For too many of us, Graham Taylor is ‘Do I not like that’ and Elton John is Princess Diana’s funeral. Both are caricatures created by the press and upheld by the public. To think of them as such is not only mistaken, but detracts from a time when the pair pulled together and changed football.
Reg Dwight had stood and watched football from the rusting shackland stands of Vicarage Road. He even had a favourite spot – a piece of old terrace between the Rookery End and Shrodells Stand known as ‘The Bend’. When Reg became Elton and sang to the world, riches accrued allowed him to move to the directors’ box. Watford were a Division Four club, their stadium a corrugated waste ground. There hung over them an amateur ethos that made for a deteriorating, if charming, club. Watford’s full-time non-playing staff numbered only three: one manned the Pools bureau, another was a groundsman and the third calculated and paid player wages, sold tickets, ran the press office and performed all general tasks.
Elton needed help. In the summer of 1977 he called Don Revie. ‘Graham Taylor at Lincoln City,’ the Middlesbrough alumnus told him, ‘he’s the man you want.’ A manager at twenty-eight, Taylor had taken his Imps to promotion the season Elton arrived at Watford, 1975-76. Twice along the way they thrashed Watford. Enticed by a five-year deal making him the highest paid manager outside the top flight, Taylor chose Hertfordshire life. Early on, the new manager asked Elton for his aims. He replied: ‘I’d like to get into Europe.’ They agreed that it would take ten years and a million pounds to get there, and then revealed their ‘impossible dream’.
One by one, Taylor’s players attended introductory meetings in his office. He sat on a giant, raised chair, each of them on a small one, looking up. His message was simple: the manager was on the way up, and only they could decide if they wished to join him. Taylor installed a new code of discipline among his squad and asked that they move to the area. All were informed that they would be expected to perform several hours of work per week in the local community. He instinctively understood that to move Watford the club anywhere, he needed Watford the town’s backing. Taylor and Elton set about giving them a more amiable place in which to watch football. They oversaw the patch-up and re-paint of Vicarage Road and scrapped the perimeter greyhound track, a source of distance and distraction.
Taylor set about instilling a playing system and culture fit for their refreshed, ambitious club. To escape the fourth tier they would blitz it: attack, attack, attack. They would be direct, but not aimlessly long-ball. Each man would know his space, each teammate where to deliver to him. The key would be getting the ball to centre-forwards who could hold on to it (gifted big-man Ross Jenkins and young rocket Luther Blissett), at which point six or seven others would attack, a ravenous pack. Each man had to be athletic to pull his weight in the machine, and focused on the explicit plan set down for him. It worked: high-tempo Watford became champions at Taylor’s first attempt. That year they won and scored more – and lost and conceded fewer – than any other team. The following season, 1978-79, Taylor’s system did the trick again. Watford were promoted. Between them, Jenkins and Blissett scored sixty-five times in league and cup. They even won at Old Trafford in the League Cup, and lost only to Clough’s Forest, soon European Champions, in the semi-final.
In two years Taylor and Elton had built a swashbuckling, vibrant club. Going through a chaotic time in the fickle world of rock ’n’ roll, Elton revelled in its structures and its avuncular manager. Taylor was one of the few ‘no men’ in his life – he banned Elton from giving freebie tickets to players and, when he showed up at the training ground in flares and platforms sent him home (‘We’re a football club here. We have standards and we have a dress code’). In return Elton often lived dreams that first entered his head while stood on The Bend. He travelled on the team bus, watched training and had his hero players round to the house, albeit to sing on a record. Where before the town had been drifting from its club, Taylor and Elton’s endeavours won them around while success made them smile. Watfordians already knew Elton was one of their own; when Taylor refused a roof for his dugout until the Rookery End had one too, they knew they had another.
The town’s loyalty helped Watford through two consolidation seasons in Division Two. The plan had not stalled, but the club had got ahead of itself. Now, Taylor revised his playing system to once more begin the move onwards and upwards. The basic ethos would be the same, but with added science and better players, produced by a lively youth system and Elton’s generous pockets.
Still Watford would keep it simple. The game was not about avoiding defeat, but about winning. Attacking play, forward passes, Luther or his rock Jenkins holding up. The yellows streaming towards them. An avalanche, a charge. Pressurising as high up the pitch as possible. Knock-backs, through balls and arcing centres. Thumps, larrups and bullet headers. Goals, goals, goals. Open play rehearsed, experiments learned off by heart and repeated on the pitch. Taylor souped-up a dossier of diagrams, statistics and patterns sent to him by Charles Reep, ‘the human computer’ whose theories had helped inspire Wolves’ Golden Greats in the 1950s. Reep had watched hundreds of matches at every level, identifying the areas from which most goals came. He claimed that on average ten shots equalled a goal, and so twenty were usually required to win a game. Taylor disagreed on some of the finer details, but put into practice the basics. By his own calculations, goals came from first-time shots and re-starts, with the far post being a fertile area to attack. Though we remembered them from the credits of Match of the Day, there was only ever one scorcher or full team move for every fifteen or twenty tap-ins. Most goals had few passes behind them. Taylor’s Watford, then, would fully embrace quick, sometimes long-range, accurate passes ‘for’ not ‘to’ a teammate, and, in short, crosses and shots at every possible opportunity.
At the start of the 1981-82 season, the system was in place. All it needed was fireworks – step forward John Barnes of Sudbury Court FC, seventeen years old, dancing feet, swaying hips, cushion chest. His debut came in the season’s opener at Stamford Bridge. The Shed made monkey noises; Barnes made goals in a 3-1 win. On the other wing, starboard to his port, was Nigel Callaghan, a homegrown virtuoso with pinpoint feet. The two helped the Watford machine move up a division, second behind Luton. On promotion day, Elton walked off stage in Norway to listen to a phone held up to Watford Hospital Radio’s commentary. Afterwards, he spoke with every player. ‘You’ve made my dreams come true,’ he told them all.
When their first season in Division One started, football’s puritans panicked. Watford were uncouth, ‘wild dogs’ who would be found out in the manors of the aristocracy. They even had the temerity not to give individual Rolls Royce opponents time on the ball, snapping at them hungrily. Theirs was throwback football and could only finish in relegation. They finished second and qualified for Europe. The impossible dream had taken only six years.
Thirty years later, grey skies garnish Watford Junction station with slow fat rain. It gloops down and settles on its office block walls like sap on a tree. Remove five Bourbon biscuits from their packet, lay them on top of each other and you have an accurate model of Watford Junction. One function of a railway station is to set your expectations of a place. A station is the handshake you judge a man by, in this case limp beyond recognition. It is probably best that you do not make eye contact with Watford Junction.
A London bus hurtles by, splattering this canvas with much-needed colour. I walk down a long, spirit level-straight avenue of taxman call centres and oil company headquarters. After waiting an age to cross the inner-city motorway that strangles Watford town centre in a noose, I walk by the proud New Palace Theatre, twice-domed and steadfastly glamorous. On Watford High Street pigeons gather on and around an old lady who feeds them Mighty White bread. The lady’s lipstick circles her chin rather than covering her lips, and her eyes are narrated by tears-of-a-clown eye make-up. Somehow she is stalked by a strange prettiness, Judi Dench plays Edward Scissorhands.
It is pleasing that town centre eccentrics survive artless, monochromic English high streets. Watford High Street and Everywhere High Street have a Revolution, a Poundland, a Greggs and so on, but only Watford High Street has its pigeon lady. Similarly, only here will you find the toothless busker whose voice douses the heinously drab Charter Place centre in feeling. With his eyes closed he sings soulfully, from the heart. Elton lives on. In front of him, children climb and bounce on marble elephant and hippo sculptures, while escalators churn dispirited pensioners towards retailopolis. This is the land promised half a century ago.
The developers wore suits to transmit seriousness and hardhats to win the high opinions of a working-class town. It was the 1960s. Anything was possible. Their plan involved charging at local streets with a planet of a wrecking ball. Where stood ancient pubs would stand stuff to buy. When their blueprint was unveiled, the West Herts Post raised a glass. ‘The face of Central Watford will change dramatically during the next five to seven years,’ they cheered. ‘By that time it is hoped that the borough will become the Croydon of North London.’ The future. Car parks! Shopping centres! Easy access for cars! Overhead walkways!
It took time, but the men with the plans, their offspring and their council cousins pulled it off. One result is the tarmac piping that courses cars through Watford’s veins. Another is the indoor market I enter. The market’s interior seems to be both dimly lit and garish. From a pitch-black background, interrogation spotlights hone in to resemble approaching UFOs. Its brown tiled floor is shiny like wet pebbles and well pounded by Watfordians. At the market’s front are stalls selling balls of wool, greeting cards and handbags, plus family butchers and greengrocers. Behind a busy curtain Tina Tarot and Peter Healer do their things, which include ‘Healing for Mind and Body, Spirit Vibrations, Putting Light in Dark Corners,’ and ‘A Psychic Experience, Only £5.’ The rear section of the market houses a less professional breed of stallholder. They embrace a more bric-a-brac approach, which means a table of dolls that are at best petrifying and at worst racist; hippyish tie-die prints and the unavoidable cupcakes. It is hard to taste the future here, but perhaps that is because the air weighs thick under colliding scents of raw butcher’s meat and sizzling canteen bacon. What you can taste is atmosphere, life, a real England busying itself in small-time commerce.
Back on the High Street, Saturday is stirring. Shopping bags and husbands are dragged in and out of faintly attractive buildings and lanes. I walk downhill and spot the familiar motifs of Transport for London plastered on Watford High Street Overground station. London tentacles stretch into Watford and endanger its identity.
Beyond the Overground station is the town museum, a stunning Georgian house, all bricks and windows. Its polished exhibits tell of a town once knee-deep in ale and paper. Lead characters are Benskin’s the brewer and the Sun Printers, both town empires and employers who moulded what Watford was. Benskin’s faded away as old Watford died of 1960s aspirations. Sun hung on long enough to be merged into oblivion by Robert Maxwell. The town supported other industries along the way, many ploughing peculiar furrows that make particular history, history that helps sustain identity in places like this. Dr Tibbles opened a cocoa factory whose products, says one town history, ‘contained a fair amount of cocaine.’ Despite his narcotic tendencies and a catastrophic fire at the turn of the century, Tibbles was placed in charge of regional munitions during the First World War.
As in all small-town museums in England, as in all small towns in England, the wars we fought feel uniting yet unique. Which part of war memorial England am I in here, I wonder, when I am in one that hides away its lists of the fallen in a faraway dead end of an under-used museum? Here I am in a non-room the colour of a sticky plaster walled by plaques for ‘The Employees of Scammell Lorries Limited Who Laid Down Their Lives in the Second Great War’ and crying panels for ‘The Men of the Watford and District Post Office Who Fought in the Cause of Freedom’. It is neither Lutonian rebellion nor Ipswichian reverence. It is saddening.
Back in the thoughts and streets of today I walk to the pub behind Sky Blue lads jiving in a Coventry burr. Only football takes chain gangs of men from one provincial town to another, and only football brings them back each year till relegation us do part. A postcard advertisement in a newsagent window next to my pub of choice shouts at me. ‘Stunning mixed RACE mature Lady Fun MASSAGE’, it reads, and I shake my head at such haphazard use of capitalisation, noting her telephone number with a view to a condemnatory call later on.
Inside, pub hubbub conquers the thick stench of fried food. Friends and acquaintances greet each other – the ritual recommences. Since their heyday Watford have usually treaded the safe waters of England’s second tier. This year has been the same; next year will be the same. Such stasis is a fine exemplar of the comfort of football and the belonging repetition brings. It means calm supporters and a club that chugs along, offending no one but the foul-tempered, ill mannered of Kenilworth Road.
With others I make the 2.40 trudge to Vicarage Road. I pass behind the One Bell pub and its adjacent, solemnly pretty church. This should be a place to linger and think for the visitor to Watford, but its rotting tombs are fenced off by crude silver barriers and chains. Such brash security seems to hush the visitor and usher him on – nothing to see here, just heritage and the dead.
I fall in behind supporters walking two by two – hurrah, hurrah. There is much evidence of traditional dress: white trainers, fresh jeans, official club merchandise coats and holdalls bearing flasks. Police huddle and chatter while fans leave the Fry Days fish shop stooping over their chips, swerving to avoid the folded arms of the law. The streets leading to the ground host an unusual array of outlets, a bizarre bazaar. One contains A Different Sauna, Beavers Strip Bar (‘Fully nude and topless lap-dancing. Air conditioning.’) and XFC Fried Chicken. The next has a shop that sells gravestones and mirrors, and one that claims to be the local bevelling specialist, a competitive market I am sure.
Vicarage Road appears suddenly, hemmed in as it is by a ramshackle collective of yards, houses, garages and allotments. Such a packed-in area forces a pounding pulse, the intensity of matchday squeezed into electric existence. The community club forged by Taylor and Elton lives on. This is resolutely still its town’s club. As they pass the Bill Mainwood Programme Hut, people nod and wave and promise to pop in after the game. The conservatory door of the sallow bungalow that hosts the Hornets Shop claps open and half a dozen young fans spill out, Merchandise one, Pocket Money nil.
By the bright orange Coventry City team coach (registration ‘KOV 1’) and beneath a barbed wire CCTV camera, the electric turnstile files me inwards. At long last I am in the Rookery, once a roofless hovel, now a steep, deep and comfy structure. The Rookery’s concourse is like the minimalist garage-bar of a gadget man millionaire. Flat screen televisions alternately flicker Soccer Saturday and an England rugby match, while neon blue computer gadgets glow, new and yet somehow already obsolete. Lager is sipped from plastic bottles; giant hot dogs test gravity to the full.
Near the Rookery’s summit I take my seat and drink in the view – a compelling one above the twenty-two men in shades of yore, old Watford yellow and dreamy Sky Blue. The goal-net shimmers breezily way below awaiting, hoping for, action, a state shared by the unfinished concrete apartment spaces that fill a corner to the left. Its crude beams and dark gaps bring to mind Spanish stories of empty development. It adjoins the Rookery to the main stand, which in turn leads to Vicarage Road’s third complete enclosure, where visitors sing. What flows from there, on the opposite touchline to the main stand, is unique.
There are in total three different enclosure remnants in Vicarage Road ghost village. Together, they resemble an amalgamation of tax year-end local authority projects. The first and smallest is a square segment of tiered concrete speckled with gravel. It is the size of the foundations for a small semi-detached house. The second is larger and steeper, and looms behind a poled canopy that shields the dugouts. It is veiled by a giant grey modesty screen, leaving romantics to imagine the memories that rest beneath, and those less that way inclined to wonder what grotesque beast sleeps under the duvet. The third ghost is of a curtailed seating area, this time with roof included. It is a quarter of the pitch’s length and proffers fading plastic seats to its front and wooden benches behind. Here no one sits but the Gentlemen of the Press, their laptops space age, freakish and not completely immune to poltergeists.
The three stands are the giant shrapnel of other times, materiel that fell to earth when Watford burst skywards. At such breakneck speed did the impossible dream happen, there was no time to anticipate Hillsborough horror. So quickly did Watford fall from the stars afterwards, there was no money to build towards the other Taylor’s dossier. Thus an entire side of the ground consists of condemned terraces and paddocks, inadvertently creating a museum to better times.
Vicarage Road’s dead side means crowds are pushed together, a community upheld by necessity. As such even low crowds do not vanish among seas of empty seats, as at the Riverside, though today’s attendance is healthy in any case. Once Z-Cars has faded it is loud without being noisy. Proximity and community force naturally reserved supporters to interact, to be the crowd not the attendance, even if that only means clapping in time. Poked along by their unremitting midfielder, captain and headband-wearer, Watford charge into their opponents, a buzzing, heady squadron. They are direct and full on, as if the grass still echoes the instructions of Graham Taylor. Coventry’s No. 30, a centre-half, is a one-man barricade. He is an oak tree, but with slightly better heading ability. Time and again in the first twenty minutes he is also a Newfoundland dog diving underwater to haul up the ball from the riverbed. Watford continue to batter and prise the castle door, Vicarage Road denizens roaring their approval like drunken sailors. Chances beg, the crowd rising as one then sinking at different rates. A goal must come. A goal needs to come.
It is nearly half-time when I realise this game is going to end 0-0. I am staring at a mascot, Harry the Hornet, who is rubbing a large Guinness top hat on his crotch. Watford have choked and frozen. Coventry are in the game, but that means little. When sky blue backline thumps reach their forwards, the ball bounces off the backs of their knees or hits a shoulder. It is like watching a toddler play swingball. Their fans, on a rare day out from staring at the relegation zone in the paper, are undeterred: ‘While we sing together/we will never lose/BLUES!’ Proceedings today bring to mind a newspaper report of yesteryear. When in the early 1900s a goat meandered on to the Watford pitch, the West Herts Post reflected that it ‘in certain actions, spoke eloquently of its disgust for the whole dull and uneventful proceedings’.
The home side lapse backwards. For long stretches headband-wearer and his midfield colleagues collect the ball from centre-halves and hoist it forward, forlorn fishermen casting a line into the same barren part of the river. ‘Give it to him, give it to him,’ screeches a young supporter behind me, ‘he’s so open.’ A man in a cloth cap glances over his shoulder and seems to tut with his eyes. All the time drummers at each side of the Rookery tap out the game’s faint heartbeat.
The whistle blows. High-tens at half-time for Coventry’s No. 30, breathing hearty gasps like a dad on a first New Year’s resolution jog. Magnets on pitch diagrams for the home team. ‘You run there. He runs here.’ Where’s Graham Taylor when you need him? For us there is the raffle, won by ticket 0001. ‘Amazing,’ screeches the PA man. ‘Just amazing.’
In the second half the ball frequently takes to the sky, as if trying to escape the match and stadium. My mind wanders. What if, in games like this, a second ball was introduced after sixty minutes? What if ballboys were allowed to join in? Why does anybody want to be a linesman?
The home fans avoid existential questioning, as they are not hundreds of miles from home watching a dire 0-0. Besides, they are performing an instrumental version of ‘Ring of Fire’, en masse and on repeat. I start to feel tired and prickly. For the first time, I slightly lose interest in the Englands and the English football I am trying to find. Watching my own team gives me time to escape thought. Watching others is giving me too much time to think.
I try to concentrate on the good things. Perversely, I appreciate the way in which Coventry punt, brick and scoop every ball they are fortunate enough to be near. They are surviving, last gasp and death defying. It is anti-Barcelona stuff, but as I am growing sick of hearing about Messi and the toe tappers, I like it. It is the dark side of Watford’s 1980s version of the game, one I have grown fond of.
I am less fond of how vitriolic crowds now seem to be, individuals at Middlesbrough and Sheffield, large numbers at Luton. Here, when the referee points his arm in a direction the Rookery does not like, hoarse yowls of abuse follow. It is not the language; because I still believe swearing has a grand place in football. It is in bit part the loss of the humour with which supporters formerly rebuked referees, but more than that it is the sheer individual venom and the way it climaxes into a collective baying mob, a million teeth gnarling. In this is a crowd’s energy wasted. Put together at a corner kick it can beseech the ball into the net.
‘Wanka, WANKA, WANKA!’ peaks the chorus. Like so many supporters, Watford’s sing in an exaggerated version of the local accent. Football breeds a higher, intensified identity. As Coventry continue to paw at the cliff edge, the home side remember how to pass. At one point they nearly score. There are six minutes of injury time, an unfair purgatory. Harry Hornet looks at his crotch. Now Coventry almost score. Again the fans rise, again they fall. The final track of their dejection is the sound of seats thumped upright and mumbled goodbyes.
Back in town, St Patrick’s Day bunting points out all-day drinkers like arrows. On the flyover that scythes the High Street into two portions are the coats of arms for Watford’s twins: Mainz, Nanterre, Novgorod, Pesaro and Wilmington. Somewhere at a Beavers twin-club in Germany, France, Russia, Italy and Delaware, a man wearing a Guinness top hat is peering at air-conditioned tits over the rim of his pint. Underneath the flyover a gorgeous busker stuns the air with her radiant voice. I put coins in her guitar case, praise for the beauty, praise for the singing. An English rose in a faraway town melts the heart and stings the Yorkshire pocket.
I haven’t smelt damp booze nor had my shoes stick to the floor in some time, so I head for Wetherspoon’s. It is named The Moon Under Water, presumably after George Orwell’s essay about the perfect pub where, ‘In winter there is generally a good fire burning’ and the garden has ‘swings and a chute for the children.’ In Watford’s version men with fading Irish accents toast the Fields of Athenry and sing of taking Kathleen home. As I open my Official Matchday Programme a Watford Irishman, not a day over eighty-six, falls backwards on to the wall, then forwards on to the table. Glass shatters. Blood curdles. No one acts so I walk into the street and give a policeman something to do.
I leave most of my pint – a sin, a sin – and check in to my hotel. ‘Do you want a room on a lower floor, or a higher one, sir? It gets very noisy up high on Saturdays.’ Dazed and confused I take a lower room, eat a pasty in it while watching Take Me Out then head for the bar. There a marvellously camp man from Head Office teaches two Polish barmen about customer service. One is blindfolded and told to buy a glass of Coke from the other. He does so, but then decides he’s been short-changed and shouts at his colleague. ‘I gave you a tenner. This is change for a fiver. A FIVER.’ ‘OK, Pavel, let’s go again and this time you thank him and you walk away.’ ‘But I am customer. Customer is always right. Customer is always dick.’
The firing gun has spoken and Saturday night in town begins. Beneath green, white and orange balloons outside Malloy’s Bar men hold pints in one hand and gesticulate wildly with the other. Girls shiver behind folded arms in the long queue for cash. There seem to be arms and legs everywhere, heels and straps too. Dance-music beats compete like fairground soundtracks and bouncers nod along, preparing. There are eight or nine pubs and clubs to be stumbled between and outside most promotion staff hop around dishing out flyers. ‘Foam party tonight, mate’ a terracotta lady outside Paparazzi says to me. She then looks me up and down and revokes the offer. Gangs of lads and gaggles of lasses cast their eyes around and talk of eating being cheating in the pissed-asa-rat race. A short-sleeved lad in his early twenties taps me on the shoulder by Rehab Bar Lounge Club and points at his friend: ‘Whatever you’re writing in that notebook, put down that he’s a cunt.’ Watford High Street on a Saturday night is a Greek island resort under shivering skies. It is the Bravo TV event Sheffield was not. Everything is pumped up, high on cold air and booze, but the mood is good. Steam pours out of ears and evaporates into the sky. For all of these people, young in an England of high flux and low employment, Saturday night is required. It is impossible to be angry at a place that has such relief-valve functions, impossible to be dismayed at England with its hair down.
On Sunday morning, the High Street breeze blows stale alcohol, and men in fluorescent donkey jackets push around WKD bottles with large brooms. Live Christian rock booms from the Centre for Missional Leadership, exorcising the echoes of last night’s noise. After passing Watford’s serene town hall I try and fail to find the Grand Union Canal, ending instead in middle-class suburbia. For an age I walk tree-lined avenues in this expansive, expensive settlement. Houses with names like Elm Cottage and pretend timber beams sit among ferns and lawns. On each drive are two or even three cars. Lonesome joggers pound away the hours, while mums gaze from bay windows awaiting their Mother’s Day visitors. Garage lights illuminate tinkering; ajar shed doors highlight pottering. On a few separate occasions the scent of sausages wafts strong. Most gardens are neat, tendered, sources of pride. Some are scruffy. There will, I imagine, have been neighbourhood meetings about these. So quiet is it here that I can make out tennis balls being thwacked on a court a hundred metres away.
When I think of southern England – and we shall come back to exactly where and what that is – I think of areas like these. I think of good people, but people whose spaced-apart properties and removed lives breed Little England thoughts. I think of the kind of people who wrote the following two letters, printed in the local press a half century apart, in 1938 and in 1993:
Sir –
I am glad to see the subject of Sunday washing raised in your paper. At one time in this part of the town people used to put their washing out on Monday and Tuesday, and then no more was put out until the next Monday and Tuesday. But now it is put out every day of the week, including Sunday. Surely housewives can do all their washing on six days of the week and leave us free from this disfigurement on Sundays. Sunday is so much more enjoyable if we make it different from other days.
R. I. K
Sir –
We are a heterosexual family of five, no gays or lesbians, no one cheating the state with false claims, no unmarried mothers, or so that it sounds more respectable, no single parents, with the result that there are no bastards in the family, nor are there any intentions of having any under the circumstances described. Could you kindly inform us of our rights, entitlements or any freebies to which we may be entitled. We all pay taxes in, then sit back and watch it being handed out to those who claim incessantly, with no contributions being made ...
C. M.
I am probably wrong, my assumptions lazy and hurtful. Those who people these houses may well be tolerant and liberal; things have changed since 1938 and 1993 (and what an angry, scapegoating time the latter was, when you think back. I can remember, as the son of a single-parent family, being made to feel second-class.) Yet whether I like it or not, it is an England that existed and probably still does in some form and from behind the primroses of areas like this one. As such it is discernible and valid and worth writing of here. I do not have to like all the Englands and should stop trying to do so. But what I like in Watford are the people of the High Street, the pigeon ladies and the psychics and the good-time Saturday-night kids. They are a lively England, rushing with passion. I leave them now and head for starry London town.