FOSDYKE AND ME
A SAGA
© John Gilham 2000
Fosdyke and Me
The
reason the 12th West Middlesex Boys' Brigade football team
Never
won a match was Fosdyke and me
Week
after week Fosdyke and me
would stand there in the freezing rain
Peering
through the West London grunge to where
The
tall, lithe, athletic, skilful, bodies of our team-mates
Leapt
and plunged after the entirely unpredictable movements
Of a
small, sodden, leather mass that me and Fosdyke were
there to stop
Right
back, him, and left back, me
We got
agitated when figures loomed out of the drizzle, coming our way
Fosdyke and me would paw
the ground like nervous thoroughbreds
Dash
this way and that, look threatening behind our NHS
specs
Though
our legs, I seem to remember, developed all the elegance of a new-born giraffe
As the
ball was tapped expertly between them and on towards goal.
Every
Saturday me and Fosdyke used to cycle out to some forgotten
field,
No
changing rooms, no bogs, no spectators, except dogs
(Who'd
cock their leg on your bike)
And
spend an afternoon being shouted at, pushed in the mud, or told by the
goalkeeper to
"Leave
it to me!" just when we might have had a kick at it.
Fosdyke and me were
responsible, I'm sure,
For our
Captain's permanent sore throat, instructing us from a distance.
"Cretins"
he called us, which wasn't polite, or p.c., but understandable,
Unlike
"Mark your man!" or "Lob!"; and
the offside rule eludes me still,
Though
I was shouted at about it quite a lot
Fosdyke and me got
elbowed aside quite a lot too,
If not
by the casual thundering force of the opposition
So that
by the time I'd cleaned the mud off my glasses
They'd
scored another three goals,
Then by
exasperated members of our own team,
Desperately
trying to save the day.
Stopping
me and Fosdyke getting the ball got to be quite
important for our side
Usually,
we lost ten-nil or so, though once it was only one - nil
When
the other side had only six men.
Me and Fosdyke
used to commiserate between spurts of action.
"Only
another seventy-three minutes to go."
We
didn't always remember to change ends at half time
And
when our glasses steamed up and our knees froze beneath our shorts
And
everything else beneath our shorts as well,
And
we'd been knocked over and trod on and shouted at for nearly 90 minutes
I
sometimes used to wonder why me and Fosdyke were there at all
Except
that I knew. They needed us. We made a
full squad.
No-one
could ever say the 12th West Middlesex Boys' Brigade
Was two players short of a footballteam.
Fosdyke and me and football remained strangers to
the end
Even
when we both simultaneously slide tackled a player coming out of the mist
And it
was the referee, even when, once, we scored - and it was an own goal
They
knew we were loyal and dutiful, me and Fosdyke
And we
kept going one whole season, even though no-one ever said thanks
or "Well-played" (which
anyway would have been a lie)
Fosdyke and me, we had our day."'
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Me and Fosdyke,
Again.
Every
time the Heston and Isleworth Young Socialists held a dance, I'd go with Fosdyke
Me and Fosdyke
would get on the bus, self-conscious in Italian suits, winklepickers,
slimline ties, and national health
spectacles,
We'd
pat our pockets for the dance tickets, the ten-bob note for drinks, the packet
of Durex we'd bought last time and never used but
still hoped to, and a stolen tube of K Y jelly just in case
(though we weren't sure in case of what, or where you applied
it, or when)
And
we'd spent all day curling our lips like Elvis, pouting like Billy Fury, moving
real slow like Gene Vincent, fixing them with a look
And in
the mirror, anyway, our chat-up lines worked every time, like Brylcreem in the ads.
Not
that we were ever real Young Socialists, me and Fosdyke.
We felt
left out. All that heady talk of
comrades and the Trots made us think of horses, or diarrhea
And we
weren't Young Conservatives either - wrong clothes, wrong accents, wrong
breeding, wrong kind of dancing, wrong politics even,
Those
long-legged, horse-riding, bacardi drinking, weekend
sailing, super girls were not for us
And we
weren't anybody's idea of a bit of rough, even.
No,
when Fosdyke and me went dancing, we went for the
girls who went for Johnny Red and the Pirates and if they couldn't have Johnny
up there on the stage would maybe have us, on the rebound Girls came in twos
and we'd always say "I don't think much of yours", hoping that we'd
get the pretty one and not her fat friend
And
then we'd close in and ask them to dance, try to keep 'em
going till the band did a slow one and we could touch them, smell their perfume,
Look
down the front of their dresses at their teen bras
Me and Fosdyke
had one thing in mind - our virginity, our inexperience
And
consumed with lust, we'd paw and fumble round the dance floor
Hoping
that the low light wouldn't show the lump in our trousers
Hoping
the Clearasil was hiding our spots and not cracking (you had to put it on thick
to hide the big ones and the blackheads)
Worrying
whether our breath smelled, should we be using Amplex,
and what was Amplex anyway,
if she minded blokes with
glasses, if she'd come outside
When
there was a break, we'd compare notes in the bog
"Did
you get a feel? Were they real?
Did she
put her tongue out when you kissed her?
Will
she go?"
But
inside ourselves, we wondered what it all meant, me and Fosdyke
We
wondered why the girls we chose always had their father coming to collect them
at 11,
Or
wanted their friend with a flat chest, tartan gymslip and knee socks to come
outside too, who moved your hand when it approached an erogenous zone (and they
seemed to be everywhere)
Who
wouldn't open their lips when kissing, who giggled with their friends and
talked behind their hands and who didn't make up for our lack of conversation
and savoir faire by talking to us themselves,
And who
were the only ones we dared ask to dance because the ones with the very short
skirts and the red lipstick and the tight, pert, sexy little bodies that they
enticed us with
And who
smiled and who knew everything and how to do it, or pretended they did and were
only our age or even younger -
Were
just too scary !
And wanked, and dreamed of stocking tops, and buttocks,
And
what it must be like to be Johnny Red and take your pick.
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Me and Fosdyke Do Poetry
When me
and Fosdyke did poetry, we wanted to do it right
It's
not easy, poetry
We had
to know about metre and measure and rhyme schemes and stress schemes and
spondees and dactyls and sonnets and alliteration and epics and epigrams,
And
epithalamia and sestinas and couplets and triolets
and haiku and similes and assonance and dissonance and consonants,
And
euphony and bathos and pathos and onomatopoeia and sprung rhythm and the
Writers and Artists year Book and how to type
And you
had to have a subject, we believed
Well, me and Fosdyke did some of that -
some of it was "O" level after all
You
could pick it up from Wordsworth and the Metaphysicals,
(Getting
it done like Donne was marvellous)
We'd
slip in a dash of Hopkins, and a pinch of bible-black,
(But
careful with the Tennyson, too much could spoil it),
And
then the merest hint of Eliot, to give a taste of greatness.
And we
said "Right, no good hiding our lights under the flight path to Heathrow,
out here in the Kipling-reading, nodding-dog suburbs,
We need
a sophisticated metropolitan audience"
So we
took our poems up to Speakers Corner, on a Sunday.
You had
to have a soapbox, we knew that, but I didn't know what a soap-box was - our
soap came in a paper bag - no elevation to that.
So we
took an old wooden box my mum kept the shoe-cleaning in and we went up on the
Tube and Trevor Huddleston was standing up there
And all
the black power guys and the hell fire guys and not yet the women's lib guys cos this was the sixties -
And the
Communists and the Nazis and the flat earth people and not yet the gay rights
people cos this was the sixties
And the
CND people and Bertrand Russell (cos this ’was’ the
sixties) and a old woman with an umbrella who heckled everybody and waved it in
your face and said we were rubbish
And me and Fosdyke doing our poetry.
We got
an audience, and some of 'em stayed longer than it
took to find out what we were talking about,
And
some of 'em heckled
And
sometimes we ad libbed back like early rappers
And
when we stopped rhyming moon with June and moved on from our adolescent sexual
fantasies, full of euphemism and sublimation
Masturbation
on paper
And got
stuck in to the Vietnam war and LBJ and McNamara and
Field Marshall Ky and all those men we loved to hate
(Before
Thatcher introduced an equality of hatred)
Then
all the American tourists in the audience would wake up a bit and some of them would shout about
patriotism and communism and the threat to freedom
And
then some other Americans would start yelling about imperialism and fascism and
the military industrial complex and killing women and children
And
pretty soon we'd have to take our shoebox somewhere else
While
they kept the audience.
And a
few people who didn't know much about poetry or who didn't speak English or who
had designs on our bodies told us how good we were
And
some made obscure invitations to what I only now realise were illegal practices
but which slid off our innocence like KY jelly
'Cos this was the sixties
And
somehow we got invited to read our poetry at the Norwegian YWCA one evening
And the
place was just stacked with young Norwegian Christian women in relaxed poses
And me and Fosdyke read our poems of
wistful schoolboy lust until they and their blonde hair and their long legs
were all put under lock and key at ten-o-clock
And we
were put out on the street.
Poetry
never did pull the girls like we hoped it would
For
somehow, when we moved from the carefully crafted expressions of undying
passion on the page to real life on the settee,
We got
into difficulties of articulation and communication and presentation and
premature ejaculation
And we
entered competitions and didn't win anything
And we
wrote out haiku in neat calligraphy and hung them on the railings of the
Bayswater Road for sixpence and didn't sell anything
Me and Fosdyke
did poetry all one spring and summer
We lyricised, we elegised, we sonnetised
We
blank versed, we rhymed, we limericked
We grew
long hair, we looked mysterious, we practised epigrams
We
confessed shyly to girls that we were poets
And
they giggled and found they had something else to do
And we
faced the dilemma, me and Fosdyke
That
you can alliterate and resonate and carbonate your words
Till
the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea
But you
have to write about something
(And at
seventeen, me and Fosdyke had bugger all to write
about)
You
know, you get some poets, like Wordsworth and Tennyson and Armitage
Who
grind on long after the inspirations's gone - living
on their fame
But
fame had never come to me and Fosdyke, nor inspiration,
And the
mainspring of our feelings was frustration
For oh
how we wanted to lie in bed with a girl on a sunny morning
And
make poetry out of used tea-bags and last-night's stockings hanging over the
radiator
Like
all the other poets who wore long scarves and cord jackets
And had
girlfriends with long hair and short skirts to be their bed-sit Muse.
Me and Fosdyke packed up our haikus and picked up our
shoebox
And
went home through the sodium lighted evening to our separate semis in our
identical streets, underneath the flight path to Heathrow
And waited
for something to happen, so we could write about it.
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Me and Fosdyke on
Holiday.
The
year Fosdyke's Dad gave him a second-hand, beat-up,
almost-undesirable-even-to-Fosdyke Hillman as a
birthday present,
We
drove to Spain.
Or
rather, Fosdyke drove.
Spain
was where it was hot and sunny
And you
could laze on the beach all day and drink all night
And the
clubs were full of purple light and girls who were over 16
And
just ripe for a holiday romance on the beach by moonlight.
And it
was cheap.
Me and Fosdyke
believed all of this.
So we
packed our short-sleeved shirts and light-coloured drainpipes and the faithful Durex and Fosdyke's mask and
flippers into the Hillman
And we
drove through France, far into the night.
We had
some of those tie-on plastic adaptors that re-align the headlight for the wrong
side of the road
And we
roared down the Route Nationale illuminating the tops
of the poplars and the opposite verge like a lit-up Quasimodo
Until
we were so tired and not far enough on so we stopped for the night in Toulouse
We went
into the first cheap-looking hotel we came to -
Where
there were women guests standing in the doorways who didn't have much on and
what they did have wasn't the sort of underwear our mothers or sisters wore
back in Hounslow
And we
passed several male customers loitering in the hallways, waiting, or
negotiating, and some didn't look like very nice men at all,
So we
jammed a chair under the door knob and I slept in my sleeping bag for
protection
Which
was just as well because when we woke up there was a cockroach under Fosdyke's coat on the door.
Then we
drove on down to the Costa Brava and parked by the beach and Fosdyke threw off his shirt
And he
had so many cockroach bites all red and swollen on his chest and back he looked
like an epidemic
Then we
booked into a hotel which was nice and clean and cheap in a dusty area just
reclaimed from the Spanish desert
And we
started to drink rum and cokes quite early on empty stomachs
Which
we washed down mid-evening with some chicken and chips
And
watched some girls dancing over a few more rum and cokes and thought we'd try
them another day.
That
was the night we found out that this town had a policeman and he was very fat
and very greasy and wore a moustache and dark glasses, even at night,
That he
kept an alsatian and that
they both hated the English
Even
before I was sick over his jackboots from where I was resting in the gutter.
It must
have been bad because the alsatian
didn't even offer to lick it up.
And
another thing was that the night porter at the hotel would give you your room
key if you could remember the number
But he
wouldn't help you find your room or give you a little assistance with the
stairs or the lift or anything
Which
wasn't very friendly
And we
said we'd stay there anyway but we might not come back next year
And I
think what he looked at us with was contempt (but I wasn't seeing very clearly)
In the
morning it got hot and we took our headaches to the beach and read some English
papers which turned out to be yesterdays
And
watched the fat policeman and his dog stopping the girls from sunbathing
topless
Which me and Fosdyke had been in favour
of;
And we
went swimming and that was actually pretty good -
If I
borrowed Fosdyke's flippers and snorkel I could see
shoals of fish, and sea urchins and if you smashed a sea urchin with a rock
there'd be a feeding frenzy of little fishes for its insides
Then we
hired a pedalo and swam from that which was really
great fun
And we
came back to lie down on our towels and gradually remembered that we weren't
just kids anymore -
That we
were here by ourselves without our families and this could be the one golden
opportunity to lose our virginity.
So we
sauntered up and down the beach a bit, one of us very white, turning a nasty
red and the other a sort of uncomfortable pink with serious blotches where the
cockroach bites were turning septic
And there
seemed to be quite a lot of local competition for the little English roses we'd set our sights on
For the
beach was littered with the limbs and bodies of off duty waiters and bartenders
and night club bouncers,
Brown
and handsome, with muscles where it mattered and tiny tiny
little black swimming trunks which bulged unashamedly at the front
And
they were caressing our English roses and staring into their eyes and promising
them nights of latin passion
That
was when me and Fosdyke's
confidence began to falter.
Though
we played the game.
We'd go
to the discos and dance crazily with any girl who'd acknowledge our existence.
We'd
use up all our best lines and then go back and sit at their table and learn
they came from Formby or Goole or Port Talbot
And
just what their Mums had to say about them coming here on their own, with
Janice.
But
though Fosdyke and me tried to look Latin and
romantic and got a few kisses and twined a few tongues and pressed our trousered erections against a few tummies
And he
says he got his hand far enough up a skirt to feel the soft, delicately fluffed
curve of a buttock
And I know
I had my fingers on a nipple
That
was just the time when they had to go -
Doubtless
to wait in the moonlight for their Spanish lovers
Whose
touch would be so much surer and more experienced and more forceful and more
successful than ours.
And I
remember that me and Fosdyke
accepted our lot in the end, and that the best nights we had were in the
chicken and chips taverna
Where
they had a guy with a guitar who could sing the Beatles and Guantanamara
and Auld Lang Syne and Sally in our Alley and Viva LEspana and Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover
And all
of the audience except us was over 40 and sang along till there wasn't a dry
eye in the house
And me
and Fosdyke sang too because that was all there was
And
nobody seemed to mind
And
maybe Mums and Dads away from their kids and their homes and their politics are
all right really.
We
drove home
As the
Hillman crossed the Spanish border we lost top gear
And
around Brive in the middle of the night we lost
bottom gear
And
when there was only one gear left we ground on at about 20 miles per hour
through thick fog
Which
made us nervous because all the other cars going the same way were doing about
100 and every one of them chose to blare their horn as they swerved past
So when
Fosdyke went to sleep at the wheel and we slewed off
the road before I could wake him, missing all the evenly spaced French trees
and ending up in a French field
I
wasn't sorry when the car wouldn't start.
It
turned out to have no water and hadn't had for long enough for things to get
hot and weld themselves together and perhaps some of the thick fog had been
smoke.
So we
waited till it got lighter and started pushing and it turned out to be only 100
metres to a garage
But the
garagiste at 6-o-clock on a Sunday morning in rural
France wouldn't wake up
So we
left a note on the windscreen and followed a sign to the railway station and
got a train to le Mans and another to Paris and on to Boulogne
And so
back home a few hours earlier than anticipated,
To the
amazement of Fosdyke's father.
Who was
more dazed than amazed by the time he got the car back and had sold it for
scrap and paid off the costs to the AA and the ferry and got 20 quid
(Which
was more then than it is now)
But
he'd paid 200 for it so Fosdyke was in the doghouse
for a very long time
And me and Fosdyke came back with our
virginity and our unused Durex
But not
Fosdykes flippers and snorkel which he'd left in the
car
Because
some bugger or bougre had stolen them -
And
neither me nor Fosdyke has
ever had a rum and coke since.
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Me and Fosdyke
Go Repping.
Some
time around 4 o clock in November, in Dewsbury, or Scunthorpe, or Runcorn,
looking out at the rain and the already dark,
By
chance, as we sometimes did, me and Fosdyke met in
some bleak reception area of some filthy factory, off some pitted by-pass,
Both
waiting to see the same arrogant Buyer, who despised as we despised him,
And as
the light outside decayed and the receptionist started touching up her nail
varnish, we decided that life had somehow given us the slip,
Or we
wouldn't be here, in Heckmondwyke or Skelmersdale or Doncaster,
Trying
to sell things we had no faith in to someone who didn't want to know,