It was 1982, a late-summer’s evening. Three of us were roaming the streets and looking for laughs, not a good combination. I was accompanied by Mike-B-, who’d lately been released from a young offender’s institution in Nottinghamshire. It hadn’t done him any good. Apart from the access to weights, which he took advantage of and emerged as an even larger and more effective killing machine than before he went in, if that were possible. The other lad, Paul-B- was a beefy specimen who once rendered Mike-B- unconscious with a vice-like headlock. Fortunately they were only messing and Mike regained his faculties soon after. Paul and Mike were vigorous exponents of the sartorial arts and daily sported lambswool Adidas jumpers and French Connection t-shirts, with bleached FUs jeans and Kickers or Adidas Nastase on their feet. ABC and Haircut 100 was in the charts. And we were very bored.
Mike had enjoyed a recent earning spree with his brother Steve, when they went on a rampage with a sledgehammer. Telephone boxes were the target; a few well-placed smacks and the phones ruptured, sending rivers of coinage into your pocket. Mike and I used to go around the pubs in Prestwich with football cards. The cards featured a table containing a football team in each box. People would pick a team from the table and pay 50p for the honour. At the end of the night the winning team is revealed by scratching off the masked winner at top centre. We didn’t bother with that part of it. Instead we moved on to the next pub with a fresh card and continued raking it in. Occasionally, clever pissheads would suss us and we’d have a shower of semi-drunk man-beasts spewing from the pub door after us demanding their money back. Fools.
Paul I knew since I first moved to Prestwich from Salford. He grew into a fine figure of a man, capable of crushing a lion’s femur with thumb and forefinger. I once saw him kill five thousand Scousers with the jawbone of a hedgehog. And he loved animals; when a local busker fell under suspicion of abusing his Jack Russell, Paul paid him a visit in the middle of the night armed with a three-inch thick sapling he’d ripped from the ground outside the guy’s council flat. An attempt by the homesteader to defend himself with a two-by-four resulted in a violent crack between the shoulder blades with said weapon, knocking the guy out, naked on his kitchen floor. Not a pretty sight. Paul seemed to improve when his personal physician put him on drugs to calm him down, but that was much later.
But I digress. It was a summer’s evening in 1982. We unconsciously headed to the Borderland, the transition zone where Prestwich and Salford meet. It is called Rainsough in this case; a curious council estate perched on a ragged hill overlooking the Irwell Valley. In the distance, the towers of Salford Precinct swam in a haze, looking like Detroit or Houston. Thankfully we were beyond their reach. That hive maintained an army unrivalled anywhere in the County, to my knowledge.
The Rainsough lads liked to kick a ball about in a grassy bowl at the side of the busy main road known as Rainsough Brow (pronounced “brew”). They called the bowl “Wembley”. On this occasion there were about 20 kids volleying and chipping a pill to one another. We looked down upon them, our numbers having swelled to 8 by now; we’d picked up some strays along the way, other kids bored and looking for enchantment in the brickish maze that was Carr Clough estate. A couple of the kids playing football were from Kersal: Over the border. Two years or so earlier, the trouble between Prestwich and Kersal had begun. The timing couldn’t have been better; casual culture had recently exploded and everyone was crazy about Saint Etienne shirts, gold cords by Lois and Second Image and Aitch and dozens of other designers. We’d given a good account of ourselves back then but by 1982 Salford had taken a turn into twisted pastures.
In time, insults began to rain down on the Kersal boys and their herd thinned out. One or two remained while others went back and forth to the Staff of Life pub across the road (that pub was featured in The Cook Report, in an episode about gangsters from Kersal running protection rackets. My dad broke his ankle stumbling out of there in the 70s. It was a lovely place and performed the role of First Pub on my original all-day drinking session just a year or so later). It quickly became clear that there were more of them in the Staff. The insults were now a two-way street. Still we stood, refusing to be intimidated by the older Kersal lot clustered outside the Staff, staring pointedly at us. After 20 minutes a trickle began to appear in the cobbled, stepped alley next to the pub; reinforcements had arrived from down in the high-rise estate a ten-minute walk away. We stood firm and instructed the other 6 to do the same. They looked worried.
Eventually, the mob numbering about fifteen to twenty became pumped enough to start coming across the road. The traffic had petered out by now and it was dark. They came to the foot of Wembley and we began asking them, “What the fuck do you want?”
“Knobheads!” came the reply. “Where’s yer Boys?”
Bolstered by my psychopathic company I afforded myself a giggle, which was horribly aborted; suddenly, down the cobbled alley came a massive team. Like what you see at United when we played decent clubs. It looked like a fast moving river of baked beans – each of the Kersal lads sporting a skinhead in Salford fashion – and most terrifyingly it didn’t seem to end. I was utterly mesmerised at the size of this crew. There were at least 80 of them, if not twice that. My transfixion almost cost me my life. Between Mike growling, insanely, “Don’t fuckin’ run…” and my snapping out of my paralysis to recognise a lad at the front of their mob, now less than thirty feet away – a known psycho whose nickname was actually “Psycho” – I turned and began to flee. Mike and Paul did likewise. Psycho had an axe in his hand and an expression of such hatred that I was sure one of us would be murdered right there and then. We were chased through some tall grass, some of the lads jumping the wall into the Jewish cemetery next door and some tearing up Butterstile Lane propelled by adrenalin and little else. Paul was hit on the head by a flying brick but he kept on going, despite feeling like he was going to pass out.
We never took the piss at the Borderland again. In fact, we all became friends. That’s right; this one has a happy ending…
