In the dead, dead station in the dead of night I board the train for London. N-n-n-n-n-n-night train/stopping off at/Carlisle. The inside of my carriage, the one containing the cheap seats, the equivalent of the Titanic’s lowest cabins, has a golden hue. It is the nocturnal cheddar yellow of a children’s moon, the colour accompanying Jesus on a tacky illustration at a souvenir shop in Knock or Lourdes. I take my reclining seat and try to tune out the white noise of an American lady in sunglasses chomping on a Walker’s Grab Bag.
It is hot in the golden carriage. Stifling. My dreams get more disturbing each time I wake from half-sleep and then roll back to slumber. In one, Graham Taylor is teaching me how to wrap text on a spreadsheet. Senses are dumbed down, but the mind heightened. I can’t be entirely sure if I am awake, asleep or even alive. Aside from the heat and the crunching American (a Twin Peaks gargoyle likely to eat my head, I decide), the carriage’s constituent parts and geography add to my mind’s crisis. As I am on the last-but-one row of seating, when I turn around the entire carriage seems to stare at me, even with eyes closed and drooling mouths open. Many are wearing eye-masks, but in such a sallow light they appear as giant bumblebees. The seats, curtains and walls are a mix of light purple, medium purple and dark purple. On the wall ahead of me is a disused flat-screen television. This will obviously come to life when everyone else is sleeping, speak to me and then pull me inside it.
As the conductor checks my ticket I ask whether the heating can be turned down a little. ‘You’d only be cold, son,’ he replies. I walk up the carriage with the aim of tutting at buffet car prices. Unfortunately, I learn, someone with my type of ticket cannot go beyond the ‘vestibule area’. I stare through the window at four people having a rare old time. I am jealous not of their whisky and wine, but of the idea that they may have air conditioning. I retreat from the Advance Purchase Berlin Wall, pondering whether the class divide is a better metaphor.
The train hulks, moans and stops dead. In the silence many shades of snore can be heard. Staff run around, as much as you can in a train aisle. A female employee with spectacular nails rushes behind a closed door. Two male colleagues follow. I drift off, believing myself to be a character in Carry on Sleepertrain.
Shortly before 1 a.m. the train violently shudders at the very thought of Carlisle and shakes me awake. For some reason I wave at Carlisle station’s nightwatchman, who northern nods back, a little perturbed. Try being on here, mate. An hour later and I am still awake on a cloying, baking sleeper train. I am rattled and berserk. Tomorrow is the first Easter since my daughter arrived and I am going to watch Leyton Orient. I’m not really here, I think, I’m not really here.
As I rest my head on a train door window a voice asks, ‘You OK there, sunshine? Can’t sleep either?’ Helen is a Zimbabwean in her seventies. She has a walking stick, which she occasionally hoists as a rifle to emphasise her point. She loves cricket and the stick is raised often when on this topic, even becoming a bat for the re-creation of an Andy Flower six. She lifts my dark, homesick spirits immensely; her wicked cackle a surprisingly hypnotic night lullaby. Suddenly, the carriage door slides open and a skeletal old woman appears wearing a scowl that would make a tiger cry. ‘Do ... you ... mind? I bought a reclining seat and all I can hear is you two. Now will you please be quiet.’ Though we savour the precision (not just any old seat ...), Helen and I have been bowled out. We tiptoe back to our seats giggling in silence.
A form of sleep takes me as far as the bourbon biscuits of Watford Junction where, given how discombobulated and timeless I am, I picture another version of me watching a lady feeding the pigeons. We slurp into London Euston and the train howls painfully to a halt at 7 a.m. Helen and me catch one another’s eye and chart the progress of our capturer as she walks by the window on the platform. ‘What a bat,’ says Helen, ‘Let’s wave’, and we do. ‘May I never be a bat. Kill me if I am.’
Euston is a spoil tip of concrete and communist pillars. I love it. Everything is straight, even, smooth and grey. It is exactly what I need after a beguiling night on the multi-coloured sleeper train. There is real air here too, and my face retracts several shades of red. Things, I think, are getting better; then I thwack my knee on a shelf in WHSmith.
Like most walking northern stereotypes I over employ the ‘loves’ in response to cold London customer service. Among sour faces in a chain cafe I watch people flock home to the shires from whence they came, for Easter. England spends so much of its time flowing into London and couriering all resources there, yet so many Londoners strain to get away when it matters.
In the cold sun I walk towards St Pancras and fail to resist its unobtainable beauty. The station – and doesn’t that word undersell it – is almost completely empty. I feel that once more I am dreaming. Light drops in and shines the heads of the couple embracing in giant sculpture. It pours through the centres of five giant brass Olympic rings suspended from the roof. In my ragged mental state it is almost too much for me, this beauty a terrible beauty.
London is the quietest I have ever seen it, yet where this silence would turn other places beige it animates England’s capital. There is so much more time and space to inhale the nooks and crannies of its buildings, to let your mind conjure and be enraptured. Like many people, I have in the past employed the sentence ‘I ’ate bloody London.’ This morning I disagree with this, because London without people in it is a city of fairy tales. There are no traffic jams in Peter Pan.
In Andrew’s Cafe on Gray’s Inn Road pop goes the radio and hunter-gatherer men tap along. ‘Two bacon rolls, darlin’, one with brown, one with red.’ ‘Hash brown roll please, sweet’eart. And a sausage one for ’er.’ A Kurdish waitress, exquisite like St Pancras, brings me a full English. Where dead London streets refreshed the mind, this fuels the rest of me. I am ready for my journey to the Orient, or so I think.
On a Tube carriage lightly sprinkled with tourists a pinstripe-suited gay couple read a newspaper together. They laugh at the same jokes in a loved-up way. As they reach the end of the newspaper one half of the pair looks away and rolls his eyes in a way that seems to say ‘you and your bloody football.’ After a lengthy spell of turbulence beneath the streets of London I step off the train at Stratford. I aim to begin my Oriental walk with a viewing of the Olympic Park, neighbour to Leyton. Stratford station belches me out into the glossy metal world of the Westfield Shopping Centre. A good rule in life is never to trust a place whose floor you could eat your dinner from. Floors like Westfield’s are so hygienically sparkly that they become like ice reflecting a staid, lifeless world. In places like Westfield, joy must be taken where possible. For that reason I snort objectionably when I see Nosher’s, and guffaw immaturely when I read a sign that invites me to ‘Enjoy a Nosher’s Experience’. The vivacious life of language and dialect and smut cannot be conquered by sheeny shopping centres.
I ask a South African woman for directions to the Olympic village. ‘Well, you have to leave here!’ she snarls, scoffing, as if I thought javelin events would take place in Waitrose, discus in Boots. I then ask a staff member at Stratford International station the same question. ‘Dunno, fella.’ ‘But isn’t this the station for the Olympics?’ ‘Dunno, fella. I just work in the station.’ We are I realise, standing beneath a giant directions sign that reads ‘Olympic Park’.
I turn and survey the Olympic skyline. First there is a fifteen-foot-high mesh fence that stretches into the long-distance, then a marquee island shanty town where those allowed through the mesh will pay high prices for sustenance. Beyond the gated community and as at Middlesbrough’s Riverside is a gigantic Anish Kapoor sculpture, this one like an upright coiled serpent. Finally, there is the Olympic Stadium itself, a silver bowl clasped by white stanchions. I am at once gladdened to be near England’s newest stadium yet appalled at how removed it is from its community. There are literal barriers here – it is the antithesis of a town’s team building their ground among redbrick terraces. Even when the Riverside was springing up from dockyards we visited nearly every week; we could smell the wet cement. No one is excitedly watching outside Westfield. The only watching being done is by a team of G4S security guards, prowling like uniformed kerb crawlers in a patrol jeep. Above, a helicopter loudly circles in the velvet-blue sky. For a place soon to be at the centre of the world it is incredibly lonely. I think they should bus in the Watford pigeon lady to colour the walls.
I tramp onwards, the Olympic fence always at my arm’s length. In places further on it has an extra, electrified tier. A side road hosts the Olympic Park Vehicle Screening Plaza, an immense linguistic mixture of security procedure and glamour. I come to a viewing platform set back enough for the whole Olympic Stadium to be consumed. A shoal of French schoolchildren swing from fences and look bemused at a poetry installation. This shack brings much-needed context and reminds the viewer that London was not born yesterday. A poem by Lemn Sissay salutes the striking Victorian match girls of the nearby former Bryant & May factory:
In tidal shifts East London Lampades made
Millions of matches that lit candles for the well-to-do
And the ne’er-do-well to do alike. Strike.
Sissay’s words bring atmosphere and make sport feel a bit trifling. When the Games begin, army snipers will be sited on top of the Bryant & May building. I continue along a raised track, the stadium to my right, a warm-up track to my left. A man in sunglasses and what can only be described as a purple leotard rollerblades by. I say ‘knobhead’ a little too loudly.
An hour later, I am still walking. London looks so much smaller on a map. At first the canal I keep stumbling by seems cute, its colour chocolate. Now it looks like sewage. It is I realise, the Lea Navigational Canal. If I fall in, I may end up back in Luton. An information board tells me I am close to the building where once Matchbox cars were made. Why was everything once something in England, I wonder yet again? Why is it nothing now, nothing but posh flats or Tesco Metros?
The board designates the happy fact that I have arrived at my target destination: Hackney Marshes. Hackney Marshes was a phrase, an abstract concept for those of us who grew up in Elsewhere England. It was often used by pundits (‘You won’t see defending worse than that on Hackney Marshes’) to signify the game at its rawest grade. Players had, very often, ‘started off at Hackney Marshes and then come through the ranks’. In my youth, I pictured a giant football factory with a thousand stars in stripes or hoops passing and hoofing. The ‘marshes’ element meant that these many players were fighting for the ball, and for the attention of watching scouts, in a deep green bog. It was mystical and brilliant. Even on a dead day I find that in reality, it is exactly that.
It is mystical because when I imagine the goals gone by here I am awestruck. It is brilliant because of how it looks. Even to describe in basic terms what Hackney Marshes is portrays its majesty: it is a whopping field with eighty-eight football pitches. The white markings of pitches stretch to what seems like the other side of earth, their goalposts like toothpicks. The grass is green like the inside of a lime, with stud mark acne and goal area bald patches adding theatre. On each goal frame are the sticky tape remnants of a thousand nets hung. Today the pitches are piercingly silent. When Sunday comes they shall ring to the barks and hollers of kickers and dreamers. This is an open-air temple.
I turn and watch a large dog nuzzle a plastic football down the left-wing area of pitch S16. He, his owner and me have this netherworld to ourselves. London in space again. Beyond the trees that enclose the Marshes in one direction can be seen the City skyline of Gherkin and wheel. In the other is Leyton, The Orient. I emerge out of the forest and into the frying pans of Lea Bridge Road. This takeaway-decorated stretch is just about the top boundary of Leyton, until 1965 an independent Borough, and before that an Essex town. Leyton is enriched by the bordering Hackney Marshes woodland that I have just walked through, and a collection of similar green spaces. Less enriching is the shabby state of Lea Bridge Road; though it does buzz along, paved golden by the many different lives lived here. It helps that all of the shops, takeaways and otherwise, are independent, albeit ramshackle rather than chic. In ten minutes I pass Baps and Bloomers (snigger), Küçükyapalak, Polski Sklep Zosia, Mr Gr8, Kozn Continental Foods, the Karabacak Social Club, Percy Ingle Bakers, Nigeria’s Cargo Force and the Indigent Muslim Trust. No matter how long I stare at this last one it still appears to read the ‘Indignant Muslim Trust’, possibly because I want it to – I like the idea of an irritable charitable organisation: ‘Oh, have your bloody grant then, I don’t care.’ The Lagos Island Restaurant – a not entirely successfully disguised house with a sign on it – offers ‘Buffet!! Buffet!! Buffet!!’ People talk on corners and it seems as if they are mixing here, if not directly then at least in buying things from one another, and sharing all-you-can-eat Buffets!! I wonder if they know that here once stood Mr Schubert’s German bakery, one of many in Leyton stoned during the First World War. Lea Bridge Road also houses the area’s other football club, Leyton FC, born in 1868 but ‘resting’ since a series of events – not least the imprisoning of its fraudulent chairman – pushed them into oblivion.
The call to prayer fuzzily sounds and crisply clad men speed-walk to the Jamia Masjid Ghosia mosque. There are smiling stragglers, as at Luton. Outside, the loudspeaker atop a maroon 4x4 vehicle competes, its message demanding votes in the Greater London Authority elections for the vehicle’s passenger. After my hushed morning the din startles me, woozy and teetering on the brink of a return to deliriousness. Was it really today I waved at a man in Carlisle and talked about Zimbabwe?
The refined poise of the Bakers’ Almshouses soothes me. These neatly adjoined cottages surround a heart-shaped lawn. They were built for destitute or diseased bakers in the 1850s. Local comedian and writer Meera Syal opined that: ‘Not even snowfall could make Leyton look lovely.’ This collection of buildings begs otherwise, though they are, admittedly, in the minority.
What happened in Leyton is a story of social class. Cast in a narrative familiar to so much of England, the town was made by the railways, though to a different pattern from elsewhere. Before tracks and platforms it was rural, a provincial settlement of mansions for the richly retired and aristocratic. White’s Directory of 1863 called it: ‘A large and handsome village, with many neat houses embowered in trees.’ Shortly afterwards, steam arrived. City merchants identified Leyton as a dormitory town. The wealthier long-term residents began to move out to the country, in search of what they had first found in Leyton. As the railways spread further and fares became affordable, on their land grew terraced housing for working-class Londoners. From Leyton, they could travel to the docks and domestic servitude without having to face the rotten existence of slum dwelling. The railways, in opposition to elsewhere, did not bring people to work in Leyton, for there was little industry. Instead, the town provided a base away from the hoot of the factory whistle. Between 1861 and 1901, Leyton’s population swelled from 4,800 to 98,900. The masses had blown in, and they had built a pie and mash shop that specialised in live eels. Earlier middle-class arrivals reacted by following their predecessors out to the sticks and Home County lives. Later, a similar trend saw many East Enders of old migrate to Essex, chasing after the county their town was no longer part of, to be replaced by those I see before me today. Now, scarves and voices of The Orient can often be seen and heard in Essex, and when rumours surface of club plans to move stadium – the county, not London, is the mooted destination.
Tiny gardens nudge the pavement in the squeezed terraced houses that remain. There are thousands of them, their host streets cambering off lengthy Lea Bridge and High Roads. In one of the houses on one of these streets was born ‘the imperishable boy’ soldier, Jack Cornwell. Cornwell was fifteen years old when he joined the British Navy, in 1915. A photograph taken at the time shows what you want it to: the hero, a determined, serious young man; the teenager, yet to shave, stroppy shoulders, fear masked by folded arms. What we are assured of now is that no boy aged fifteen should be sent to war.
The same war that took Cornwell took Orient men too – forty-one players and staff – the largest contingent of any club – served in the Footballers’ Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. Leyton Orient were consumed by the conflict at home and away: an anti-aircraft gun kept watch from the terraces of their Spion Kop; at war, three of their players died.
George Scott came from the coal pits of Durham and died in the cesspits of the Somme. A versatile forward loved for his bandy legs, he was in the footballing form of his life when that bullet struck Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He knew the French, he knew France; he had played for London against Paris not long before. Then there were his pals, Richard McFadden and William Jonas, teammates, bestmates, deathmates. Jonas had the looks, McFadden the brains. Jonas had the girls, McFadden the goals. So many love-letters went to the former that he had to place an advert in the Orient programme demanding they stop. So many times did the latter score, big clubs, even Middlesbrough, fluttered their eyelashes at him. On a forever Orient corner of Flanders Fields, Jonas, another County Durham lad, and McFadden, from Cambuslang, sat together, shaking in the trenches. An Orient programme clipping from 1916 tells you what happened next:
On the morning of the 27 July 1916, the two of them were trapped in a trench near the front. Jonas turned to McFadden, shook hands with him and said, ‘Goodbye Mac, best of luck and regards to the lads at Orient.’ Before he could reply, Jonas was up and over.
No sooner had he jumped out of the trench, he was killed. On 24 October 1916, McFadden, his partner on the field and in battle, was also killed in action.
I think back to Luton, where they burnt the town hall down, and I understand the anger of those who nowadays are referred to as ‘normal people’, those who struck the matches and chucked on the petrol. A Leyton boy dies at sea, and his tragedy becomes not a metaphor for the futility of war, but a jingoistic jamboree. Star Orient players are sent to their pointless death. All’s fair in sport and war, and they did get a telegraph from King George (‘Good luck to Orient FC, no football club has paid a greater price to patriotism’). It is a wonder town halls still stand, here and everywhere. I ponder whether similar events today would reap a Leyton or a Luton. Reverence and rebellion, those two strands of war memorial England, again come to mind. Just as England seems ready to admit mistakes and march against war in great numbers, military muscles are flexed and to question whether the meaning of Poppy Day has been lost is to kick someone’s granddad in the balls. In an England of flux the fighting past is a surety.
When war took Scott, Jonas and McFadden, their club was just under thirty years old. Its origins were familiar – men of cork and willow desperately seeking winter entertainment. Fellow members of the Eagle Cricket Club had shoehorned into captain Pomp Haines’ house in the 1880s. One of them, Jack Dearing, suggested the name Clapton Orient. ‘Clapton’ came from the area west of Leyton in which their team would play, ‘Orient’ from Dearing’s employers, the Orient Steam Navigation Company. Eagle members agreed to the ‘Orient’ part of the name as it would reflect their origins in the East End of London, and add an exotic mystique. ‘Clapton’, a label courting undesirable connections, was voted down and Orient FC came into being. At the turn of the century Dearing, a key player and influence, told a club meeting: ‘With Clapton now being considered a good district socially, the name would give the club more respectability’. They became Clapton Orient, and moved to Millfields Road, a 40,000 capacity ground nestled next to Hackney Marshes.
Early days were spent in the London League, home to Thames Ironworks (later West Ham United), Millwall Athletic and Queens Park Rangers. As Sheffield’s professionalism annexed the south, Orient took the plunge to pay workers for their labour in 1903. Propelled by the schmoozing and influencing of Leyton bigwig Horatio Bottomley, the Os were granted league status two years later. They finished bottom and sent in the cavalry, supporter and army Captain Henry Wells-Holland, to plead for their survival. ‘I beg you to extend to us the benefit of the First Offenders Act,’ Wells-Holland petitioned, ‘after all, it has been our first year in the league. We will do infinitely better this forthcoming season.’ It worked, just, and the Os stayed in the league by one vote. Their history was to become pockmarked with such near misses and wiped brows. Wells-Holland’s promises were not completely hollow. That 26,000 people saw them defeat Arsenal a few years on from his statement says that much.
Funds have forever been scarce at Orient. Their geography is a killer: Spurs to the left of them, West Ham to the right, they are wafer-thin ham between chunky rustic bread. Early on they rented out Millfields Road for boxing and baseball. In 1908 3,500 people watched the British Baseball Cup final there. Nachos and flat caps. Their surprisingly strong royal links have helped in the form of donations. In 1921 the Prince of Wales took in an Orient match against Notts County, becoming the first royal to attend football. He sat beside Orient director and Labour top brass Herbert Morrison, who I hope lectured him on the offside law and the advance of democratic socialism. Football had the power to not only level a royal, but to make him feel inferior – many in the crowd laughed as he craned his neck to converse with Notts keeper Albert Iremonger, six foot-six of pure Nottinghamshire breeding. However, one was obviously impressed; the Prince’s brother George, future king, came for a look a year on. When later Orient had slid into their default position of dire finances, George sent a healthy donation that helped save the day.
Whatever fate befell Orient, they littered the game with characters and were often witness to some of football’s key events or hosts to its greatest sons. There was Dave ‘Buck’ Brennan, a swashbuckling half-back known across the land for wearing a skull-cap during matches and Ike van den Eynden, a Belgian signed in 1913 and barracked by Hull City fans as ‘slant eyes’ in an early example of racial, and racially confused, chanting. When the great Herbert Chapman’s damned Leeds City visited, Orient haggled the kick-off time and scored three goals in a pitch-black second half. Chapman seethed. Newcastle wonder-boy Hughie Gallacher was marked out of an FA Cup tie in the year of the General Strike, more hurt piled on the Geordies. A crowd of 31,400 saw Orient that day, perhaps their greatest. And what of Ted Crawford, Orient’s gruff but incisive centre-forward? In 1935-36 he scored twenty-three, beating the fallen McFadden’s record for a season. Later Crawford revealed he had played for six years with a broken ankle, sometimes drunk. He was not alone. An Orient legend tells of the team turning up at Waterloo station for a game at Christmas time. All were already soused, so when the manager greeted them with a barrel of beer for the journey things moved from merry to boisterous. If only they had been on my sleeper train.
During Crawford’s spell, Orient moved to Brisbane Road. Their existence continued to be varied with light patches. It started off well enough when chairman Harry Zussman, ‘a short, plump, ever-effusive shoe manufacturer, bespectacled under a homburg hat’ according to Brian Glanville, appointed Alec Stock as gaffer. Stock was player-manager of Yeovil when in 1949 they slayed the Mackems in the FA Cup, and joined Orient shortly afterwards. Slow improvement saw FA Cup runs and in 1956 the Division Three South title, a rare accolade for a team that avoided trophies as if touching them resulted in gout. Arsenal called for Stock before that pot was won, though he lasted only fifty-three days as assistant manager there. On returning to Brisbane Road he came over all It’s A Wonderful Life, declaring:
Hard as I tried, I could never stop thinking of Orient. My mind said Arsenal, my heart Os. I realised that friendship to me is more important, much more valuable than all the progress and prestige I might have had at Highbury.
While Stock was away Orient moved to sign Tommy Johnston, a pulsating forward who played each game with one arm bandaged, the spoils of a mining accident. Johnston’s goals were rocket fuel to Orient. Until he reached East London, he had tramped his battered boots from the coal mining village leagues of Aberdeenshire to Kilmarnock, Darlington, Oldham, Norwich and Newport. In Orient he found a home. Johnston’s winner snared that title for the club in 1956, and then he scored twenty-seven the following season and thirty-five in thirty-two games in 1957-58. When Saint Brian of Ayresome brought his Boro boys to Brisbane in October 1959, the Scot shined a light in his eyes. The miner’s rock blunted the steelman’s scissors. Orient won 5-0. He and Stock had made creaking little Orient a permanent instalment in Division Two. Stock left in 1959 for AS Roma, eternally Orient in the Eternal City. Later, he would light up Luton, such do the clubs of England interlink on their merry ways. Johnston departed in 1961, returning to his vagrant ways before establishing a betting shop beneath bright lights on the Lancashire Riviera. Both had contrived to plant Orient firmly in the minds of their supposed betters. Outside respect meant self-respect, which bred ambition. Somehow, Orient climbed to Division One and played there for a season, 1962-63. While there they cudgelled West Ham, Manchester United and Everton. On the final day Bobby Charlton socked in a special and Orient were relegated. Within four seasons they lingered in Division Three with debts of £100,000.
Buckets for survival were shaken then as they would be again throughout the 1980s. In our touchstone season of 1981-82 Orient slipped back into Division Three after a decade in Two. They soon dropped another tier, and nearly collapsed altogether. ‘Os Shocker, Nearly Went Bust!’ ran the local news headline in August 1986. Liquidation was indeed perilously close. Saviour came from a combination of copper coins and the cash of board member Tony Wood, a coffee-merchant based in Rwanda. A few years on, conflict once again stalked Orient when the Rwandan civil war left Wood almost penniless. Now chairman he offered to sell Orient for a Fiver, as a Channel Four documentary title put it.
I was thirteen when Orient for a Fiver was screened. I still have the homemade tape. It was, as far as I was concerned, the greatest bit of television ever screened. Football clubs then seemed more inaccessible and mysterious. Seeing inside a manager’s office was as exciting to thirteen-year-old me as finding a black bin bag of porn magazines in the local woods was to fifteen-year-old me. Players were utterly remote. Where did they live, we wondered, what did they talk about? Twitter has since killed that mystery for the younger generation and even killed the memory of what I felt in 1995; if footballers were as inane then as they seem in 140 characters now, I was wasting my wonder.
The star of Orient for a Fiver is manager John Sitton, a jug-eared ex-Orient captain who is more Cockney than Harry Redknapp marinated in jellied eels. All of the best scenes take place during his generously expletive, howled team talks. For months after it aired a few of us at school would regularly be caught by teachers acting out scenes. Shakespeare would have approved of our, ‘You’ve had two good games and you think you’re fucking Bertie Big Bollocks and you’ll play how you like’ routine, Pinter our ‘You, you little cunt, when I tell you to do something, and you, you fucking big cunt, when I tell you to do something, you do it.’ Our teachers did not. Wood, forever in the wings looking like a depressed owl, gets his fiver in the end. Step in Barry Hearn, still Orient chairman today. Grinning my tired grin over thoughts of Sitton scenes, I continue along Leyton High Road towards his club.
I skirt by the end of Wesley Road under a clickety-clack railway bridge. On that street was born Harry Beck, designer of an image that clothes a thousand London walls: the Underground map. Soon I pass a muscular cricket pavilion, which looks like an undisguised Transformer robot, but with Tudor beams and white walls. Essex played games here until the age of punk. Then, typically, they chased the county boundary to Chelmsford. The High Road winds on and much feeling disappears from my feet. I pause to rest and read a reliably entertaining collection of window adverts. ‘Double room to let – £90 a week for 2 Gills’. It seems an expensive way to store fish parts, or is it the desperate work of a man with a fetish for Gillingham fans? Laughter pours from the Mogadishu Restaurant, though not from the Hollywood Smile Dental Lab close by.
At long last I catch sight of red-backed people drifting into bars and nodding at fortnightly friends. The chimney-stacked and bay-windowed houses that lead to Brisbane Road are on the kind of tight terraced streets that should always lead to a football ground. Tannoy tidings are our call to prayer. Despite the horror of the journey, I still feel the clear heaven of a new ground, and I still feel that this, football, is where I should be on a Saturday. It takes more than an existential crisis to stop me needing this game of ours. The outside of Brisbane Road – renamed the Matchroom Stadium after a sponsorship deal, but let’s ignore that – is overwhelmingly grey, with red lettering smeared around, lipstick on a pig. The grey is not completely depressing, just functional like a PFI hospital. Bizarrely, there is an NHS chemist’s in the main stand. Similarly as strange are the four apartment blocks huddled behind each corner flag. ‘Are you a burglar then, mate?’ asks a steward as I photograph one of the structures. Fans of Orient and fans of Notts County happily mix outside the supporters’ bar. One man has his baby strapped in front of him: a pint in one hand, its bottle in another.
A turnstile takes me behind the goal into the Tommy Johnston Stand. ‘Caution. Beware of stray footballs’ reads a sign where perhaps a ‘welcome’ one might be more usual. There is reason for this. As if recreating the quirks and terrible sightlines of an old stand, this relatively new stand has a dry moat at its foot. Walking at the front of the stand leaves the supporter unsighted. Several times in the first half I think of hiding from the match in there.
To our left is a harebrained concoction of a grandstand too. It is a completed work, unlike Watford’s, but I am not sure that is a good thing. Perhaps it is better to look at a classical but rotting canvas than a modern and complete one. A breezeblock wall leads to twenty or so rows of seating, followed in turn by three storeys of office block window slits. At the very top is an open balcony, The Gallery, where today one can watch the game for £40. The ground is saved by its individuality and by the old stand, which remains to my right. From beneath its rickety gable County fans sing in rounds. Some of their number are watching from the balcony of a corner flat, beer cans in hand. Is this the Watford dream, realised?
The goalnets sag perfectly, ridged but not too organised, and the match kicks off at a determined pace. County’s No. 6, a midfielder with the figure of the Honeymonster and the brawn of the Hulk, attracts shin-kicks, but is insurmountable. Up front, their No. 40 is masterly on the ball, the best player on the park, though running seems beyond his ken. A strong side-to-side wind quickly stuns cold Orient’s tactic of looping passes forward, while County keep things low and brisk. The away side are looking up at the stars while Orient flirt with the gutter, and it shows.
Twenty minutes into the match a bald gentleman in a long coat and a Crystal Palace scarf files into a nearby seat. I am jealous yet again of the nomadic potential of a London football fan. I imagine Saturday mornings studying the endless possibilities of the fixture list and Saturday afternoons in far-flung crannies of Harry Beck’s map. A trumpeter seems to be playing the theme tune to EastEnders, as if to stomp on my fantasy.
Orient muster a couple of corners and rouse those around me. ‘Come on, you Os’. Each corner is pitched high, hung on a coat stand for someone to head. No one does, and the game reclines to familiar County possession. The man in front of me slopes back into his seat, knocking my knees with his back. He turns around. ‘Sorry, sir, I am proper pickled.’ For a time I appreciate his Dickens the Movie use of English and his advanced state of inebriation. That time ends when he decides I need to hear more from him. ‘Where you from? What you doing with that pen? What you writing?’ Why is it that people feel it permissible to ask that question? They would never approach someone tapping a text message and say ‘’ere, who’s that you texting? Cor, that’s a lot of kisses.’ Behind me a couple argue, firstly about the route of a bike ride they once went on and secondly about the definitions of mortgage types. I am the filling in a sandwich of irritating babble.
A through ball dies, but Orient’s goalkeeper and centre-back chase it and crash into one another. There follows a top-notch session of fingers in faces, then a calming word from their skipper. ‘Russell Slade’s red and white army’ slowly bays a hoarse voice from the back of the stand. That particular war cry always requires such a throaty, guttural start-up, wherever you are. It needs the spluttering ignition of a dear old car to make it bang. When it fires into action the sound can enmesh the pitch. Here it is stunted dead as Orient, apropos of nothing, forget who they are and play like kings of the earth. There are dropped shoulders, dummies and snapshots. I particularly like their No. 8, a centre-midfielder. He awakens to become the pulse of all this. Best of all, he is wearing ankle strappings, as I imagine lower-division midfielders always do. That such stereotypes hold helps me belong to this game. ‘Shirt from Mothercare. You got your shirt from Mothercare’ sings the pickled one, but Orient press on like an urgent iron. Half-time interrupts. An incandescent segment has ended without a goal. Underneath the seats is a bar that bristles with noise. ‘No Children Served in This Bar’ reads a sign, cannibalism having been a breach of committee rules for some years. I stand with my pint, looking at pictures of old Orient and listening to an American and a Canadian discuss away travel in North America, and the drawn-out half-times of US sport.
I move seat in the second half and sit behind two smiling men in turbans. The temperature falls and the noise rises. Shouting is thermal. A County substitute is called on. Some years ago he spent time in prison for causing death by dangerous driving. ‘Murderer’ and ‘Scum’ bay people around me. The County fans worship him as a hero. Morals are both heightened and forgotten at football. He can do little of note as Orient find rhythm once more. Notts become brutish, as if trying to cramp the style that the home side have stolen from them. An elbow flies into a home face. Orient’s physio sprints on, a rucksack replacing the traditional bag. As usual, fans start to blame the referee for all ills. And as usual, chiding him is as loud as they get.
There are no just deserts for Orient, in fact justice deserts. With a rare attack County smash a bar and pillage the rebound: 0-1. Their keeper jumps, delighted, fists in air, by an away end in a heavenly frenzy. They can smell promotion while the home fans whiff relegation. Then Orient equalise. I am surprised to find myself jumping, gleeful: 1-1. Except it isn’t. The linesman’s flag, that sick-bright harbinger of doom, is up.
County attack again and County score again: 0-2. Orient fans begin to shuffle out. One is on crutches, and he battering rams the moat wall as he exits. The turbaned men in front look at one another. ‘You?’ ‘Yeah. You?’ ‘Yeah’, and with that they bounce away into their evening. Punishing those foolish enough to remain, seven minutes of injury time are added. Another goal for County empties the ground almost completely. One man stays and launches into an extraordinarily detailed rant against a County player who is being treated on the goalline, holding up play. It is triumphantly sweary and forensically knowledgeable of the rules. A departing supporter wearing a brown North Face jacket hops up and down to try and be seen over the moat. ‘Barry Hearn. BARRY HEARN. FACKING ... DO SOMEFINK.’
The final whistle goes and my endless day weighs heavy. Tiredness. Long walks in the wilderness. More loneliness in places I had only ever imagined. In Asda by Leyton station I splash water all over my face and hair. I breathe heavily and attract frightened glances in the mirror. I want to go home. I need to hit the north.