97 Lost Futures

Some memories relating to having watched the Hillsborough disaster as it unfolded on TV.

'97 Lost Futures' is an autobiographical piece by Patrick Wray, an artist based in London. Patrick is the author of 'The Flood that Did Come' (Avery Hill), 'Ghost Stories I Remember' (Colossive Press), 'Grandad Reg' (Kus!) (Illustrated, made in collaboration with Clara Heathcock) and not forgetting, 'We Can Collect the Keys' (EXIT Press) (Illustrated, made in collaboration with Clive Judd).

To see and hear more from Patrick, you can connect with him on Instagram, Twitter, or at http://www.patrickwray.com.

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I kept on pacing around the living room and occasionally going outside, still hoping that the game might resume. My only thought was, ‘This is boring. This isn’t the exciting game of football we came for; it’s just people standing about on the pitch.’ It gradually dawns on me that this game won’t re-start; something else is going on now that has rendered the match irrelevant. But still my selfish young mind insists, ‘We want to be entertained!’ My gormless kid mind doesn’t pick up on the nuances of what they call ‘the mood music’. I don’t really register the commentator’s words, or the change in tone, the serious faces as the video link cuts back to the Grandstand studio. I only understand finally that the game won’t restart simply through the fact that it never does. 

I was there on that sunny day in April 1989, twelve years old, watching the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forrest. I was at home watching from the safety of my own living room, a cup of stewed tea that had been freshly heated up in the microwave to hand and my usual quota of three digestive biscuits piled up beside me. My mum and my sister were out and about somewhere. My sister liked Irish dancing back then, so they were probably doing that. My dad was in the garden enjoying the sunny weather and saying, ‘I’m thinking of getting this garden paved over so I don’t have to cut this bloody grass anymore!’ This was my home. I was there when it happened.

Everyone always says that it was a glorious day that day, and so it was, if you go by the weather forecast alone. ‘On a clear, sunny day at Hillsborough, the stage is set for a re-run of last year’s classic!’ commentator John Motson proudly exclaimed as the game kicked off.

At around four minutes into the match, Peter Beardsley hit the crossbar, and the crowd roared. We didn’t know it then, but in that very moment people were already losing their lives. A bunch of fans who had escaped what was happening in the stand were now gathering on the pitch alongside the goalmouth. John Motson commented that this was unusual, but no-one seemed overly concerned about it at first. They go with the flow, with the crowd.

A major disaster can be a grimly fascinating event when we look back on it, which is probably one of the reasons I have returned to view the footage of the day and watched quite a few documentaries about it over the years. Tragedy on such a large scale becomes something that is, in some cases, loaded with so many wider implications and questions for society. This is certainly the case with Hillsborough. It starts to incorporate an ever-evolving, growing ensemble cast of characters who are all caught up in a story they wouldn’t wish to be a part of. 

My young mind could not comprehend the extent of the tragedy at the time. My life, in many ways, carried on as normal. A sick joke in the playground about Hillsborough was shared by someone at school. Terrible events in the news take on an abstract, almost ornate status in the young mind, too immature to fully understand or empathise with the pain and misfortune of others.

I liked football back then, but then I lost interest in it during the nineties. I guess I never loved it, I just liked it. It gave me and my dad something to connect about in 1989 and he used to sometimes come and join me and my friends in the park for a kick about. ‘He’s mad on football,’ and ‘He’s just like his dad,’ people would say.

Part of that original BBC broadcast I watched all those years ago is now uploaded to YouTube as ‘Hillsborough: rare match footage’. That phrasing ‘rare match footage’, it seems to imply there might be some historical significance in seeing how the match was looking on the day.  Not long after Beardsley’s crossbar, referee Ray Lewis stopped the game. John Barnes calls over to Ray Houghton, ‘What’s going on man?’ And so, it had begun, that terrible afternoon when everything that could go wrong did.

I must confess I have watched that clip a few times over the years. Maybe it’s morbid curiosity, but I would like to think there is something more to it than that. I still think of that day quite often. I was home; I felt safe, but for some out there, the world was falling apart, the world was ending. But I was at home; I was safe. Ignorance is bliss.

After a third or fourth viewing of the Hillsborough match footage, it begins to feel like I am seeing a memory of a memory. The original memory of watching it on the day becomes mixed in with the memory of watching it again with a broader perspective of what is happening onscreen. It also starts to bring some of the people onscreen into clearer view, they become familiar faces, real people again, rather than just figures on a screen, faces in a crowd.

I sat there that day, with a bored and arrogant shrug for a match delayed, postponed, ‘Come on, let’s get on with it!’ and, ‘What are they playing at now?’ I went in and out of the house, updating my dad, ‘They’ve stopped the game.’’ He tuts, ‘Scarce gits!’ He always uses that term when anything to do with Liverpudlians comes up. I don’t know why and if I ever asked him, he’d just say, ‘They just are, aren’t they?’

Hillsborough has remained in the public eye ever since it happened. It still makes the news now. So many things around it remain unresolved to this day. ‘Unlawful killing’ was the verdict of an inquest in 2016, but no-one has been prosecuted, no heads will roll, really, there will only be early retirement on a full police pension.

As that April afternoon blurred into early evening, the victim count at Hillsborough was still rising by the hour. I was sitting outside and I mentioned it to my neighbour Joan who was in her garden putting out some washing.  Joan had a kind and warm personality; she was easy-going and gave everyone, including children the time of day ‘Terrible isn’t it?’ ‘Sixty odd people dead,’ ‘It’s gone up to seventy odd now,’ ‘Ticketless fans,’ ‘They’ve done it again, they only have themselves to blame don’t they?’ A roll of the eyes and a knowing look. The die had already been cast.

The lies reported in the newspapers in the coming days, most notably in the Sun’s despicable ‘The Truth’ issue, were already starting to spread. Other newspapers did not exactly do themselves proud. My dad was a Daily Mirror man, and I remember their  garish full-colour spread on the Monday after the disaster which featured horrific close up pictures of fans crushed against the perimeter fence, ‘Hell of Hillsborough’ and ‘Never Again’ the headlines rang. The face of a terrified teenage girl haunted me for years after. I presumed she had died, but she hadn’t. She survived, why did I never check? I just presumed she must be dead: how could anyone survive that? Then one day, I saw her interviewed on a documentary about the disaster. Her name was Debbie Routledge. 

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster there was much discussion about whether that year’s FA Cup should be played at all or whether it should be abandoned completely. In the end it was decided that it would go ahead. After beating Forest 3-1 in the rescheduled semi-final on the 7th of May, it was to be a Merseyside derby against Everton for the final.

The FA Cup final took place just over a month after the Hillsborough disaster on the 20^th of May. I again found myself plonked down in front of the television in our front room waiting for the match to kick-off, just as I had been for the Hillsborough game only a few weeks earlier. Once again, my mum and sister were out somewhere and my dad sat in the garden reading the paper with a beer. The rhythm of life for us remained exactly the same. Why wouldn’t it?

Me and dad were both neutral fans, having affinity for neither team, but for some strange reason we decided we would back Everton to win that day. Why as a neutral supporter would you begrudge Liverpool victory this year? But that’s what we did.

The final was a dull game at first. Liverpool scored early on and the rest of the game was uneventful until Everton grabbed an equaliser in the eighty-ninth minute. I shouted at full volume, ‘Everton!’ and dad ran into the house and cheered. We performed an absurd jig together, doing the contrarian dance, backing the wrong side. It was to be one of the only moments of unadulterated, spontaneous joy dad and I would ever share.  In the end Liverpool beat Everton 3-2 in extra time. In extra time the game had turned into somewhat of a thriller, but in the end Liverpool clinched it with a victory that must have surely seemed bittersweet.

A few years later on Easter Sunday in 1992, my mother had a brain haemorrhage and spent several months in hospital, first at Leeds General Infirmary and then at Keighley Airdale Hospital. On the same ward, in the bed next to her was the ninety-sixth victim of Hillsborough, Tony Bland. Tony had travelled down from Keighley to Sheffield to watch the match on that fateful day in April 1989, but he had remained in a coma ever since being caught up in the fatal crush at Hillsborough. He was visited by his family every day, just as we visited mum each day.

We were aware of who Tony Bland was as his story had been on the news a lot, but I don’t recall having much conversation with his family when we visited mum. We must have at least acknowledged them I suppose, said hello, but I don’t really remember. We were there to see mum. Hospital wards are a bit like that though aren’t they? There is sometimes a kind of camaraderie that forms between the patients, but for visitors, that doesn’t tend to happen as much, does it? You are too focussed on worrying about the person you are visiting, everyone has enough on their plate. Each hospital bed seems to have an invisible wall built around it and the beds become like lifeboats drifting on a sea of uncertainty.

I sometimes wonder now if Tony could hear us as he lay there in silence, unable to communicate.  Lying there so still, soaking up everything that happened on the ward, overhearing hundreds, thousands of conversations, years of different families’ stories, as each of them, worried sick, visited their loved ones; a universe of trauma, tears, laughter and family rows echoing through his mind as he fell through space, waiting forever to find out the score. He eventually passed away in 1993 after a court order to let him die was finally granted, making legal history at the time.

All these years later, Hillsborough remains in my thoughts when memories of other disasters that happened in the same era have largely faded. Perhaps it is because I was watching it on television as it unfolded that I remember it more, because I was in some tiny way, a participant in the event.

Another reason Hillsborough is so embedded in my psyche is that so much about it remains open and unresolved. People waited for a match to restart, some never realising it stopped at 3.06 that day.  Years later, a crowd chanted for answers and for justice that never came.

I would not describe my formative years as exactly idyllic, but they were okay and, much like anyone else, I had nothing else to compare them to at the time. As a child, things have a sense of certainty to them and that is something I remember, the certainty of school terms, Christmas holidays and television shows, back for a new series.

It takes experience to learn that nothing is a given and that life can profoundly change overnight. Things for my family changed a lot after my mother suffered her brain haemorrhage, but in many ways they didn’t, they just carried on. It was that sense of certainty and safety in life that I think Hillsborough made me question for the first time and perhaps that is one of the reasons why it has continued to occupy my thoughts ever since.

I still remember that day. I was at home, I was safe. I remember getting up from my chair because the match had stopped and I was bored, because I wanted to watch a game of football.

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