Chapter 291: The Bovril End I

I told him on the Tuesday evening, on the Bovril End.

I rang him at dinnertime and asked him to come down to the ground at 7. He asked what for, and I said I would tell him when he got there. He said that was the kind of thing doctors said, and that he would come anyway.

Kieran was on the pitch with the big mower when Ted came in through the gate in the corner by the front wall. Ted had his stick and his scarf, though it was June and warm.

drone of the mower going away from us towards the far goal, and the smell of cut grass coming up the steps.

“He does it in stripes,” Ted said, watching. “Even in the summer, with nobody to see it.”

“He says the grass knows.”

“Course it does.” He looked up at the roof. “Where do you want me?”

“Wherever you sit.”

He went up the steps one at a time, with his free hand on the rail, to the old wooden seat at the back where he has sat since his legs went.

I sat on the step beside him. From up there you could see the whole of the terrace falling away to the front wall, every step of it, and every crush barrier. They were painted the same green they had been painted every summer since before either of us was born.

The concrete was still warm from the afternoon. A paper cup from the last home game had blown into the angle behind one of the barriers and stayed there, flattened, with the club badge still on it. Nobody had been up here since the semi-final in May except Kieran and the pigeons.

Out over the estuary a gull went kek, kek, kek and nobody answered it.

“Go on, then,” said Ted.

“There is a rule for clubs that go up into the Championship,” I said. “We get 3 seasons. After that, every ground in the top 2 divisions has to be all seats. No standing anywhere.”

He did not say anything. He looked down the terrace.

“This one,” I said. “3 seasons, from August. By August 2016, it has to be seats.”

“I heard about it,” he said, after a while. “On the radio, years back, after Hillsborough. I never thought it would come down this far. I thought it was for the big grounds.”

“It was. We are a big ground now, as far as the rule is concerned.”

Kieran turned the mower at the far end and started back towards us. Ted watched him come.

“How many does it hold?” he said. “This end. Standing.”

“6,000.”

“And sitting?”

“If you bolt seats onto these steps as they are, about 3,000. A man sitting takes the room of 2 standing.”

“Then 3,000 of them stop at home.” He leaned on his stick with both hands.

“And it will not be me that stops at home, son. It will be the lads who come with a pound and a bus fare. It will be Kelly’s boy, and the boy behind him who has not been born yet.”

“That is why I am not going to bolt seats onto these steps.”

He turned his head and looked at me properly.

“I want to take this end down after the last game of the coming season, next May,” I said. “The steps, the barriers, the lot. The roof stays. Then put it up again under the roof, deeper and steeper, with as many seats as it will hold.”

“And the price?”

“The price stays where it is. I said that in February, and I meant it in any division.”

“And the singing? The drum, and Tony’s bell, and that boy’s tide song?”

“Behind the goal, where they are now. The cheapest seats in the ground, in the middle of the end.”

“Seats,” said Ted, as if he were trying the word for size. “They will be stood up on them by the second Saturday. You know that.”

“There will be a rail along the front of every row,” I said. “A bar, at waist height, in front of every seat.”

“What for?”

“It makes a stand safer. If a crowd moves, everybody has something in front of them to hold.”

I believed every word of that. I had another reason as well.

In the life before, the Government let people stand again at the top of English football from the 1st of January 2022.

They allowed it only in parts of a ground where every seat had a barrier in front of it. It was the exact kind of rail I was describing to Ted on a June evening, nearly 9 years early.

Chelsea had it from the start, and the 2 Manchester clubs, and Tottenham, and Cardiff. Other clubs spent the years after that fitting rails to stands that had gone up without them.

“Will anybody ever stand on this end again?” Ted said. “After.”

“That is for the Government, Ted. Not for me, and not for the League.” I looked down at the green barriers. “I am going to make it so that if they ever change their minds, we are ready the same afternoon.”

He nodded slowly. drone of the mower, closer, and then Kieran saw us. He lifted a hand off the handle and went away again.

“I stood on that one,” Ted said. He pointed with his stick at a barrier about a third of the way down, a little to the left of the goal.

“You could lean on it at half-time and get your breath back, and talk to whoever was next to you. I do not think I ever stood next to the same man twice in a row.”

“Do you want it?” I said.

“Want what?”

“The barrier. When it comes out.”

He laughed, and it turned into a cough, and he waved a hand at me till it stopped.

“Where would I put a crush barrier, son? I have got a front room the size of a bus shelter.” He wiped his eyes. “Put it somewhere in the new one. Somewhere people can lean on it.”

“I will.”

“And I want to be on it for the last one. Whatever the last game is, next May. I want to stand on that barrier for the last 10 minutes, legs or no legs.”

“There will be a place kept for you on it,” I said.

He looked at me for a long time. Then he looked back down the terrace, at the barrier, as if he were checking it was still there.

“You had better take it to them,” he said. “The trust. They have not got a vote on a stand. I read Margaret’s paper. But you had better take it to them anyway.”

“I was going to.”

“I know you were,” said Ted. “I just wanted to be the one who said it first.”

The engineer came on the Thursday. He was a careful man from a firm near Chelmsford that had put up stands at half the grounds in Essex.

He unrolled 3 drawings on the boardroom table and weighed the corners down with Margaret’s stapler and 2 of Maureen’s mugs. rustle of the big paper, and clink as the second mug went down.

“Option one,” he said, with his finger on the first drawing. “We leave your steps where they are and bolt seats to them. It is quick and it is cheap. About a million, all in. You lose half the end.”

“No,” I said.

“I thought you might say that. Option 2.” He moved his finger.

“Steps out, barriers out, everything out under the roof. New steps, deeper and steeper, so every seat sees over the one in front. A seat on every step and a barrier rail in front of every row, the way you asked on the phone.”

“And the roof?”

“Your roof stays. We lift it on new columns and carry it back 6 metres over the new rows, out into your car park.”

“How many seats?”

“About 4,500. Your away end is old steps as well, but that is the small job. Seats bolted on, and visitors sit where they are put. Your ground ends up at about 6,000, and every one of them can see the whole pitch.”

The second drawing was a cross-section, the end cut through like a slice of cake. The old steps were drawn in a dotted line, low and shallow.

Over them the new ones went up in solid black, deeper and steeper, each with a small seat on it and a thin line standing up in front of it at the height of a man’s waist. There were 30 of those thin lines, one above the other, all the way up to the roof.

“And the cost?”

“Between 6 and 7 million, depending on what we find when we dig.” He sat back. “Option 3 is a new stand from the ground up, 2 tiers, about 6,000 seats, and a new roof. You would be throwing away a roof that is not a year old.”

“No,” I said.

“Thank you,” said the engineer, and rolled it up.

Maureen had her pencil out over a pad. Margaret was reading the second drawing upside down.

“The rails,” Margaret said. “Are they allowed? In the Championship?”

“They are seats with a bar in front of them,” said the engineer. “The licence says seats. These are seats. The Germans have used them for years, at Hannover and plenty of other clubs.”

“Has anybody here got them?”

“Not yet. Peterborough’s chief executive went over to look at them last year, and came back writing about them to anybody who would listen.”