stewards and also those of us who felt sick hearing monkey noises and might have asked them to stop, was that the people shouting this abuse were enormous violent thugs who would think nothing of thumping anyone who did. I’ve found that liberals are rarely built for physical confrontation. We just had to put up with sitting near white men making monkey noises at black men as they ran past. The irony of them accusing black men of being like monkeys while actually behaving like animals from further down the evolutionary scale was lost on the thugs. Fathers, sat next to their sons, would racially abuse players. Prejudice was being passed from generation to generation. Wingers got it the worst. Playing down the centre of the pitch, I’m told that one could almost imagine it wasn’t happening. But people who played most of their game on the touchline were under no illusion. Taking a throw in or corner would result in fearsome abuse. It was grim.
Then there was the fruit. One racist wag thought it would be funny to throw bananas at the black men; it started happening all over the country. Even within this horror, there were rules. Black players who played for the home team would be cheered at the same time that bananas would be thrown at the black men playing for the opposition. It was bizzare. It must’ve been great for greengrocers. One of the gang must’ve been charged with paying a visit to their local shop on the way to the game. Sales of bananas must have rocketed.
This abuse wasn’t confined solely to black players. Tottenham had a large Jewish following – Arsenal fans used to sing songs about gassing Jews and how Spurs were on their way to Auschwitz. It was awful. I fucking hated that fans of my club would sing songs like that. I knew that people didn’t like Jews. I could see it every lunchtime in the playground at school. There was also the odd comment about being tight that I overheard as I walked to synagogue when I was younger. And my grandparents made sure to remind me not to trust ‘the goyim’ (slang term for non-Jews).
I saw this prejudice up close one weekend. I’d got a Sunday morning job with my friend Robert, working for two Jewish brothers called Maurice and Leo Greenberg in their shop on Petticoat Lane, East London. The late 1970s was the tail end of the Jewish schmutter trade in the East End (schmutter – Yiddish slang for cheap clothes) and one could get all sorts of keenly priced gear. There was a shop called Goldrange that sold sheepskin and leather jackets and coats from their discount centre in, as the advert said, the big red building in Petticoat Lane. According to Paolo Hewitt’s The Jam: A Beat Concerto, Paul Weller bought his first Crombie coat up there.
The shop used to sell Marks & Spencer clothes that had a small fault and had been rejected. There were cotton/polyester trousers for seven pounds a pair. They came in either beige or brown. Personally, I would’ve rejected them for that reason alone. We sold shirts for a fiver. There were also Safari suits for twenty quid. I thought they were only worn by Roger Moore in James Bond movies, but they turned out to be very popular with the large number of Nigerians who came to the shop. I remember wondering whether they actually used them on safaris. I didn’t know exactly what happened on a safari but I figured the large number of pockets would perhaps come into their own. I tried one on once but I looked ridiculous.
There were also five or six rails of clothes out front. This area was looked after by an old Jewish guy called Jack. He’d stand out front shouting ‘Come and have a look inside’ to try and entice people into the shop. It rarely worked, possibly because he used to put his hand down his trousers and adjust himself on almost a minute-by-minute basis.
‘Quiet day,’ he’d say, not realising that an old man constantly feeling himself up was hardly encouraging for passing trade. I never wanted to know what was going on down there, but he’d let me know anyway.
‘Oh, they’ve gone again,’ he’d say before stuffing his hand down his trousers and hauling his bollocks back up to where there were meant to sit. I never understood this when I was fifteen, but I do now.
There was also a small workroom upstairs where they did wig fitting. Robert and I were never allowed up there but it wasn’t difficult to spot the men wearing them. For one thing, there’s always something odd about a man who turns up bald and an hour later leaves with a full head of hair. That tends to be a bit of a giveaway. There was also something very wig-like about the wigs. They were made from real human hair but they just looked wrong. The men all looked like they had seventy-year-old faces and twenty-five-year-old hair. I’m sure there have been improvements in fitting and style since then but in the late 1970s, men wearing wigs might as well have been wearing a sandwich board that said, ‘This is a wig. Please feel free to take the piss’, with an arrow pointing upwards.
Petticoat Lane had quite an illicit feel back then. There were a lot of petty criminals wandering about. People who looked like Private Walker, the spiv character in Dad’s Army. They’d suddenly appear with a tray full of knocked off perfumes and pitch on any available bit of pavement. It was entirely illegal.
‘Come on, girls. Got some of your favourites here. Paco Rabanne, Chanel, Opium, all sorts.’
A small crowd would gather and brisk cash sales were made before a policeman would be spotted, a signal given, the tray would be folded up double quick and the crowd would melt away clutching their now entirely legitimate goods. One afternoon, Maurice told me to shout ‘’Ave em up Arry’. I didn’t know what he meant but I shouted it anyway and the illegal perfume seller ran off down the street. He came back ten minutes later. He had to be restrained when he found out it was me.
There were also more opportunistic thieves who targeted the shops. There was a period when we were robbed almost every week. Why anyone would’ve wanted to steal what we were selling was beyond me, but it drove Leo crazy. I think he counted the trousers at the end of most weeks so he knew when it had happened. The shop’s entire stock must have been worth ten grand at the most but after repeated robberies, Leo installed an alarm system that cost twice that amount. The robbers would’ve been better off nicking that.
Maurice and Leo were the first people I’d ever met who were politically active. I’d heard Paul Weller singing about political issues and societal problems but I’d never spoken to anyone about anything like this. Maurice and Leo hated right wing politics and the National Front and with good reason. Leo was more religious than Maurice and wore a skull cap and a prayer shawl where the tassels hung over his trousers. He was very visibly Jewish. National Front skinheads would abuse him as they wandered past the shop and it fascinated me to see him take them on.
I remember one thug stopping outside the shop. He was looking at the rails of clothes but there was something not quite right about him. For a start, he was wearing a Crombie coat, a checked shirt, tight jeans and sixteen hole Doctor Marten boots. We’d recently started selling Harrington jackets so he may have been after them but he certainly didn’t seem the type to buy beige or brown polyester cotton mix trousers with a slight fault, even for the bargain price of seven pounds. Leo was serving another customer. I was watching from the doorway of the shop. I was absolutely not going to go out and serve the thug.
‘Oy, Jewboy,’ the thug said, looking at Leo. I winced. I’d been called Jewboy more than once; it was never a friendly greeting. If the thug wanted help with trouser measurements, he had a funny way of asking for it. I could only see Leo from behind and he continued to serve the other customer but there was something very tense about his back.
‘Oy, Jewboy,’ he said again, slower this time. More deliberate. Leo looked up. The thug then started making a hissing sound. I knew what he was doing. It was the noise of gas escaping. Cunt. I guess that in his twisted ideology, he’d calculated that the Jewish man may not have been pleased about the Holocaust reference coming his way but being money obsessed, wouldn’t have broken off from the customer for fear of losing the sale. He calculated incorrectly. Leo lunged towards him with alarming speed. He was a big guy and in that moment, he looked very dangerous. The thug, with a slightly surprised look on his stupid face, ran for his life with Leo following close behind. The customer and I stood there silently watching them disappear down the road. There was very little to say. Leo didn’t seem to be coming back any time soon. After a while, I asked the customer if he wanted to buy the pair of trousers he was holding. It took him a moment to regain his composure and then he looked down at the trousers and nodded. I think he thought it was probably the least he could do, but I’m fairly