SYNAGOGUE TO SLOUGH TOWN

 

Printed in the FA Trophy 3rd round v Eastbourne Borough Saturday 18^th October 2021. We won 3-1 in front of 400

Well that was one weekend I won’t forget in a hurry. One minute I’m in a North London Synagogue for my nieces bat mitzvah; the next I’m part of bin maintenance duty with the rag tag and bobble hat Rebel army. Then i'm hotfooting back into London for the after party in a lavish hotel with Boris Johnson one of the guests!

After those heady heights it was back to a Hemel Hempstead bump as train after train was cancelled and the Slough faithful wandered like lost souls across the green streets of the town looking for a few beers at the Inn.

Now here we are again, back to Arbour Park for another glamourous FA Trophy tie. Some clubs seem attracted to each other like moths to a flame. No disrespect but what is it with Dartford, Havant, Eastbourne and cup draws. How I looked enviously at Dulwich's trip to Plymouth Parkway while the Dorks go to Southend. At least if it was in Eastbourne I could have enjoyed the delights of an evening in the town. A hotel room overlooking Slough high street just doesn’t cut it as much.

As Christmas and COVID wave four approaches we need to look out for each other more than ever. What that weekend highlighted was that we are want to belong and paradoxically the pandemic that has caused such isolation has accelerated technology that can help. The banks of computers full of zooming in faces, will no doubt be a permanent feature of places of worship especially for those old and infirm.

In between the Hebrew songs I heard about the story of Joseph who went to the Pharaoh after his dreams warned of 7 years of famine after 7 years of plenty. He convinced the Pharaoh to order people to store grain in the times of plenty so when crops failed there would still be food. This biblical tale is similar to the one told by a Premier League chairman who complained about football fan led proposals, likening them to Chairman Mao’s great famine! So how comes, in a time of football plenty, so many clubs have fallen into administration or even gone bust. This brings not just a terrible economic hit on those local communities but affects those whose football clubs give a sense of belonging. It seemed the demise of Bury Football Club especially hit home to the Crouch review authors.

So how do we humans adapt as we try and get life back to normal? Staying in Kings Cross we headed to the old Granary, another upmarket area full of trendy places to eat and drink and settled in a plush outdoor Spanish restaurant where our kids got to lob meat and fish on our table BBQ. Back at the hotel the young staff were overwhelmed thanks to the self service booking-in system not working for nearly two days. These places rely on cutting staff costs to the bone and with no self service they just couldn’t cope as queues stretched out the doors, families with young children slept on the floor, while others were given rooms where people were already sleeping! As we walked up the stairs, scared to get in the lift in case we were blasted into space, our patience had been tested especially as we are so used to clicking our fingers, and the goods and services are ours. So just wonder how we would feel if our families lives were in real danger, if we could see no economic future, if climate change was making life unbearable. Wouldn’t we want to escape and build a better life?

Human migration has shaped the history of our world just like pandemics do. I can understand why the authorities didn’t want to let us know that pandemics aren’t usually over in a few weeks, but after reading the excellent Apollos Arrow history of plagues I got my head round that it would rumble on for a few years. At least we have vaccines and boosters but if we don’t help vaccine the rest of the world then it will just go round in circles with us all learning new variant words.

KINGS CROSS TRANSFORMED

My old Aunt Bet wouldn’t believe the transformation of Kings Cross from the time she ran the Scottish Stores pub during the Second World War. While we talk about how violent the world is now, my grandparents grew up with bombs dropping on their head every night with my relatives running a pub that made the old Kingsfisher boozer in Slough seem like a ocean of tranquillity.

I used to chat to my nan before Slough games about her life and she told me ‘Your Aunt Bet always said the pub was a finishing school. It wasn’t a comfortable pub really with the fights and the prostitutes. The soldiers would come off the trains, Kings Cross and St. Pancras station and head to the pub.

‘We used to have a couple of gangs that came in there, the Deaf Boys and the Angel Boys, who used to beat the Americans up just because they were American. The Angels gang were rough, like you’ve got your hooligans now. They were Army dodgers. They made out they had a bad back or something. A lot of them paid the doctor to pass them off as invalids. They’d shoplift, there was a massive black market on beer and cigarettes and all like that. One of the gangs was a deaf gang. If there was a fight, Dummy they called him, oh he was a big man, he couldn’t talk ‘ck off, ‘ck off’ and they’d look at him and go ‘ok mate, ok’.

‘It was a good pub, but it was rough pub. We used to take your uncle Geoff and your mum up there. Geoff was about a year old and we went up there, Christmas time and they had a big parcel. There was a board and easel for your mum, a Meccano set for Geoff. The prostitutes had clubbed together and bought that. They were decent girls. Most of the girls come from up North, they come down to London and got caught in that trade. One of them had two beautiful boys, she showed me a photo, they had little bow ties. They were with her mother.”

‘The police wouldn’t go near there, they were too frightened. There used to be a copper on the corner directing the traffic and there was a fight one night and your Granddad went up to the copper and he said ‘give us hand mate we’ve got a fight in the pub’ ‘what pub’ ‘Scottish Stores’ ‘f-you’ and walked off, he wouldn’t come in. The military police used to come round more. I don’t think a pub ever got closed down – it was a different time.”

For a while the Grade II listed building was renamed The Flying Scotsman, a strippers club, but in recent years it has re-opened again as the Scottish Stores, but with a more upmarket clientele.

With London flattened by bombs, huge blocks of flats replaced the houses, communities were scattered, and my nan and grandad moved to Langley with their young family. The last time I saw Aunt Bet she told us rather colourfully to go back to Slough after we had blocked her rubbish chute with cardboard then lost the rubber bit of her walking stick trying to unblock it. Like the nan in Catherine Tate she didn’t mince her words!

The world moves on, sometimes so fast it makes our heads spin. While some find solace in places of worship, some of us make do with the solace of football. The highs, the lows, those shared memories, that friendly face as we come through the turnstiles, that fist-bump and a beer with some footballing friends, our songs of worship. Now that’s got to be worth something to bang on about and cherish.