Aaahhh the South Bank...from my every-game perch clinging on to a rafter high in the roof like a little cockney sparra above the North Bank Skinheads in the early 70's (all bouncing about to ska, reggae and tamla, gaff was proper rocking). I go to a big school in Stratford and one Saturday morning over Wanstead Flats we play another local school, Brampton. There's a kid playing for them from Upton Park who is definitely a bit lively called Andy Swallow and also lives a few doors down from one of my best mates at the time in my class, so after the game we all get the bus together back down to the Boleyn and go to our first match.
I'm not sure if we were even teenagers at that point but there's a history that comes from that which has become sort of legend all over the world, I.C.F. That's the true start of it in a way, if anyone is remotely interested, cultural history of a sort. But I'd been to the very first game of my life over there in the South Bank v Man U in the 68/69 season when my Dad (thank you Docker Bill of the Chicken Run) plonked me on one of them stanchions behind the goal. Only a nil-nil draw...but boring? You're havin a laugh. We had the World Cup winning Moore, Hurst & Peters, they had Best, Charlton & Law. Who needs goals right? Unbe- fucking-lievable. Atmosphere that gives me goosebumps to this very day. 41,000 people and not a fag paper between them. Working people through and through venting their love, identity and pent-up frustrations of what life is really like....an almighty empowering noise that picked me up and never put me down again. Just like a junkie that goes over the first time, lost forever in something from that very first hit - that's me there rising and standing up on that stanchion and screaming 'Come On West Hammmmm!' nearly a bullseye ago, and i haven't stopped since. And as I will be doing tonight for possibly the last time ever (at Upton Park).
It'll be emotional of course it will but equally looking forward to a bright new future, cannot wait for that Juve game...thing is we all have to move on or we just stagnate, stand still, wilt and die. But make no mistake these are the steps that I grew up on, where i learnt the lessons of what it takes to be a man, to never back down and standing up for what you believe in. Right across that terrace from me and Swol's first little team in the cage on the left, through bouncing about both sides of that police partition on the right...weren't always pretty, ok I'll have to admit, but these are the things that form you in life - and lessons learned on those terraces for sure has kept me alive and alert in warzones with my camera all over the world. That's home right there. And we're moving. The spirit will never die, after all its just bricks and mortar but boy oh boy...win, lose or draw, sun, hail or snow - we were there. And oh what fun we had. WHTID
Grant Fleming
Follow Grant on Twitter @GrantyRio
Memory added on May 10, 2016
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