11th May 1985

On this day in 1985 56 Bradford City fans who went to a football match and never came home. May they rest in peace.

11th May 1985

On Saturdays they came and went
From Cullingworth and Heckmondwike.
After defeat or victory
A pint or two at the Corn Dolly
Would set the world to rights.

On Saturdays they flooded in
To Midland Road or to the Kop
And were united for two hours
In unremitting Yorkshire showers
Whether they won or lost.

That Saturday they went with dads
And brothers, sisters, partners, friends.
Young parents took their little lads,
Proudly claret and amber clad,
To applaud the season’s end

That Saturday supporters cheered
As onto the pitch their heroes came,
And even when they saw the smoke
They thought that it was one big joke...
Until they saw the flames.

That Saturday supporters screamed
As fire encroached at breakneck speed.
They ran to find their exits blocked -
The gates were chained and the doors were locked
And they died there in their seats.

That Saturday they came and went
Via houses that they didn’t know
Queuing to use the phone to say
“It’s alright, Love. I got away.
I will be coming home.”

That Saturday at the BRI
The lucky ones patiently queued
With blistered hands fixed to their hair –
The falling asphalt stuck them there
Acting like superglue

That Saturday we sat at home
Listening to John Helm’s commentary.
And in his voice the fear grew
And in that moment, then, we knew
This was a tragedy

On Monday kids returned to school
And sat down next to empty chairs
Remembering Friday’s kickabout –
The last of its kind – as they filed out
To the special assembly and prayers

A silence falls throughout the crowd
The final Saturday each year,
As we sit secure in the Carlsberg Stand
Remembering those fallen fans
And wipe away our tears.

(From "Love and Death and That", 2012)

More serious stuff

I've blogged more times than most of you probably feel is absolutely necessary about Bradford City, and many times about the fire, so this is more of a quick plug for next year's Bupa 10K. OK, it's early, but I wanted to get a page up and running in advance. It's here

I am going to take myself away, drink a lot of tea and try to think of something amusing to write about. It's been too long...

Bind Us Together

Hmm, so ending the first day of the working week with those immortal words of one Stephen Patrick Morrissey - "In my life/why do I give valuable time/to people who don't care if I live or die?" - running through my head is not a positive sign of things to come. (The answer, by the way, is normally "because you get paid for it.") And now I'm sitting brooding in a corner, Tears for Fears providing appropriate mood music, pouring hot water onto a mango teabag and wondering how many times I can do this before it stops tasting of mango. (Not that it especially tasted of mango in the first place...)

I could of course go for a deep and meaningful walk, secretly wondering if anybody will bother to come and look for me, but they won't; and anyway, it's pissing it down; and I've already been running tonight; and my tea would get cold.

So...

I'm going to think of ways to work Bradford City into my impending AKC exam instead.

And everywhere I look opportunities present themselves!

OK, so I probably won't get very far working it into an essay on Heresy. I can't think of even the most tenuous link that might do anything other than bemuse the examiners. But that's OK - I have my fun cut out of me already there trying to think up some cow definitions for Apollinarianism and Arianism. Oh yes. You'll see it here first.

And then, as I pretended to read Durkheim, elaborated little analogies started to form in my mind. Durkheim, you see, was the bloke who said that rituals were "designed to elicit, maintain and reproduce certain mental states among participating groups" (that's a quote, that!) Can you apply this to the (unswervingly optimistic) fanbase at Valley Parade? Damn right you can.

Oh and before you point out that this is not some new discovery, OK, OK, I know it isn't. My book - yes I'm reading a BOOK for this exam. Get me! - even uses football as an example of "the sacred in secular society". But to put me in a little perspective: I have an English degree. I'm qualified merely to read Durkheim and compliment him on his flowing sentence structure. Except I can't even do that, because he didn't even write in English. I'm the person who pointedly read "The Communist Manifesto" on the exercise bike in Fitness First, not because I understood it, but because I delighted in the irony of this little tableau. I know enough about sociology to snigger when F describes his A Level Sociology lessons as "Here's a picture of Marx. Now colour it in." But that's about it.

I do know, though, that Bradford has an unusually high turnout for a beleagured (by which I mean "rubbish") club, packing out a stadium of Premiership proportions every other week, and taking coachloads of supporters down to the most Godforsaken areas of Britain on the Saturdays in between. What binds them together?

I'm sure studies have been done - and when I have time I shall look for them - that look at class, and adversity, and all of those sorts of things, and the turbulent history of Bradford as a City as well as a Club probably does a lot to bring them together under that one corrugated iron roof in the name of football just as much as the tantalising power of the sport itself. But my book (same book - I'm only reading one. Oh come on, I'm not THAT keen!) gives some examples of events that have become "sacred", amongst them the death of Diana and September 11th. At Bradford, it was 11th May 1985, and it was the Bradford Fire.

56 people lost their lives in horrific circumstances when a stand caught fire and burned to a cinder in a mere 4 minutes. Now I'm normally cheerful (um, OK, that's pushing it. Shall we say "aiming at humour"?) on this blog, but it needs saying: people remember Hillsborough (and rightly so), and Heysel (at which 39 died); people forget about Bradford. Unless you're a fire safety officer (my husband watched the video of the disaster in Fire Safety Training) it isn't necessarily something you'd know about. But whole families were erased in an instant.The youngest to die was a boy of 11; the eldest a man of 86. Now, after every match, if you pop round the back of the stadium to have a peek at the simple, understated memorial you will not be alone. People pay their respects there week after week, and flowers are still left there. Silences are held each year; church services commemorate the dead on the anniversary. The club, despite its own financial problems, raises thousands every year for the burns unit at Bradford Royal Infirmary. And in the area directly around the stadium you don't generally find the undercurrent of racial resentment that can at times plague other parts of the city. In Manningham, local shopkeepers and residents, mainly of Asian origin, flocked to help, taking victims into their homes, making tea, letting people use their phones.

So yes, football does bind people together and instil a sense of community through its very power. But so does tragedy. I intend to write about both, if I get the chance, but in the meantime, I probably ought to stop sulking and be grateful for what I have. May God bless the victims of the Bradford City fire, and, of course, may God bless Bradford City.