm the air. Everyone is chasing their Saturday night.
I walk down Silent Street, renamed, so it is said, when all of its inhabitants died of the plague. Its delicate mix of Georgian and Elizabethan buildings seems transcendent and surreal, England channelled through a Dickens film set designer from Arkansas. At the silent foot of Silent Street a bronze Cardinal Wolsey stares at me like skin-heid staring at a football. Thomas Wolsey was the son of an Ipswich butcher who for a while in the sixteenth century ruled England by proxy. Henry VIII devolved the irksome business of government to Wolsey, who initially won his trust by efficiently organising a royal feast and pageant. The next time you organise a finger buffet, just make sure the Queen is watching. Far from giving Wolsey – probably the most famous Ipswichian – celebrity status, the locals called him ‘The Butcher’s Dog’ and subscribed to the view offered by his biographer that he was ‘the haughtiest of men in all his proceedings that then lived, having more respect to the worldly honour of his person than he had to his spiritual profession.’ They’re not much better these days – until the statue was erected in 2011, he was commemorated by Cardinal Park, a leisure settlement counting KFC, a Harvester pub and the Liquid/Envy nightclub among its tenants. After capping the night two or three times over I take the long walk home, passing the Rasputin Eurofood shop on my way. The rain has stopped on Portman Road and Sir Alf is speaking to the moon. Ipswich’s England has been a pleasant one. There is a permanence about the place, from footsteps and voices in the street to autograph hunters at the stadium. It is not a backwards idyll of farmers buying batteries, but there is a sense that Ipswich is a destination for the area rather than its own metropolis state. In from the country they still come. There is an ethereal beauty to life here. It is like watching a dream you cannot influence. I retire to my room with a pizza, fall asleep in my shoes and snore away the night in quiet, quaint old Suffolk.