Banksy (2 page)

When I saw Jairzinho arc around the ball, I knew the cross was coming. I moved two feet off my line, expecting him to cross to the penalty spot, in the belief that, since Pelé had now just entered our penalty area, I’d be first to the ball. Only Jairzinho didn’t aim for the penalty spot. He whipped the ball across to a point just outside my six-yard box, a yard or so in from my right-hand post.

As I turned my head I saw Pelé again. He’d made ground fast and such was the athleticism of the man, he’d already launched himself into the air. Sidestepping on my toes, I covered the ground to my right and was only two or three paces off the centre of goal when Pelé met that ball with the meat of his head. As an attacking header, it was textbook stuff. He rose above the ball and headed it hard and low towards my right-hand corner. The moment the ball left his head I heard Pelé shout, ‘
Golo!
’

Faced with a situation like that, your mind becomes clear. All your experience and technique takes over. The skills I had acquired through countless hours of practice and study had become what psychologists call ‘overlearned’, or, in layman’s terms, second nature. I suddenly found myself at a forty-degree angle with my right hand stretching out toward the post, my eyes trained on the quickly descending ball. One thing did flash through my mind: If I do make contact, I’ll not hold this. Instinct, over-learning, call it what you will – I knew that if I made contact with the ball, I had to get it up in the air. That way Pelé, following up, would not be afforded a tap-in at my expense. The ball hit the deck two yards in front of me. My immediate concern was how high it would bounce. It left the turf and headed toward my right-hand corner, but I managed to make contact with the finger of my gloved right hand. It was the first time I’d worn these particular gloves. I’d noticed that the Mexican and South American goalkeepers wore gloves that were larger than their British counterparts, with palms covered in dimpled rubber. I’d been so impressed with this innovation that I’d invested in two pairs. Those little rubber dimples did their stuff: the bouncing ball didn’t immediately glance off my hand and I was able to scoop it high into the air. But another thought flashed through my mind. In directing the ball upwards, I might only succeed in flicking it up into the roof of the net. So I rolled my right hand slightly, using the third and fourth fingers as leverage.

I landed crumpled against the inner side netting of the goal, and my first reaction was to look out at Pelé. I hadn’t a clue
where the ball was. He’d ground to a halt, head clasped between his hands, and I knew then all that I needed to know. With the luck of the gods, the angle at which I’d managed to lift that ball was perfect, and it had ballooned in the air and over the bar, out of harm’s way for a corner.

As I got to my feet Pelé, ever the great sportsman, came up to me and patted me on the back.

‘I thought that was a goal,’ he said, smiling.

‘You and me both,’ I replied.

The TV footage of the game shows me laughing as I turn to take up my position for the corner. I was laughing at what Bobby Moore had just said to me.

‘You’re getting old, Banksy,’ he quipped, ‘you used to hold on to them.’

Like hell I did.

When the wind blew in the direction of our terraced house in Ferrars Road, it was the only time you never saw washing hanging out on the line. At the end of our street ran the main Sheffield to Rotherham road, on the opposite side of which stood Peach and Towser’s steelworks. The works stretched for nigh on a mile and a half and what I remember most about it was the smell: an acrid mix of fired coal, sulphur-tainted steam and human sweat. Even when the wind wasn’t blowing in our direction, the smell was ever present. When it did blow our way the washing was brought indoors because the cosy rows of terraced houses were immediately coated in a film of raven-black soot.

On such days I can recall drawing comic faces in the grime that coated our windowsills. Washing windows and paintwork was a constant job in the Tinsley area of Sheffield where I grew up. My mother seemed to spend half her life with a bucket of water and wash leather in her hands. But it was a thankless and never-ending task, like painting the Forth Bridge.

And when the soot descended it found its way inside every
house no matter how tight the doors and windows were shut, and settled like a blanket over everything. This was part of Sheffield life in the 1940s. No one complained, least of all my mother. No one could remember it being any different. No one worried about the danger to health of this air pollution because we had never been told it was a problem. We lived in ignorant harmony with the smell and the soot, because they were simply the by-products of what everyone aspired to – work. My dad worked in a steel foundry. My mother, or so it appeared to me, divided her time between cooking and washing. I was the youngest of their four sons, the others being David, Michael and John. John was always referred to as Jack, though in truth it was always ‘Our Jack’, a term of endearment that was always a source of bewilderment to me as a small boy, as I could never fathom why it was needed. ‘Our Jack has eaten all his cabbage,’ Mam would say, as if to identify which Jack she was talking about.

Dad didn’t earn much and, with six mouths to feed, money was always tight for us, as it was for all the other families in our neighbourhood. Tinsley folk may have been poor, but they were proud. I remember one Sunday lunchtime, a man from across the road appearing at his door to sharpen a carving knife on the front step, to try and make the rest of us believe they could afford a Sunday roast. He might have succeeded, too, had it not been for the incongruous smell of fish frying, as out of place on the street on a Sunday lunchtime as we children being allowed to play out. Fish was plentiful and cheap then, and that’s all the poorest could afford.

In the forties Tinsley families moved house rarely, if ever. Co-habiting for unmarried couples was unheard of. It was unheard of for couples to set up home together before they were married. That done, the vast majority stayed put until the time came for their children to call the funeral director. There were no nursing homes, no managed flats for the elderly. A house was bought or rented and turned into a home. At various times it was also a nursery (though we didn’t use the term ‘nursery’), a
hospital, a function room and in the vast majority of cases, in the end, a chapel of rest for those who had purchased the house in the first place.

People occupied the same house for such a long time that it seemed to seep into their being, each home, internally and externally, taking on the character of its occupants. From either end of Ferrars Road the terraced houses all looked the same, but I soon learned the subtle individualities of each one. It was the owners’ small touches – usually the mother’s – that gave them their identities. The highly polished brass letter-box on the front door of the Coopers’; the pristine gold-leaf house number on the fanlight over the front door of the Dobsons’ (I had no idea why this number should have survived intact when all the others had become mottled and flaked with age); the net curtains in the front window of the Barbers’, gathered rather than hanging straight as in every other home; the red glass vase, no more than four inches high, that balanced precariously on the narrow window ledge in the Archers’ front window.

I never saw this vase containing flowers (they would have had to have been very small). Fresh flowers were a rarity in our home as they were in every other house. In the summer Mam would occasionally give me a threepenny bit and send me down to the allotments to ask one of the owners, ‘Have you got any chrysanths you don’t want?’ Chrysanths – that was all the steelmen who worked the allotments seemed to grow in the way of flowers. With their football-like blooms and tall stems these flowers dominated the small living rooms of the houses they fleetingly graced. It was as if, having been denied fresh flowers for the best part of a year, these allotment owners thought, ‘What’s the point in growing small, delicate flowers that will have little impact in a room? If we’re going to have flowers, let’s grow them big enough for everyone to see and marvel at.’ I only heard their full name, chrysanthemums, when I was in my late teens. True, chrysanths runs off the tongue a lot easier but, looking back, there might have been another reason for our constant use of the
shortened version of the name. To have called these flowers by their full and correct name would have invited accusations of trying to get above your station. ‘Chrysanthemum’ sounds Latin, something only posh kids learned. In Sheffield in the forties such class distinction was as clearly drawn by the working class as it was by the middle and upper classes.

Furniture and the wireless apart, what possessions people did have took the form of such trinkets. The red glass vase in the Archers’ front window was typical of the ornaments that used to decorate every conceivable surface in the home, including the walls, where lines of brightly coloured plaster ducks, of decreasing size, seemed to fly up the wall in a desperate bid for freedom. Being plaster ornaments, of course, they never moved. Just like many of the people whose homes they graced.

For a young Tinsley lad, the only escape from a lifetime of work in the steel foundry or pit, was sport, mainly football and boxing. Cricket then was still the domain of the gentleman player and professionals were few and far between. I had three childhood passions, the most important of which was football. In those days it was quite common to watch both the Sheffield teams, Wednesday and United, on alternate Saturdays. With money short, however, I rarely got the chance to see either. In fact, between the age of seven and fifteen, I reckon I saw no more than twenty games at Wednesday or United, though counted myself lucky to have seen that many.

Tinsley County School was only a stone’s throw from Tinsley railway shed, where steam trains were housed and serviced. At times there were up to fifty steam engines in there, each belching smoke and steam in competition with that from Peach and Towser’s. The phrase ‘Go outside and get some fresh air’ was never heard from the teachers in my school.

The close proximity of the railway shed was a bonus to me, for my second passion was trainspotting. It’s a hobby much ridiculed today, but in the forties, with no television, no computers and few toys, train spotting was a hobby taken up by most
of the boys round our way. It cost next to nothing to get started. All you needed was Ian Allan’s
ABC Spotters’ Book
, a notebook and a pencil. I rarely ventured outside Tinsley and the sight of engines from other towns and cities always filled me with a sense of wonder. They may have come from distant Newcastle or London, or just Wakefield or Bradford. It didn’t matter. Just seeing them evoked in me a feeling of travel, a consciousness of places I’d only heard of, or whose names I had only seen on a map. It was as if these faraway places had come to visit me. Though I never moved from my vantage point on that sooty brick wall a short walk from my home, I felt my horizons broaden.

At Tinsley shed my devotion to trains and football combined, for there was a class of locomotive named after famous football teams. I remember it always gave me a great thrill to see these particular engines. Names such as
Bradford City
,
Sunderland
,
Sheffield United
and
Everton
emblazoned above the centre wheel of the engine, with the arced nameplate bearing not only the club’s colours but a half caseball made of shining copper. Many of these nameplates now adorn the reception areas of their respective clubs and to see them always brings back memories of my childhood at Tinsley County School.

For quite another reason, the close proximity of the railway shed was a boon to many Tinsley families, mine included. In the shed yard was a coaling stage, under which steam engines stopped to have their tenders replenished with coal. To one side of the coaling stage was a large stockpile of coal, a magnet to the many families on the breadline. Many was the time my mam would send me and one of my brothers down to Tinsley shed to procure coal for our fires in my old pram. We’d fetch the pram from our backyard shed under cover of darkness and push it to a well-known spot in the wooden fence that ran along one side of the shed yard. A number of fence panels had been loosened by countless others keen to put heat in their hearths, and it was simply a matter of my brother raising these panels to allow me
and the pram through to the yard. Then my brother and I would walk up and down the sidings near the coaling stage on the look-out for windfall coal. (We never took it from the stockpile; Mam would have considered that to be stealing. Picking up stray lumps of coal that had fallen from a tender or spilled from the coaling stage during refuelling she considered to be no more than helping keep the engine shed yard tidy – a view not shared by the shed foreman.)

The pram was large and navy blue, with highly sprung, spoked wheels. We always had the hood down, because once the carriage of the pram had been filled with good-sized pieces of coal, we could always use the collapsed hood for any amount of smaller lumps. Fully laden, we’d then set off for home, nervously negotiating the rough ground back to the fence. A speedy exit from the shed yard was impossible as the heavy pram would constantly jerk and veer to either side whenever it came into contact with the many stones and bits of iron protruding from the ground. Quite often we had to leave with the pram only half full of coal as we were alerted by the beam of the foreman’s torch bearing down on us from a hundred yards away. Once through the loose fence my anxiety lifted and I’d chirp away merrily to my brother, as we pushed our ill-gotten bounty along the smoother pavements back to Ferrars Road, only braving the cobblestones when we had to cross a street.

We’d come in by the backyard door and call to Mam in great triumph like hunters bringing home the kill. Mam, dressed in her ‘pinny’, would come out to cast an eye over what we had brought home, some pieces the size of a kettle, the small lumps, for making the fire up in the morning, safely stowed in the pram hood. Mam suitably satisfied, my brother and I would then unload the pram into the coalhouse, careful not to break the big lumps. I’d then wash my face and hands in the kitchen sink before changing into my pyjamas and enjoying a supper of toast made on a fork in front of a blazing fire, courtesy of the night’s work.