A FAN’S NOTES

My England and the World Cup

England will play Croatia this Wednesday in the World Cup semis. Black is white. Up is down. Set-pieces and penalty kicks.

I grew up in an idyllic Montreal neighbourhood. There was a park at the end of the street, three or four blocks wide and two deep. The summer red clay tennis courts were the foundation of the winter ice rinks. There was an unfenced baseball diamond where a well hit or misplayed ball could bounce its way onto the football field in deep left-centre. The football uprights were whitewashed iron, capital aitches. The field could easily be transformed into a rugby or soccer pitch. There was space enough for extra chalk lines atop the gridiron pattern, the uprights were already there for rugger and soccer netting could be attached to the bottom of the portion of the H.

The fellows who played rugby and soccer were not from the neighbourhood. They spoke with accents. English ones, mostly. These strange games shared characteristics with the ones I was trying to become better at: passing, play-making, attack the opponent’s goal and defend yours.

Dad’s father immigrated to Canada before the First World War. The family business, a near monopolistic haberdashery in Fishponds, a suburb of Bristol, UK, was disrupted by the introduction of a bus route into the city, and competition. Papa Moore settled in Montreal. He went to work for Bell Telephone. After company hours he earned his engineering degree at McGill, attending school in the evenings. Dad’s mother was born in Hove, near Brighton, UK, famous for its holiday pier. Her family owned a bakery. Nana was on holiday in Montreal when the First World War broke out. She didn’t go home again until 1968, a two week visit.

Canada’s only World Cup appearance was in 1986. Canada lost all of its group stage games and did not score a goal. The three of us watched a rather respectable one-nil defeat at the hands of the French in Nana’s and Papa’s apartment living room. Perhaps Canada would fare better four years hence? And judging from the way Mick and Keith spoke of one another in the music press, the Rolling Stones had obviously reached the end of the line. That particular tournament itself though lives on in infamy as England ceded a goal to Argentina, one guided into the net by ‘the hand of God.’

Around this time my first short story had appeared in a literary magazine. A second one had been accepted for publication. Still, my stack of rejection slips was thicker than the Montreal phone book. As a reader, I was immersed in the gritty world of post-war British fiction. Three titles still resonate some thirty-five years on, perhaps because they were sports oriented: Alan Sillitoe’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,’ David Storey’s ‘This Sporting Life’ and Brian Glanville’s collection of stories ‘Goalkeepers Are Crazy.’ Though the activities depicted were foreign to my experience, the insight into the universality of competition was not. These books in my library will outlive me.

Dad collected stamps his entire life. Another quiet, deskbound passion of his was digging around the roots of the Moore family tree. Dad wrote letters to various civic officials in English cities and towns seeking copies of official records. He’d enclose a modest money order to cover time spent on his behalf, usually five pounds. He managed to trace our family back to 1760, to one John Moore, a picture frame maker in Gloucester.

In 2005 my older brother, my older sister and I accompanied Dad to England. He was getting on. Since the early seventies the four of us had spent an exceedingly small amount of time together as a unit. Dad carried sheets of engineers’ graph paper filled with his precise printing. We had addresses for Moore family homes and businesses throughout the south of England: Bath, Brighton, Bristol, Fishponds, Gloucester, Hove and Salisbury. Dad of course had his own memories from previous visits and the war years spent in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Some of ‘our’ buildings were still intact, amazing given the passage of centuries and the Blitz aimed at factory towns and ports. We visited cousins and friends; we poked around graveyards seeking the resting places of ancestors.

During an afternoon lull in Gloucester I left the hotel we’d just registered at to investigate a Tesco store on the other side of a traffic roundabout. For the most part, my career in advertising had generally been intertwined with the grocery industry and the brands on the shelves. I was curious; I’ve always enjoyed walking up and down the aisles of grocery stores, especially those outside of Canada. There was a building beside the store with a kiddie playground, swings, slides, monkey bars, by its entrance. At first I thought it was a school or a daycare. I eventually realized it was a pub.

I went in. The space was jammed with people wearing either red or blue, and grey cigarette smoke. Children ran around shrieking or crawled along the floor. Madness. An October fixture between Chelsea and Liverpool. I ordered a pint, stood back and watched the fans watch their game. I felt as if I was inside Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch,’ a bookmark or a keepsake.

England is favoured over Croatia tomorrow. If that really meant anything they wouldn’t play the game and the betting shops wouldn’t offer odds that entice half their clientele to lay money to the contrary. Anything can happen. Yet there’s a giddy sense too that ‘anything’ has already happened: Argentina, Brazil and Germany, always favoured to advance, are out. England could reach the final and conceivably abscond with the country’s second World Cup. Given the current state of affairs in the old country, there’s no better time for a miracle.

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