We don't live here. Solomon, my nine-year-old son, enjoys asking me questions such as Why did you leave? We just left Goodison Park, the home of our football team, and are going back to my parents. Solly wants to linger in the streets around Goodison, as he does whenever we visit, because he is on a high after the game. He likes how different the area is from our home. It is obvious to him that it is rougher, not as pretty, and poorer than our bourgeois patch of Kensal Green in London. He likes the shop that we just popped into for sweets with its Haribos behind caged wire. He likes the guys on their bikes and is interested in a documentary about life on the street.
I would be teasing him for taking a walk on the wild side if he were a pal with me. My boy and I can smile at how much he is enjoying himself.
If blame is required, it's mine. The football is a project that I worked on all the time. I wanted one of my sons to care about my team as much as I do. Why? It makes life easier if your kids share your interests, there are fewer fights over what to watch on television, or play in the car, and there are easy answers that resemble the reasons why I want them to be into the Beatles or old Simpsons episodes.
The football attachment is different to nudging your child towards the Beatles/Simpsons. It isn't all about pleasure, or to be more precise, you can guarantee pleasure. Fans of clubs that have been more successful than ours deal with frustration and disappointment. The key difference is that the club has to do with belonging and identity. Solomon, a poor guy, would follow me as I followed my father. We were 200 miles away from the club's home.
A north London native, he wanted to step into my childhood
He liked the idea of tribal division. He would talk of classmates: "X was Spurs, Y was Arsenal." He liked the chance for teasing and banter. He picked up on the politics of fandom with its insistence on real commitment. He was going to make a joke about one of his friends changing his loyalties depending on the outcome of the game. Not like him, he would say, "Don't worry, Dad, I'll always be Everton, like you and Grandad."
I didn't know how football would become a gateway to a deeper attachment to place and family. Solomon doesn't hear much about nostalgia around our house in London. You would struggle to find anyone who had rushed more readily than I had as a young adult, as I later learned to call it, as I was revelling in the exposed floorboards and bookcases of my new middle-class home. Did I want to join those liberals? If they would have me, please.
My son, who was born on those exposed floorboards and already bouncing between his theatre trips and debating clubs, took a fancy to stepping back into my childhood, with its narrower options but, as he saw it, deeper seams.
From the ground, he finds it fascinating that there are links everywhere that connect to him: schools attended by his dad or grandmother or cousin, churches marked by family births, marriages and deaths, and parks played in over generations. The forebears left Ireland and my lot has been in the city for a century and a half. This history is not part of Solomon's regular world because of the presence of a family over a long time. In his playground, there are almost as many different football shirts worn by children as there are 888-269-5556 888-269-5556 888-269-5556 888-269-5556. My wife's mother is Canadian.
In my rush to be elsewhere, I forgot the richness of place
His passion affects me as well. As Solomon presses me to remember the buildings, I know how much I have begun to take from his interest in his family gang. Over the past few years, the turn towards identity in the national conversation has been frustrating. It has an impulse to box people in. Do we want to be defined by where we were born, or by our ethnicity? Are we happy to be a citizen of anywhere or somewhere? This was my completely unboxed hyphenate, my English-Canadian-Londoner, finding something deeply comforting and appealing in belonging through football.
He asks Grandad to tell him about old games, and they watch recorded matches, the stories my dad tells of these bleed into others, beyond football, of school, of work, of what he and his friends did for fun, my mother now joining in. My dad's childhood living in a pub and the occasional naughty recycling of beer bottles from the yard are some of the well-worn tales. How much easier is it for a grandchild to ask?
Where are those venues and the factories now, Solomon asks. Can we smell them and walk there? The smells tend to change. Tobacco and rum are not present in the air at the dockside warehouse, where my dad worked as a teenager. Why are we different from the other team? The game, which served as a prompt to all the boy's wider questions, can itself go deep. The answer is that the early boards of the football club tended to be Liberal and in favour of Home Rule for Ireland, even though they had strong links to the Orange order. My dad landed on the other side. It's fun to remind my friends at my club of the history of this club.
As Solomon drinks it all in, I have more reason to thank my nine-year-old. Accounts of neighbourhoods like the one I grew up in, home to my parents and our football club, can fall into a grim pattern. The problem isn't in documenting social ills, it's our job. If levelling up ever proves to be more than a phrase, its purpose is surely to lend more options to those living in such areas.
The flatness of the lives depicted can jar, the greyness can be seen elsewhere. There is a clue in the phrase. The richness of lives is often missed. It blows Solomon's mind that our family is the sort of people who are unchanging. He can touch their birth certificates, hear about them, and read about them. I might have forgotten a little of this richness in my haste to be elsewhere. The boy has not missed a thing. The boy did well.
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