A couple of weeks on and I have calmed down. I have, to quote a nonsensically sensible Teesside phrase, ‘had a word with myself’. I am glaring too intensely at the magic eye; the image must come to me. Manchester helps. As we shudder into Oxford Road station I feel calmed by the cherry bricks and damp archways of this poised city. I wait for the 11.53 to Llandudno and drawled voices of Mancunia further soothe me. My train, its signage proficient in English and Welsh, tiptoes above the city on Victorian stilts and out past Old Trafford. We work up a speed into the Cheshire countryside. The move from urban to earth is one from dark to light, a dimmer switch turned. Wet stone gives way to blanket fields of yellow rapeseed. Lambs gambol on small hills and snooze in tiny valleys. They look like white mice climbing ladles in a cutlery drawer. The north is putting on a show, redeeming me and my journey.
We stop at Newton-le-Willows, the birthplace of Rick Astley and once home to Pete Waterman. With such a devastating heritage it is the musical version of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Earlestown comes next. Wilf Mannion, the Boro golden boy whose feet made the ball dance, the Mozart of football, managed Earlestown FC in 1960. Prior to that appointment he had worked on the production line at Vauxhall, Luton. Football, England: all interlinked, all small.
A toddler stands on the table across from mine, lost in the world rushing by his window. ‘Preston’, calls his mum, ‘Preston, we have to get off in a minute, love.’ Given that we are in England’s north-west his name could well be sourced in the Brooklyn Beckham vein. I sincerely hope he has a wee brother named Skelmersdale. Behind them a slurring man phones home and promises to give his child ‘a love’. This sounds exceedingly sinister until I remember that my Leeds-based relatives used such phraseology, at which stage I downgrade it to ‘plain weird’. Outside the train, industry has been tossed on to the countryside as if from the palm of a giant Spiderman. Above Runcorn is Rocksavage Power Station, a retired Star Wars space station of frames and flues, then the metal twists and towers of chemical plants. There is beauty in land and toil, and beauty in the two combined. The industry inhales the oxygen from the land. I thereby twin the area with Teesside and order a ceremonial cup of tea.
At Frodsham, hometown of Gary Barlow (what is it about this route?), Chester supporters board in groups of four or five. Blue-and-white striped shirts hang over the tops of denims like butcher shop fly-screens. They sit and talk about days gone by and days to come. This has been a champion season for them, and the next promises more. Their calmness, their conversational lulls, fit a stereotype I have long attached to the city of Chester and its football club, and indeed other places like it. I cannot imagine groups of men heading to the match in the north-east being as tranquil as those before me. They don’t even have cans. Chester, I reflect not for the first time, is too posh, too nice, for football.
Being a keeper of the well-worn faith that football was a working-class release valve, I struggle with teams like Chester. Ditto, among others, Cambridge, Chelsea, Cheltenham, Exeter and Lincoln. In my world of simplicity and romance, clubs were founded to give hatters, railwaymen and knitters a place to breathe and berate when Saturday came. Who went to watch Chester City, and what release did they provide? A break from the strain of manning a tea-room urn? Escape from the pressures of high-octane gift shop commerce?
My scepticism comes not only from the past. The football I watch, whether in Scotland or Middlesbrough, and that I have seen so far on my journey, remains a traditional, largely working-class game, or a low-wage one at least. It is not a bourgeois fad as for some at Arsenal or a middle-management daytrip as at Old Trafford. There is nothing middle-class about Kenilworth Road. In Middlesbrough’s case, a compelling, widely applicable one, a fall from grace has stripped the club of floating, disposable-income fans and left those who would sell their child’s Christmas to buy a season ticket. They are unlikely to be fund managers. Then in Scotland, a club like Cowdenbeath is the only remaining unifier for an ex-mining community. Of the six months in my season so far, little has hinted at the Sky-ed up to the eyeballs environs of the Premier League.
This is not to say that my football is solely watched by farmhands and call centre workers, but it is closer to being their game than it is to being the preserve of the hobbying middle-class. Sky and the Hornbyfication of football never really happened at their clubs, and if it did it was fleeting. They endure. For the crowds at Brammall Lane and Vicarage Road, it remains an escape, a necessity and a vent, even if that spills over into wild anger at referees. There is the question of age too. So many of the supporters I have seen this season, and indeed at Middlesbrough and in Scotland, are retired. They are retired not in a ‘place in France, fly home for a game every now and again’ way. They are retired as working-class pensioners who have always gone to the match and always will. This is not the overwhelming state of things, but it is what I see. It is also the football I prefer and the one which most resembles the early steam-valve game I lose hours dreaming of. I find it impossible to imagine Chester belonging to it.
My prejudice towards Chester is not helped by the station plaque that greets the arriving traveller. It reads: ‘Opened by Gyles Brandreth MP’. The station has the particular elegance of an old Sicilian fish-market and opens into a fine wide street pinned at each corner by grand station hotels. A taxi, for I am feeling flush, flows through the veins of the alluring city centre towards my bed and breakfast. Its driver is more like a host, me a welcome guest in his car. He is enormously pleased that I am on my way to watch Chester FC. ‘It’s so special now. The town realised what we might lose and now it’s a community club.’ In the rear-view mirror I watch this proud Cestrian’s eyes cloud over wistfully as he tells me of recently taking his five-year-old son to a match: ‘It’s all dads and lads and mams and lasses now.’ Inside my stereotypes of Chester, my crass class analysis of football dies a little at this point. I am not all that bothered, as I like the sound of this.
The driver drops me at the B&B, his wheels crackling on its pebbles as he reverses and leaves. My chamber for the evening is situated in a grand Victorian mansion, all climbing ivy and things I dare not touch. I am welcomed cordially but remotely – think a senior funeral director hosting a family fun day. The proprietor is smartly dressed in shirt and tie (and trousers. Plus shoes, and presumably underwear), and wears sleeve garters. I fail to recall if I have ever seen anyone in real life wearing these before. It is like talking to a museum exhibit. He phones another taxi for me, directing that it should take me to ‘The Football Match’.
Another sunny driver speeds me over the river and beyond a colossal racecourse towards The Football Match. He tells me about ‘Scouse Day’ at the races, when Liverpool decamps to Chester and, supposedly, all cabbies receive a message warning them to look out for forged notes. We trawl through an industrial estate that is more of an industrial society and pull up outside one of the units, which turns out to be the Deva Stadium. From this distance it looks more like the warehouse attached to a kitchen wholesaler: corrugated metal, scaffolding spokes and windowless stretches of breeze-blocks. As I approach the Deva I see that it has devolved its beating heart to the thousands who flutter outside its shell.
Excitement, and ownership of that excitement, is tangible as I circle the ground. It is tangible in the perma-grins that seem to be held up by puppet strings and in the way people are slowly moving between each other to have the same conversations over and over. You can hear their ownership in the words they use. There is somehow more ‘double-u’ when they use the word ‘we’ to describe Chester FC, more heart in ‘us’. Some pause to look at a banner on the side of a stand that reads: ‘Your City. Your Community. Your Club.’
The Blues Bar is packed, its low ceiling of plastered squares recycling the hubbub. If the BBC starts releasing sound effects records again, this track is called ‘Merry Mediaeval Inn at New Year.’ I order a pint of Champions’ Ale, a specially produced local brew, and read the banner behind the bar: ‘One Club. 2,000 Owners.’ This bar is the happiest I have been in for a long time, football or not. When a rickety double-decker bus carrying away supporters chokes by, many wave and cheer by way of welcome. This contented club is a modern club. They have had to go to hell to find heaven. Much has happened, some of it a grotesque cabaret that speaks for football’s recent days, days when the likes of Mr John or Elton are seldom seen.
Chester were formed in 1885, an amalgamation of Chester Rovers and Old King’s Scholars. When I finally get around to reading about Chester rather than making assumptions, I smugly note the nicey-nice names of their former homes: it is impossible to picture a working-week-weary blacksmith exhaling his stresses at The Old Showground or Whipcord Lane or The Stadium.
What emerges as I read is a club that had currency in its community, and in return welcomed that community warmly. One example sticks in the mind: when Chester installed a public address system in the early 1930s, each game began with the announcement: ‘Hello Spion Kop, Hello Albert’, the latter a greeting to a long-serving supporter. Clubs like Chester are not the complete antithesis, it seems, of my own romanticising of football as a working-class kettle whistle. Both Chester and that romantic vision are rooted in communalism, the former of the city’s people, the latter of the dock-workers or the steelmakers. Together they stress the ingenuity of football in bringing people together.
Chester spent their earliest days ambling around the Lancashire Combination and Cheshire County leagues. In 1931 they joined the Football League and up until the war were renowned for their luxurious passing game as ‘the aristocrats of the northern section’. In that period Chester panelled Fulham 5-0 in the FA Cup, gubbed York City 12-0 and twice won the Welsh Cup. The Second World War, though, halted their momentum. Post-war, they strived for mediocrity and even suffered, in the 1960s, the affront of a takeover bid from the Duke of Westminster, who decreed that under his rule they would adopt family heraldic colours of gold and green.
The beguiling screws and kinks of football meant that soon after that indiscretion, Chester City slaughtered one of the greatest sides in Europe. Their 3-0 win against Leeds United came during a run to the semi-final of the League Cup in 1974-75. ‘The better team won on the night,’ said a humbled Billy Bremner afterwards, ‘they were a different class to us.’ In the quarter-final, Chester held Newcastle at St James’ Park and lanced them back in their amphitheatre, goalkeeper Grenville Millington repelling Malcolm Macdonald at will. Magpie manager Joe Harvey spat his dummy deep into the froth of his schooner of Brown Ale. ‘I don’t rate them at all, not one bit. They are a kick-and-rush side with no outstanding players.’ Before a semi-final slog with Villa, Chester manager Ken Roberts told his public, ‘We are not dreaming of Wembley. We are planning for it.’ A 2-2 at home, and they continued to plan. A 3-2 defeat at Villa Park, and the London hotel was cancelled. What a run! Over now, but with the consolation of promotion from Division Four, Chester’s first ever elevation. That and the Debenhams Cup in 1977. In 1981-82 they fell back down, rock bottom.
Things went quiet for the two decades to follow. Then in 1999, the Grim Reaper called. The devil had a space for a football club in hell. The first man to try and fill that space was an American named Terry Smith. In 1999, Smith purchased Chester and promised her the world: First Division football inside three years, international signings and sell-outs at every home game. At the time, most Chester supporters were glad of the attention, happy to have had someone look their way. That is often a frailty in the relationship football fans have with their teams: if somebody who appears to have money talks up and buys our club, we ask no questions. When boss Kevin Ratcliffe resigned, Smith made himself one-fifth of a management team. They appointed ‘zonal captains’ – skippers for defence, midfield and forward line. To fiddle in football’s Division Four basement Smith acquired players from Serbia, the USA, Canada and Trinidad. They and their bemused teammates were given seven-page game plans before each tussle with Torquay, each car crash with Carlisle. He even had them utter the Lord’s Prayer in the dressing room. It would have been the last straw, had that not upped and left long ago.
In the final game of 1999, Smith’s Chester played bottom-club Orient at home. Orient had not scored for nine hours. Result: Chester 1 Orient 5. In the final game of the season Chester played Peterborough. They had to win to stay up. Result: Chester 0 Peterborough 1. The Deva loyal went berserk, trying to drag their club from the chewing jaws of Beelzebub. Smith waved the red-horned one on, after the game bleating: ‘I have no regrets about my time in charge, in fact I have achieved 10 of the 11 targets I set for the club when I took over.’
When slight success tickled Chester the following term, Smith claimed credit. He ascribed a run to the semi-final of the FA Trophy under new manager Graham Barrow to his scouting reports and ‘design’ of the quarter-final’s winning goal. Towards the season’s close, Smith sacked player-of-the-year Paul Beesley (apparently, during training ground set-piece rehearsals ‘Beesley stood in the wrong place, ruining it for everybody’) and banned the remaining squad from speaking to the press. He followed up by dismissing a long-serving and long-suffering club volunteer who had supported the club for life. Chester were again line dancing on the precipice, moving back and forth towards the underworld. Supporters arranged a funeral march, hauling coffins through town to the stadium, and club stewards resigned en masse. Their picket lines chiselled thousands off the gate, squeezing it to 700.
In sauntered a Scouse saviour named Stephen Vaughan. Smith’s club became his. He would save them; he would turn hell to heaven. They should have checked his tenners were real. Vaughan was a boxing promoter whose ownership of Barrow FC had resulted in liquidation. When Chester were drawn against Barrow in the FA Cup, it transpired Vaughan still retained shares. He quickly transferred them to a local painter and decorator friend so that Chester’s crashing out of the FA Cup at its qualifying stages for the first time since 1930 came with moral and legal impunity. Early in his reign Chester fell to the bottom of the Conference. England’s own Mark Wright, he of straggly ginger mullet-lite, became manager and helped stave off hell. Vaughan cleared the club’s debts and gave him money, money, money to splash. He also tried to buy Tranmere Rovers. Principled supporters who had hounded out Smith kept their questions to themselves while the team hopped out of hell and hovered beneath heaven’s door – this, after all, is the football fan’s way. In 2004, Wright’s team made it back into the Football League, 6,000 Chester people attending their final game of the season. A scent of murk saw Wright resign during the summer break. Vaughan employed the tried-and-mistrusted first-person defence: ‘The time for fans to worry is when Stephen Vaughan leaves this club.’ Ian Rush, once of Chester, later of some others, became manager. In his first game, Rush crossed swords and swapped stories with Paul Gascoigne of Boston United. It rarely got better than Memory Lane, Rush lasting until the following April (‘various events have gradually made it impossible for me to carry on’).
Rolling up next was Keith Curle whose early mailbag included a winding-up order from the Inland Revenue. Vaughan had, he said, spent £4 million so far, but the taxman needed another £180,000. The owner responded by buying Widnes Vikings rugby league club, sacking Keith Curle and bringing back Mark Wright. The supporters had, by now, grown tired and found their voices. They could sniff hell on Vaughan’s breath. When only 269 attended a pre-season friendly, he blocked all transfers and put Chester on the market for £5 million. Wright felt the chop in the traditional sacking month of April, and his successor Bobby Williamson lasted under a year. In the summer of 2007, Vaughan resigned as chairman and director shortly after forcing a pre-kick-off minute’s silence for shot Liverpool underworld figure Colin Smith. Simon Davies became manager for a while, before the third return of Mark Wright ... right, this is getting confusing, isn’t it. Think of it as being like the first book of the first testament: Ratcliffe begat Smith, and Smith begat Barrow, and Barrow begat Wright, and Wright begat Rush, and Rush begat Curle who begat Wright again, and Wright begat Williamson, and Williamson begat Davies and Davies begat Wright again ... and as for caretaker managers ... look, it was a mess.
In May 2009, ownership of Chester City passed to Stephen Vaughan Jr, their highly paid midfielder. They voluntarily entered administration, owing creditors £7 million. Wearily Cestrians greeted the devil once more. Remarkably, creditors agreed to accept the only bid submitted, one of £290,000 by a Stephen Vaughan company. They were admitted into the Conference with a 25-point deduction attached. In November, protesting fans invaded the pitch and forced a match to be abandoned. Chester entered 2010 at the Conference’s foot, their tally of minus three points a horror story to those fans who dared to look at the league table. As a New Year’s gift, HMRC submitted another winding-up order for £1 million due to them. On 6 February 2010, 460 people saw Chester City lose 1-2 at home to Ebbsfleet United. It was to be their last stop before hell.
The following week, the team bus driver refused to leave the car park – that car park in which I now watched the happy masses smiling – until his bill was paid. Chester could not pay their fare. Their match at Forest Green was called off. Soon afterwards Conference clubs voted to expel them and on 10 March 2010 in room 76 of the High Courts of Justice in London, Chester City were wound up. Proceedings lasting less than a minute ended 125 years of history. No one from the club was there to hear the death knell clang.
Back in Chester those that cared had said goodbye to their club long before that lonely moment in court. Purgatory had led to despair, but then plotting. Once hell was reached they could turn death into life in the form of a new club, by the fans for the fans. With help and solidarity springing thick and fast from other supporter-owned outfits – FC United, AFC Wimbledon, AFC Telford United – and their own tenacious dreaming, City Fans United formed Chester Football Club on 20 May 2010. Nearly 3,000 people saw the new club’s first game, a 6-0 victory. By May 2011 Chester FC were champions of Evo-Stick Division One North; a year on, they are champions again and next season will be one more promotion away from the Conference. Hell is banished and they are knocking on heaven’s door. To complete the Scooby Doo-meets-Brookside denouement, in 2011 Stephen Vaughan was sentenced to fifteen months in prison for assaulting a police officer.
I file out of the bar among elbows holding pints to chests and head towards my terrace for the afternoon. A lady in a cardigan places a leaflet about prostate cancer in my hand with the words, ‘Don’t worry love, it’s free.’ I pay a tenner to push the turnstile, then receive a free match programme and find a metal bar to lean on behind the goal. The sun winks above us. This is not just heaven; it is utopia realised. My neighbour, John, is a cheerful soul in his seventies and has the frayed glint of a club circuit comedian. ‘Alright, kidda’ he greets me, ‘this is the life, eh?’ He has a thick Chester accent, which is essentially a thin Scouse one.
After pleasantries we both silently watch the pre-match fanfare engulfing the pitch. As Chester are champions there is, obviously, a samba band thudding and chiming their way up and down the halfway line. I wonder when brass bands were usurped from this role and blame Middlesbrough. In 1995, when Boro signed Juninho, the Riverside rattled to the painful rhythms of steel drums and whistles on a fortnightly basis. Around them the players of Chester and Marine warm up. Their drills mostly consist of lashing balls over empty nets. Hurrah. The terrace we share is ten or twelve concrete rows high and speckled with sky-grey barriers. Everyone has their place, routine as ever an ingredient for the sense of belonging football propagates. Ideological and emotional belonging is complemented here by literal ownership; these supporters belong to Chester FC, and Chester FC belongs to these supporters. In an age when provincial philanthropists are beggared compared to overseas bidders, and of byzantine ownership structures and debt payments, it seems like an entirely logical future for my kind of football. It plays on the unique pull of a club on its people and its town, and acknowledges that such an entity never will be ‘like any other business’ as many submissively claim. By pitching itself at the opposite end to billionaire buy-outs this kind of club shows us that another world is possible. It reminds us of football’s genius for leading the way. On a walkway at the foot of the terrace each new arrival stops every few paces to wave at a Saturday pal or idly gossip about 1-0s, 2-0s and 4-0s. ‘I tell you what,’ John leans across to me and says, ‘I am loving this season, but roll on next year. I love what this club is now. Our club.’
On the tropical green turf in front of us the samba band has trudged off to audience indifference. Tough gig. ‘We Will Rock You’ sparks up, its bish-bosh drumbeat audibly causing irreparable damage to the intestines of the PA speakers. When it finishes the announcer either skips three tracks or plays the world’s briefest medley until we reach David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, welded into ‘The Final Countdown’ as the players enter the fray. If we can’t have the musical silence I crave then at least he has the decency to play such homely and often reassuringly hammy football ground staples. Routine, repetition; he knows the supporter all right. Besides, at one point he says wearily: ‘One last time, ladies and gentlemen. I believe we’re getting some new music next season.’ Those around me awaken from their cosy chats and slowly chorus the anthem of the hour: ‘Championies/Championies/are we are we are we.’
Things change from communal buoyancy to shared sadness in the blow of a whistle. We do not need the PA announcer to tell us that there is about to be a minute’s silence; we recognise the familiar trudge forward of twenty-two players and the regimental crest formations they form around the centre-circle. John leans across to me again and whispers, ‘This is for that babby, isn’t it? That poor little ’un who died. Terrible.’ Indeed, one of his club’s youngest, a boy of seven, has died of heart failure while playing football. Twenty-two players place their arms behind their backs and a further whistle stuns the air numb. The world stops like it always does during the minute’s silence of a football ground, and light slides away from the pitch as clouds cloak the sun. It is not often that so many people will be having the same thought. To look around and to watch a normally frantic place turned motionless is like watching the plundering of a killer whale, something that once swarmed with life and presence suddenly idle. We are all grateful when the whistle sounds a third time and it comes back to life.
The blue and white stripes of Chester tip-tap the game to a start. They are up against a Marine side clad in yellow, meaning proceedings resemble a match between Sheffield Wednesday and Brazil, which brings to mind the strange team combinations on the covers of birthday cards my grandma used to give me. Yeovil versus Australia was a favourite. ‘Come on Ci-ty’ sing those around me – City are dead, long live City. The two No. 6s among two teams in 1 to 11 shirts are dominant in the game’s waking moments. Chester’s is a centre-midfielder who manages to lord the middle of the pitch despite being as one-footed as a kipping flamingo, Marine’s a defender large of chest and intent. The game at this level – effectively Division 7 – takes the same shape as that higher up the pyramid. Similar runs are made, forwards mosey around to shuggle free of their defenders, wingers beat men and fall over, and players that don’t quite merit white boots wear them regardless. On the whole, both teams are friends with the ball, though it does not always like them. Difference comes from the pace of play (slower) and the shape of players (bigger-boned). The principle of a move or pass sometimes outweighs the collective or individual ability of its author, so that the most common refrain from the terraces is ‘the idea was right, son.’
This is probably an unfair day to make such judgements as neither team has anything to play for. As Chester are up and Marine upper-mid table, it is perhaps like carrying out an Ofsted inspection on the day before summer holidays when everyone brings in a board game. Things have dropped towards the lackadaisical among the crowd too. It feels as though the football is obstructing the festivities. By way of revenge Chester’s goalkeeper launches a frenzied attack on the balloons in his penalty area, popping half a dozen with his studs. It seems to stir the crowd. ‘Come on!’ shrieks a man behind me. ‘Get behind the lads. We an’t been bloody relegated. This is supposed to be a party. Are all your parties this shit?’
Chester put down the cocktail stick and turn up the music. From here, we cannot see all of the goal at the other end, so shots frequently look better and more likely to hit home than they probably are. This is all down to a pitch camber that feels reassuringly vintage, so rare now are such charming imperfections. It also cuts off the shins of those in the dugout, so that they look like Roman ghosts beneath modern street level, wearing sports gear rather than tunics. John is not looking at the game as he has spotted yet another acquaintance. ‘Baz. BAZ. I wanna see you, lad. Did you get rid of that thing?’ ‘No, John mate, I didn’t.’ ‘Giz £25 back and I’ll get rid, mate.’ While he and Baz barter over their mysterious product Chester take a 1-0 lead. The goal happens when Marine’s keeper decides he is no longer on duty, sauntering as he does into a left-back position. He is beaten to the ball, which is dispatched with ease. As one, the Chester team tear towards the dugout and unveil T-shirts bearing the name of ‘that babby’. ‘I tell you what, John, he had to score from there’ offers someone behind us, the banal co-commentator to John’s poetic meanderings on wing-play and objects worth £25.
For the rest of the half a pattern emerges. Chester pass twice, give the ball away, Marine pass back to them, Chester pass three or four times and eventually score. Their second goal today makes it a century for the season and elicits a roar to match the achievement, and their third thuds into the net from thirty yards. They are playing with the brio and largesse of a boxing champ at his career best, the ball stroked around at will and garnished by needlessly fussy outside-of-boot passes. I lose five minutes thinking how odd it is to be at a match that smells of the countryside, and another five realising I have been in Scotland, England and Wales today. The match has become like background music so, before Leyton paranoia or Vicarage Road existentialism can set in, I tune my radar to two men arguing about socks.
‘Yeah. But that stripe is white. It’s a white stripe.’
‘No, it’s blue.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Bloody hell, he’s got odd socks on.’
‘He bloody hasn’t.’
‘I’m telling you, he’s got odd socks on.’
Their debate is silenced when a third man arrives carrying a can of Coke in one hand and a coffee in the other. ‘Double-caffeine. This’ll shift the hangover.’ Ahh, the football hangover, when you stare at your pre-match pint for an hour and contemplate using a stadium cubicle for the first time ever. At half-time John turns to the hungover sockmen and the four of them plan for next season. His ‘I don’t think we’ll win the league, but we’ll definitely go up’ meets with approval. Round here, they deserve to lounge in such optimism. As the sun shines down on smiling people, as we watch Chester teams from Under-9 to Under-19 parade the pitch, it feels like the end of a film.
The second period gets under way to the tune of the PA announcer requesting that fans stay off the pitch when the game ends. A teenage girl nearby replies, ‘I don’t know what “encroach” means, so I’m off on.’ The noise gathers as the party approaches. To ‘Que Sera’ it is, ‘Should I be Chester/Should I be Welsh’ and ‘shoot the Wrexham scum’. To ‘Anarchy in the UK’ it is, ‘I am a Chester fan/I am a Cestrian/Youngy’s barmy blue and white army/Chester FC/top of the league/Cos I’m proud to be, Chester FC.’ The latter, in its craft, in the way it is sung by boys of five and grannies, in its evidence of the football crowd’s creativity, is a work of art that lifts my heart. Again, football is reminding me why I fell for her in the first place. ‘Oh West Flintshire/Is wonderful/Oh West Flintshire is wonderful’ is less moving.
The Cestrians on the pitch are maintaining a relentless yet slow kind of pressure – think Leeds United v. Southampton, and Barry Davies’ ‘Poor old Southampton ... just don’t know what day it is.’ Marine cannot get hold of the ball, chase as they might. It is like watching a beggar fruitlessly approaching people with his palm upturned. In the stand to our right a teenage bugler plays a slow lament not far removed from ‘The Last Post’. Perhaps he has not updated his repertoire since the days of hell, a cabaret singer in a punk world. Things have flat-lined once more on my temporary terrace home. It is as if we are hidden behind a curtain, waiting for the star guest at a surprise party to arrive. I begin to admire the Marine goalkeeper’s paunch. He is not overweight, but resembles how most blokes his, our, age should be, and as the proud owner of a burgeoning spread I like players it is possible to relate to. I am drifting again. I read the flags strung in the gallows of the main stand. There is an Irish flag with ‘CFC’ across the tricolours, one that says ‘Chester FC: Founded 2010’ and one that simply reads ‘Until the Sky Turns Green,’ a line torn from the Stone Roses to mean, I think, unending support. It is while I am reading these that Chester score their fourth goal. ‘Championies’ rings around the Deva, followed by ‘We’re going up as fucking champions’, which sounds better than it reads. We pass the 90-minute mark and reach the final moments of Chester FC’s second season. Today, there are 4,000 people here to see out this seminal minute. ‘What you gonna do for the next three months?’ queries John of a friend, a question half a million people in England ask themselves every May. ‘At least there’s the Euros,’ he continues. Then a lone voice bellows: ‘Stand up, for the champions/stand up, for the champions’ five times over to disinterest and one response: ‘You what, mate?’ There is a pause and then the singer begins again: ‘Sit down, for the champions ...’ At last, the same whistle that muzzled the crowd into reflection earlier now sends it into rapturous hullabaloo.
A smattering of fans gathers at the front of the stand. Men in fleece coats, jeans and Timberlands bob up and down and use each other’s shoulders to balance on tiptoes. They are peeping at a small stage being built in the middle of the pitch over the hoardings, the camber and an oblivious groundsman forking his injured turf. From above is piped essential promotion party classic ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’, before someone called Dame Patricia Bacon is introduced to the crowd. ‘Boooo, gedder off, Dame Bacon or not’ bawls John. Then, two by two, the players are introduced and treated to applause. The couples emerge in flip-flops to take their acclaim and climb the stage, battered legs on one more surge. Finally, the league trophy is heaved skyward towards the heavens and away from all former hells. The comeback is not complete, but it is at an advanced stage. Behind the players, ticker tape quivers and a smoke machine churns out 1980s disco atmosphere. The squad moves as one, a flock of geese with medals, around each stand and when they reach ours two or three teenagers scale the wall and join them. ‘What are they bloody doing?’ asks John, and those around me start to boo. It is too late. Fellow teenagers join them in spits then blobs, then the age of invader gets older: teens, twenty-somethings, thirty- or forty-somethings and their children, those children’s grandparents. Soon, the terrace has all but emptied. ‘Sod it,’ says John and, brilliantly, a steward opens a gate on to the pitch for him. Without thinking, I sneak on behind him and join the carnival in the penalty area. To be on the soft turf where dreams are made looking back into the stands is a novel rapture. I watch lads who should know better – some of them are thirty, for God’s sake – mime crosses, shots, headers and saves in the goalmouths. A heavily ginger man of similar age looks pensively at the length of the pitch before sprinting across it, giant blue and white flag in hand. Whole families dance on the pitch, their pitch. This is football to love, and it has destroyed my Chester prejudice. It is a modern take on a club existing for its community, not as a working-class release valve but as a unifying force. Support is heartfelt and critical, going beyond 3 p.m. and above the bourgeois hobbying of neighbouring clubs. The goosebumps are back and Orient is forgotten. I am among friends.
Dusk is dimming the light by the time I get back into town. Chester’s hallowed streets are surprisingly rowdy, manned as they are by numerous Mancunian and Liverpudlian stag nights and hen dos. ‘At night, when the tramcars have stopped running and the crowds have gone home,’ wrote H. V. Morton in 1927, ‘ancient cities like Chester come most vividly to life.’ Spanish tourists look up at the heavenly architecture and down on the frothing lads with sombreros dancing around a busker. I stop for a pint in the Old Boot Inn, its abundant beams, golden light and conversational percussion thrilling my senses and evoking an England very sure of itself. The time machine returns me home when I overhear the word banter (‘Yeah, there’s banter and there’s Chantelle. That’s not banter.’), newly ubiquitous and permanently baffling. In trying to grab the past back I walk to the Blue Bell, a medieval inn turned Oriental restaurant. Beams abound again – if there’s ever a shortage of firewood, Chester’s yer man – and an open coal fire turns meat-sweat phizogs crimson. Two couples numbering a gang of four that probably meets up every week and holidays together imbibe and giggle, the familiar motifs of Saturday night England. ‘Match of the Day then bed for me,’ says one of the male halves. ‘Match of the Day? You’ll be asleep by the news,’ replies his wife. ‘I watch it sneakily,’ he retorts, before his mate adds ‘You watch summat else sneakily, Bryan, Snatch of the Day.’ A couple arrive and are happy not to be left alone. ‘Our anniversary today,’ the lady offers. ‘Seven years. You get less for armed robbery.’ Is this ‘banter’? Possibly. It amuses me, anyhow, and shortly after my deep-fried something is dispatched I am invited to sit between the two tables for imbibing and giggling.
When I awake to the Sunday morning bells of the B&B’s grandfather clock, my mouth feels as though it has spent the night above a Dyson Airblade on full blast. I scuffle to the breakfast room and take my place next to a couple who have clearly had a row. Despite being a Yorkshireman he wears a Manchester United shirt, so mentally I take her side. In their disgruntled silence cutlery seems to clink more loudly and I am glad when the sleeve-gartered host opens a conversation about the contents of his hash browns. I ask for more orange juice (as in most B&Bs, the glasses here are too small for a hungover mouth), and stare at the fuzzy words of leaflets for local attractions.
The breakfast rebalances me; the walk into town eases my head. I cross the River Dee on a grandiose bridge. It has to be large to drape this heavy and glistening river, an expanse of water on which Chester is founded. First the Romans used the Dee as transport, then the Saxons as a defensive weapon, the Normans as a seat of power, the Elizabethans as a trade route and the Victorians as a place of leisure. One river in one city in whose shimmers can be seen the grand strokes of England’s history. The bridge leads me towards Chester’s city walls, which bear hug her oldest parts. Their turrets and bases are black, their uneven bricks almost ginger in this morning’s sunlight. If Watford Junction is a Bourbon biscuit then Chester’s walls are the cross-section view of a Crunchie bar. Where the walls reach the city centre they peck the cheek of modern buildings including a multi-storey car park. These are mostly monstrous creations and look like no biscuit I can think of. It is as if the walls are an annoyance and get in the way, a barrier to progress and DSS tower blocks.
After a difficult encounter with a persistent pigeon I continue to The Rows. The Rows are tunnels save for two features: they are open on one side and one storey of a building up. It is as if a long chunk has been mined from several streets of tall mediaeval houses, and some shoe shops inserted. Walking among them imbues a cosy feeling of being cut off from the ebbing throngs in the streets below. I feel like a ghost floating above the future. Not all visitors share my enthusiasm – Daniel Defoe called The Rows ‘old and ugly’ and Celia Fiennes, who rode through the country on horseback, described them as ‘penthouses set on pillars’. There is no living among their galleries today, just shopping. I reach a sofa outlet, which was once called Leche House. Like many of Chester’s dignified old houses, graffiti is to be found on its windowpanes. This is not the work of anyone the Daily Mail thinks should have an ASBO, but of ‘Charming Miss Oldfield, 1736’. Along the street at Bishop Lloyd’s Palace each and every window was once cobwebbed with inscriptions like ‘Oh that my pencil could the features trace of him I think possessed with every grace’, and on from there Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, scratched ‘Rotten without and mouldering within/This place and its clergy are nearly akin’ into the glass of the Yacht Inn. Swift’s words were revenge upon the Chester Cathedral worthies who had stood him up when offered an evening meal. It is nice to think that he then blew out the candles and got shitfaced in the dark.
I pull a slightly egg-stained leaflet from my pocket and follow its map to an open-top bus from 1914. This maroon charabanc offers city tours and if I really want to look at and not for England, to enjoy it, then there’s nothing, says ‘casual observer’, like failing to hear the history of a place above a howling gale. As the bus slowly fills I read about the cathedral we currently face. Apparently, it contains the shrine of Saint Werburgh, a nun so pure that when she found geese eating her crops she called a meeting with them. Having received Apologies from God and Jesus H. Christ and agreed previous minutes, Werburgh moved to the first item on the agenda: asking the geese to fly away. The geese took off but circled above, claiming one of their number lost. Werburgh found that a servant had cooked the missing goose, and brought it back to life from its bones. The next time someone asks me why I am an atheist, I am going to hand them a laminated copy of the last four sentences.
A Geordie lady of a certain vintage lumbers to the front of the bus. ‘It’ll probably rain, like’ she tells everyone, before unleashing a landslide of doomy predictions (‘I cannat see this auld bus lastin’ the journey’ and ‘This’ll nee be as good as the one in London, like’). Fortunately, the bus driver and owner is of a more cheerful disposition, but then so is a gnat. A significantly hard-of-hearing man behind me commentates loudly on the driver/owner’s well-oiled routine, so that I begin to think he is part of it. ‘He’s very funny, him. Great sense of humour.’ The lauded driver/owner passes the microphone to his wife who sits next to me. At one point I am sure she catches me writing of how the brim of her hat keeps gouging my neck, because she sidles closer and starts work on my cheek too. People wave at us from the street, or perhaps they are trying to tell me that my face is bleeding. We chug through Handbridge, the part of Chester closest to Wales. The Welsh call it ‘Treboeth’, which translates as ‘Burnt Town’, so often was it the home of dragon-on-lion violence and retribution. In the 1400s Prince Henry proclaimed that: ‘No Welshman of whatsoever state or condition he may be, remain within the walls of the said city, nor enter into the same after sunset, under pain of cutting off his head,’ and the Welsh were banned from entering pubs and gathering in groups of three or more. England was either at war or really hated Welsh male voice choirs. It was in Handbridge too, I learn from the hat stabbist, that Mary Jonas, furniture dealer and mother of thirty-three children, lived. Through the nineteenth century she had given birth to fifteen sets of twins, each comprising a boy and a girl. To reward her efforts in contributing the most personally to the British Empire’s expansion, Tit-Bit magazine awarded her a lifetime’s subscription, because she obviously had a lot of spare time to sit around reading trivia.
The tour ends and I repair to a bathroom to check for facial scars. Again one of my journeys is coming to an end and I am in the public conveniences of a foreign town. This time I am content. Chester, and Chester FC, have gone a long way to restoring me and redeeming England. I did not look too hard; I just let it happen to me. Perhaps England demands that kind of distance, like a wild but intelligent primate. When I emerge from the Gents, entire armies of Scouts, Cubs and Beavers are marching in the rain. A brass band starts and I know the north is trying to give me a cuddle. Calm, fetching Cheshire has been kind to me, so it is just as well that I will soon return.