The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness: A Memoir - Hardcover

Graham Caveney has worked as a journalist, academic, and critic. Publications he has contributed to include NME, Q, Blitz and City Limits. He is the author of a memoir, The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness; ‘The Priest’ They Called Him, a monograph on William Burroughs; Screaming with Joy, a monograph on Allen Ginsberg; and, with Elizabeth Young, of Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. He lives in Nottingham, UK.

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When a Person From Accrington (PFA) meets a Person Not From Accrington (PNFA), there will, at some point, be the following exchange:

PNFA: So where are you from . . . ?

PFA: Er . . . (either sheepishly or defiantly, embarrassed or proud) Accrington.

PNFA: Oh . . . (delighted by their perspicacity) . . . Stanley . . . !

Accrington Stanley FC was indeed the only claim to fame that my hometown had when I lived there. Years later we would be able to add Jeanette Winterson and the actress Julie Hesmondhalgh to our roll call of Accrington’s great and good, but in the seventies and early eighties, the folk memory of a founding first-division football team was as close to recognizable as Accrington got.

When I first left home and went to university, I probably had a dozen such exchanges within the first day. Such was my annoyance that I tried to fudge it with a vague “Lancashire way,” which only served to make me seem either evasive and furtive, as though I was on the run from the police, or dim and uncertain, like I’d just had a course of ECT. I tried amending my answer to “Manchester” for a while, mainly on the basis I had a northern accent and a record collection that contained the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, and Magazine. This would work until I actually met someone from Manchester, or anyone who had been to Manchester, or anyone who knew anything at all about Manchester. Within minutes I would be forced into mumbling something about “a town near to . . . er . . . cotton mills . . . close to Blackburn.” Eventually I would blurt out “Accrington,” they would say “Stanley” and another little bit of me would die.

Quite why I took so vehemently against my hometown’s football club I don’t quite know. It’s partly the name. Could we not have been a robust United or a stoical Town? “Stanley” made us sound as though the team consisted of one man, or, worse, eleven men all with the same name. It added to my sense that I wasn’t from a place so much as a punch line to some unimaginative southern scriptwriter’s joke.1 Where you from? Accrington? Sorry to hear it. I did try on the football thing as a kid for a while. I decided that if supporting a football team was compulsory (and it felt as though it was), I would at least give it a perverse twist and support Burnley Football Club. My dad dutifully took me to Turf Moor (Burnley’s Stadium). I still remember the chant—“Leighton James, Alan West, Martin Dobson, and the rest . . . na, na, na, na, na, na, na, ana”—sung by the Longside (Burnley’s Football Club’s supporters’ end) with boozy exhilaration. I remember getting a hot pie and Bovril at halftime and scalding fat oozing out of the crust onto my paws. I remember thinking, as we stood behind the goal, how unfair it was that we had paid full price but only really got to see half a game, and wouldn’t it be better if they used one end of the pitch rather than both. I remember the fence being charged, the one that separated the Away fans from the Home fans, and a chant going through the ground “A-G-R-O / A-G-R-O / Hello” to the sound of Gary Glitter’s “Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again.” I remember feeling sick and grabbing hold of my dad’s hand and him telling me not to worry. I remember the chants getting louder—“You’re gonna get your fucking head kicked in”; “You’re goin’ home in a fuckin’ ambulance”—and sharpened coins and empty crisp bags filled with piss and crushed beer cans and darts all being thrown from one side of the railings to the next. Ah, the beautiful game.

1 Not just southerners, actually. There was a time when Coronation Street used Accrington as shorthand for a certain kind of existential dread. “A face like a wet Wednesday in Accrington” was one I remember.