Hillsborough, and the lives it changed
As the years have passed, it’s become one of those where-was-I moments, as is the case with and older generation and John F Kennedy’s assassination. I was in Bombay, as Mumbai was called then, on my summer vacation. My aunt, her son, my sister and another cousin were making the most of the last significant holiday we would have before secondary and tertiary education sank their claws into us.
My quest to find a copy of The Satanic Verses on Bombay’s many book-lined streets had been unsuccessful. Ayatollah Khomenei had issued his fatwa a couple of months earlier, and though we knew very little of what was in it, the urge to find out was irresistible. Sunil Gavaskar, one of my childhood heroes, had retired, and India’s cricketers were taking a battering in the Caribbean.
For me, April 15 was already a sombre day. It was six years to the day since my paternal grandfather had passed away, almost willing himself to die as he waited for cancer to claim my grandmother. We were in Kalyan, one of the townships on the far fringes of the big city, and everyone else was having a great time. I didn’t grudge them that. Not everyone is unfortunate enough to have a calendar implanted in the brain, throwing up memories on pretty much every day of the year.
The previous day, we had celebrated Vishu, the Kerala new year, and the celebrations had only just begun to die down. After dinner, as the others busied themselves with thoughts of which movie to watch, I slipped quietly out on to a balcony with my small radio. It had been nearly two and a half years since we returned to the roots from the north of England, but I stubbornly refused to let go of my strongest link to ‘home’ — football and Liverpool.
It was a subject of mirth for many, but I really didn’t care. That evening, the BBC’s Saturday Grandstand was going to take me to Hillsborough and the FA Cup semifinal against Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest. Liverpool were level on points with Arsenal at the top of the Division One table, and the league-and-cup double — accomplished so thrillingly in 1986, and thwarted by Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang 11 months earlier — was once more within reach.
It made me all the more angry that I was so far from the action. I’d been in England for Kenny Dalglish’s first season as manager, and watching the double clinched against Everton remains the highlight of my childhood. But even then, at the age of 12, there was the sense of an era ending. Everton were the better-balanced side, and they would prove as much while romping to the title 12 months later. Liverpool needed a rebuild.
By the time it began, I was back in India. All I knew of the combination of John Barnes, Peter Beardsley and John Aldridge was what I heard on the radio. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s — August 1996, to be precise — that I’d actually see the Reds on television. For almost a decade, the short-wave radio was as good as it got. Barnes was perhaps the second-greatest player in the club’s history after Dalglish. But for me, his glory years in the red shirt mostly mean remembered snatches of Alan Green’s radio commentary.
I decamped to the balcony after the pre-match ritual of throwing up whatever I’d eaten had been completed. As I tuned in, my thoughts had already turned to David, my best friend in secondary school and fellow football geek. I had been madly jealous when he went with his father to Wembley in ’86, and I was certain that the two of them would be there for this semi as well.
The first reports about why the kick-off was delayed were pretty vague. By the time the game was called off, I knew that something terrible had happened. But the BBC were playing it safe, and there was no inkling yet of the sheer scale of the tragedy. I had watched Heysel unfold on television four years earlier, and also seen footage from the terrible fire at Bradford, but was too young to process either in any depth.
By the time Hillsborough happened, I knew first-hand that the paying customer was right at the bottom of the sports pyramid. We were the afterthoughts. I’d watched international football from makeshift bamboo stands in Kozhikode (Calicut) and seen India play West Indies in a one-day international from a super-heated concrete slab in Trivandrum. In both cases, spectator facilities weren’t even a consideration. If you needed the toilet, you used a plastic bottle. If you wanted food, you brought your own. As for a numbered seat, there wasn’t even such a concept.
From stories David had told me, quite a few British stadiums at the time were little better. Venues like Hillsborough were glorified death traps, with previous incidents brushed under the carpet. After all, in Thatcher’s Britain, only the yobs went to the football. Their welfare was hardly a priority.
I was worried when I went to bed on April 15, but not so much that I couldn’t sleep. The cold-water bucket of reality hit me in the face the next morning when I tuned in to Sports Round-up. The death toll was more than twice that at Heysel, and some were still missing and unaccounted for. The rest of that holiday passed by in a daze. I worried myself sick thinking about David. But with social-networking sites and mobile telephony far in the future, there was absolutely no way to find out if he was alright. A letter would have taken the best part of a fortnight, and a reply would be no less delayed. I didn’t even bother.
The newspapers in India reported the tragedy, but there was no comprehensive list of victims. David and I finally exchanged letters only in the summer of 1991, by which time King Kenny had resigned and the post-Hillsborough decline had begun. We wrote of books, and cricket and, most of all, Liverpool, but what happened on April 15, 1989 was not mentioned even once. To this day, more than a quarter century after I last heard from him, I don’t know if David was there or not.
By the time the cup final — Everton again, after Forest had been beaten in the rearranged game — came around on May 20, it represented something far more than a football match. This time, I was home and listening on the radio. From the time Aldridge scored in the fourth minute till the final whistle blew at the end of extra time, I was in floods of tears. I’ve watched Liverpool play ‘bigger’ matches before and since, but never have I been so desperate for a victory. Part of me knew that victory and defeat were laughable ideas next to what had happened just over a month earlier, but there was another side that said there could be no better tribute to the 95 (Tony Bland would pass away only in 1993).
A week later, we went to Trivandrum to visit one of my father’s closest friends, who was visiting from the UK. This was the man who had first taken me to Stanley Park and kicked a ball around with me. The home league game against Arsenal remained, but a second double in three years seemed inevitable. Again though, we spoke not a word about Hillsborough.
The morning after the last-gasp defeat to Arsenal, he shrugged his shoulders and said: They’ll win it back next season. That was how things were. The sun rose in the east. Every Michael Jackson single topped the charts. Liverpool won league titles. And he was right. They did win it back the following season.
But not once since. He passed away last March, with Liverpool still in the hunt for a league-and-Champions-League double. Before this pandemic rearranged our world, I remember telling my mother that I was inclined to see Liverpool’s stellar season as homage to him and thousands of others like him who had grown old and passed on without seeing the title return to L4 0TH.
In the quarter-century that I’ve had access to the Internet, I’ve read thousands of pages of testimony, from those that were there and also those who were left behind. I’ve followed every trial and every judgment. The most important parts of each stadium visit have been the moments of contemplation in front of the memorial. When my daughter wears her little replica shirt, I remind her that the eternal flame for the 96 at the back is as important as the club crest at the front.
I stopped reading the testimonies in 2014, when the 25 thanniversary coincided with a rare Liverpool bid for the title. There’s only so much sadness you can process. I often think back to something Tony Evans, fellow Liverpool fan, wrote 20 years after he went to a game that would change so many lives. “You go back to Hillsborough, like I did last week, and cry for the dead, the crippled and their families. But you also weep for the fools who believe ‘The Truth’, those who think that my friend and I were wilful killers.
“And hope that justice will one day be done. That no one else has to live through something like this at a football match again. Because even us lucky ones have to dream.”
I can only imagine what he and so many others still go through. I was 5000 miles away, shielded from the trauma of seeing friends and family die. Yet, it impacted my life more than any other event. Every year, April 15 is the double whammy — the grandfather I barely knew, and Hillsborough. It’s sometimes tempting to wonder how different life might have been if it hadn’t happened.
There will be no memorial service at Anfield this year, and the families have now decided that they no longer want it to be held there. If Jon-Paul Gilhooley, Steven Gerrard’s cousin and the youngest of the victims, had somehow survived, he would be 41 now. That’s how much time has passed. But for a generation of fans, no matter how many days go by, Hillsborough remains the nightmare that doesn’t ever end.
Originally published at http://dileeppremachandran.wordpress.com on April 15, 2020.