Baz, Ant and the Boys

By Ian Veazey

The summer started with ‘Brown Sugar’ and it ended with The Who at The Oval cricket ground, where they turned live rock music into a mesmerizing, pulsating miracle. And bound up in this heady atmosphere of 1971 was the pure, unadulterated love of football and all its absurdities, where sex, snakebite and the slide tackle scythed their way through everything.

Shortfall College, a gaunt and brooding building, reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution cut a dark slice of shadow across the South London sky. It was here that an oddball, dotty selection of students set out in search of the Holy Grail – the South London Intercollegiate Cup – aided by spurious tactics and hindered by countless distractions.

From Marlene, the landlord’s wife, a goddess and vixen with a predilection for ice who couldn’t keep her hands off Baz, to Norman, a ringer, with a rather unhealthy lopsided grin who completely snapped when trying to remove an opponent’s ear with his teeth.

Driven ever onwards by The Bear, their captain and inspiration, and Baz, his defensive henchman, they try to rein in the Ant, who possesses the aerodynamics of a spear and a footballing philosophy whereby the ball isn’t absolutely necessary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398487918

Ian Veazey

After 20 years of teaching English and Drama in London, Ian Veazey left England for the island of Lesvos, where he taught English and lived for the next 23 years. This is where he met his wonderful wife, with whom he has two equally wonderful daughters. Now he lives in a Greek village on the mainland a stone’s throw from the mountains that separate Greece from Bulgaria. The garden is abundant in olive and fruit trees, which is shared with Tara his extremely silly dog and Roushka, the family cat, who just happens to be a princess and ruler over everything she sees.

Book preview

About the Author

After 20 years of teaching English and Drama in London, Ian Veazey left England for the island of Lesvos, where he taught English and lived for the next 23 years.

This is where he met his wonderful wife, with whom he has two equally wonderful daughters.

Now he lives in a Greek village on the mainland a stone’s throw from the mountains that separate Greece from Bulgaria. The garden is abundant in olive and fruit trees, which is shared with Tara his extremely silly dog and Roushka, the family cat, who just happens to be a princess and ruler over everything she sees.

Dedication

To Dick and Tess with all my love.

Copyright Information ©

Ian Veazey 2023

The right of Ian Veazey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398487901 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398487918 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

The summer started with the release of ‘Brown Sugar’ and the death of Jim Morrison, and it just kept trundling on from there. The Weeley Festival shocked the local residents of Clacton and when 150,000 soaked and muddy souls creamed their jeans over a T-Rex set that bruised the Gods, they couldn’t really understand it. And it ended with The Who at The Oval cricket ground, where they turned live rock into a mesmeric, pulsating miracle. 20,000 staked themselves out on the turf, usually the preserve of the country’s best medium-pacers with a nagging length, and began to believe in heaven.

Ford Cortinas wore the letter ‘J’, loons, platform shoes and velvet jackets with enormous lapels were in, but pounds shillings and pence were out. This made a pint of lager in the college bar 15p instead of three shillings. It was a heady, bewitching time of freedom, independence and ignorance. Marijuana got confused with Capstan Full Strength and the Big Picture was difficult to imagine. Vietnam and the consequences hadn’t yet been understood. Nelson Mandela was in prison because the Rastafarans said so and nobody had a clue that on the bottom right hand side of Europe Greece was under the thumb of a military dictatorship which tortured people on a political whim. And the Iron Curtain was something that only John le Carre knew something about. And not many people knew about him!

It wasn’t a time of putting all the loose ends together; it was a time of wondering what each end actually was. There was so much to take in and sex, snakebite and football just clambered over everything.

Autumn Term 1971

baz

As the train sped south to King’s Cross, the track beneath it cut and separated two different worlds. To the right were the soft, rolling hills and wooded hollows of a more gentle landscape, to the left was the very western edge of the land of his birth, the Fens; land that stretched unflinchingly into the distance without a single hummock or swale in between. A vast openness only broken at times by thin lines of silver birch, a roof of a low building or the raised bank of an arrow-straight drain. And this, for once, without any weather to speak of. When it rained, it came in nail-hard iron and it hammered the land and the people on it. When it blew, the Gods spat their venom in such rage that they lifted up the thin soil and whipped it into clouds and drifts with not a hedge to prevent it. When it snowed, the world became a white dome. The bark of the birch-narrow ghosts, grey pencils against endless white. A land of extremes made tame to the eye through the window of a train and the late, benign, September sun.

Baz looked through the glass at the few remaining fields of stubble and the dark brown soil turned by the plough. He watched the beauty of it as the memories of the summer shifted further and further into the distance. He could still smell the dust from the combine, diesel and muck, the spiked barbs of barley and chaff, and the warm smell of wheat gushing in torrents from augers. The sheer pleasure of the fierce sun baking men and stones, the mystery of wood-varnished sunsets spreading across sweat-streaked faces.

He relaxed into the relative comfort of British Rail and wanted to self-combust. It had been a great summer. He had worked hard, his body was fit and strong, he had money in his pocket and he had a week to go before college started. A week of meeting friends, going a little crazy and reacquainting himself with good old London Town.

The train cranked to a halt around 6:00 p.m. and he took the tube. Between the rush hour and ‘going out time’, there was usually a lull, but this didn’t seem to affect the amount of weirdoes and drunks living out their own insecurities. He had forgotten that so many existed. There were some right cranky cuckoos up in the Fens but nothing to match this lot.

Generally, they tended to leave Baz alone because of his appearance. He was not particularly tall at 5 ft 8 ins, but he was built like a barn. He was barrel-chested with legs like girders and his neck sat on his shoulders like a stubborn rock. But it was his chin that gave him that daunting edge. It jutted out and was so deeply cleft that it resembled the backside of someone bending down—a shorter, more attractive Desperate Dan.

Above it, though, was a gentle face dominated by two sharp black, deep-set eyes and long dark hair that was swept back into curls and nestled around the high part of his shoulder blades. He might have looked like he could have thrown anyone from one week into the middle of the next, but the spirit was never willing. On the football field between kick-off and the final whistle, every sinew of body and mind was used in aggressive detail, but in the confines of civilian life, he couldn’t hurt a fly.

He waited for the sliding doors to open; he even made himself wait until the train had gone. It was a time to savour. He loved the wild Fens, but he had discovered in this pulsating city that he could easily carry his homeland around inside him. A marriage of memory, and the power of the present, had been wrestled with to create harmony.

He noticed a poster for ‘Straw Dogs’ on the platform with the graffiti ‘So Does Hay’ written across it. His limited grammar couldn’t cope—obviously been in the sticks too long. But he had no such trouble with the ‘L’ neatly crossed out of ‘Clockwork Orange’.

He handed in his ticket and walked down the tunnel. An old man was selling flowers in the forecourt and an even older one was shouting out the headlines of the ‘Evening Standard’. He turned right onto the South Circular with a warm errand on his mind.

After a brisk five-minute walk, he was standing outside Mr Patel’s, one of those corner shops that sold everything from dishcloths to crumpets but with an exotic perfume grooved into the walls. Shelves of spices in pods and powder that gave Baz a bubbling appetite just by breathing. He pushed the door open and put his bags on the floor. His nose immediately gave itself up to seduction.

Mr Bazil, you’re back. And what a pleasure it is to see you.

Mr Patel was from Calcutta but sounded as if he should have been reading the Six O’clock News, not a trace of an accent east of Broadcasting House anywhere.

Mr Patel, the pleasure is all mine. How are you?

Not bad, old chap, not bad at all. And you? They shook hands over the counter.

Couldn’t be better. And the wife?

Growing more beautiful by the day.

That’s the ticket.

Mr Patel and his wife had taken to Baz from the beginning and had been fascinated by his daily demand for lager, bread and milk. He rarely bought anything else. Maybe it was because of this that they started giving him little extras and, when they heard that he had begun to pursue the delights of Indian food, he was offered tasty morsels such as homemade onion bajees, lamb dupiaza and sag aloo. Mr Patel went out of his way to explain that they would never eat such dishes in Calcutta, but it was a part of their integration programme into British life. The irony was not lost on Baz, as he was blown away by the intoxicating flavours and their generosity. They once gave him some Bombay duck in a small plastic bowl and told him to boil some rice and add the paste to it. Baz had never tasted anything like it and marvelled at how they fed ducks in Bombay.

Baz produced a large parcel from one of his bags. I have eaten many of your wondrous delights, Mr Patel, so now it’s your turn to eat some of mine. Prize country sausages!

Ah! What a gift! This is indeed a proud moment.

Made by my father. Herby, spicy and incomparable. And for a side dish, a free-range chicken and half a dozen eggs. Simple fare, Mr Patel, to show you how we simple folk live.

What can I say? I am humbled. And he was. Mr Bazil, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Baz placed his usual order and his Asian friend gave him a couple of fresh paratas.

To the splendour of autumn, said Mr Patel.

To the splendour of paratas, said Baz.

*

The privet hedge had not been cut since Baz, the Ant and the Tench had moved in the previous January, and the detritus of the landlord’s occupation seldom changed behind it. Pat was a builder of sorts and the front garden was one of his dumps. There were torn bags of cement that had solidified in the rain, two broken toilet cisterns, a wide variety of plastic pipes, bricks, breeze blocks and God knows what else. He lived on the ground floor with his wife and the front room was used as yet another dump. Baz and the Ant had often been asked to lend a hand in moving stuff in and out, and the hall because of the constant movement, was often covered in grit, gravel or sand. And, being forever covered in dust himself, Pat looked more like a baker. He never kept regular hours and was rarely seen moving from one place to the other empty-handed, and most things that Pat was involved in, they were convinced, were not exactly legal. Though a hard man to pin down, he was always there or thereabouts when the rent was due. No one believed for one minute that Pat knew what a taxman was.

Baz stood on the doorstep with a smooth key poised an inch from the lock. If happiness meant feeling good, then he’d cracked it.

the ant

The Ant, however, hadn’t managed to crack a thing. It was the same old story.

Come on, Luigi. Think on it as a farewell gift.

You always mention this. You not right in the head.

I’m going crazy.

We no change jingles. The jingle and the van one thing.

Just for today. A gesture of goodwill.

Insurance, my friend. Insurance.

What insurance?

You think I run the best ice-cream business in the world without insurance? Bah!

He threw his arms in the air and muttered in his native tongue what sounded like profane and disturbing oaths.

Isn’t a Christmas song a bit at odds with ice cream and summer? Why can’t you give me the old Bedford with Mozart in it?

Luigi embraced his belly and hunched it up into position on the top of his belt.

You selling ice cream? This was always his final argument. He stabbed a chubby finger at the Ant’s chest, what there was of it.

That’s not the point, said the Ant.

Bah! He guffawed, tossed his head back and wobbled off to his office where he settled down to do some paperwork. The Ant paused awhile, tugged at his ear and then headed for his van. He had worked out that during the summer he had heard the refrain from ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’ at least three thousand and twenty-six times; it was getting to him. But what the hell! It was his last afternoon and by tomorrow night he would be back in good old London Town.

*

The sky was a mixture of weak blue and thin, uncertain clouds. It was trying to be warm, but there was a hint of autumn on each breath of wind. Not the perfect day for selling ice cream but a perfect day nonetheless. After three stops, he hadn’t sold a thing, but at least the tight balls of cotton wool were successfully fusing the jingle into a subdued, painless hum.

Around 2:00 p.m., he pulled up in a terraced street that was in spitting distance of his beloved Fratton Park. The austere stands with their black roofs, solid and defiant, rising above the houses clustered on every side of them. The dark, empty stadium where Pompey had strutted their stuff and inspired his dreams since childhood. He jumped out of the van, ran hither and thither in darting, exhilarating runs that criss-crossed both road and pavement. He sold dummies to lampposts, dropped his shoulder at the last minute, swerved and rolled out of tackles in diametric, mazy runs and for an encore he did a few impressions of great Pompey centre forwards scoring great Pompey goals. After a bag of hat-tricks and the attendant celebrations, he punched the air and made an idolatry dash to an imaginary corner flag. This was not accepted practice, but it summed up the Ant and his footballing philosophy perfectly. A precedent here, a footballing precedent there and way, way ahead of his time. It was the pushing back of boundaries and just before dizziness set in, he noticed a woman and a child standing at the window of the bright, yellow van.

If you want to attract attention, love, I’d use the jingle. I don’t think that dance will catch on. Not round here anyways.

The Ant was very similar in stature to a stick insect but far less complicated. He was made up of six bones. Five of them were of nearly equal length and thickness and these acted as arms, legs and torso. Number six was perched on the top and passed off as a head. His face was narrow, depth being given to it by two thick eyebrows that gave shelter to hazel eyes beneath. There was no stubble to speak of, a face and complexion of soft copper and hair, the colour of light honey, flew in wild abandon behind him. It fell halfway down his back and when trying to score goals for the college team, or driving an ice-cream van, he wore an old school tie as a bandanna. And he could move! Having the aerodynamic advantages of a spear, he was able to cut through any weather at speed and with such stamina that he resembled an antelope in full flight. When not sleeping, reading or extremely stoned, where he reverted in temperament and movement similar to that of the two-toed sloth, he would be on the hoof. A mixture of creatures then, all trussed up in a young and passionate heart.

I’ll have a double-flake and a strawberry sundae with all the trimmings.

Syrup?

I said all the trimmings, didn’t I?

The woman had a sour face and two very thin lips that treated words unkindly.

Yes, you did.

You a supporter, then?

I am.

Were you in there last March?

Sadly, I wasn’t.

Don’t suppose anybody was. She was enjoying this.

Last March, they went seven and a half hours without a goal. Can you believe that? Our neighbourhood was the quietest one in the whole of the south of England on a Saturday afternoon. And all them fancy-dans earning all that money. It’s criminal.

This was blasphemy. The Ant, smarted by these heathen words, was of the mind that words would be wasted, whereas actions might not. Swallowing his socialist principles for a moment, he stabbed his scoop into the vat and creamed up a portion. With a deft flick of the wrist, he flipped it on the top of a cone. There was enough air inside to keep an earwig alive until Tuesday.

Have a nice day!

He said goodbye to Fratton and parked up in a deserted side street. He took out ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and started to read. He even toyed with the idea of having a nap. It was his last day after all and his ears had eaten enough of the ding-dong song to last a lifetime.

baz and the ant

As soon as they had learnt how to kick a ball, they had been hooked and life became an unfulfilling experience without one. Born and brought up in different parts of the country, in environments sharply juxtaposed, two young boys bought a programme on match days, listened with strained ears pressed against the radio for the away results and became their heroes in every field, road or path they could find. From Peterborough—‘Up the Posh’, to Portsmouth—‘Play up Pompey’, every day was never long enough. Darkness came all too quickly to dim the location of the pullovers posing as goalposts and each dawn was a fresh, high-octane start. While Baz revelled in all the records broken by the Posh in the 60s, the Ant was still hanging onto the narcotic memories that hung in every rafter since the glorious days of 48–50. Cold Saturday afternoons on empty terraces with freezing feet and the reek of urine. Hot Bovril to warm hand and gut, the thrill of hearing bad language from adults and the slide tackle that never ended.

At Christmas, the Meccano set offered interest and distraction, but it couldn’t create a sustained tingle like the Football Annual. There were stories and facts, statistics and tables and above all the photographs. Black and white ones of Ron Springett flying through the air like a majestic bird, Johnny Haynes with hair blown back steaming through the mud with the ball at his feet and Jimmy Greaves turning to salute the crowd. Hair and shirt soaked, socks round the ankles and magic displayed in a raised hand. And the wonder of the glossy portrait! Stars with exotic names such as Di Stefano, Pele, Puskas and Yashin from strange, faraway places. Hidden languages and cultures ignited in the technicolour of the imagination.

And so they both grew with school interfering immensely. With far more emphasis placed on books than on balls, their footballing hearts broke into pieces as they stared at the page. Frustration screwed their souls to the scholastic wall as one meaningless conjugation was replaced by another. Latin followed by French, logarithm and sine, litmus paper and phosphorous thrown into the waste bin to create any kind of diversion.

Though written in different ink and by a different hand, each report was a test of courage to take home. There were no distinctions or encouraging phrases that made walking through the front door easier. As ‘O’ levels loomed, a tutor took Baz to one side. He explained, barely able to hide a sneer, that a boy, even with only one ‘O’ level, had every opportunity of progressing from the dark, acrid vaults of the brick kilns to the office after a few decades of serious application. Baz thanked him very much and ticked off sarcasm in his burgeoning book of life.

But Baz and the Ant survived. They read the introductions to textbooks and novels, copied notes from more conscientious friends