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ASHES TO ASHES, HARRY C A BARMY BLOW-IN! 21-12-06
Peter Holmes
The Ashes circus rolled like a compulsive juggernaut into my home town, beautiful Perth, putting the most isolated capital city on the planet into the cricket world spotlight for one lager soaked hectic week.
More importantly, the Ashes tornado wind blew in ComeOnBoro's resident sage and leader of the 'Hairy Lemon Rat Pack', the one and only Harry Callaghan esquire. I had not seen HarryC for heading for thirty years, which also helps illustrate what a pair of old farts we both really are.
Hang on - correction, I'm an 'Antipodean Old Fart', Harry is an 'Aging Acklam Lothario!'
So a there is a bit of history, albeit broken, in the friendship which was renewed by our activity on this very Boro website a year or so ago.
Myself and Harry, were thrown together in the late 1960's after both moving with our clans into the then very salubrious climes of leafy Acklam, the new Wimpey built private Kader Close Estate to be specific.
It was around the period we were finishing junior school in the parallel religious academic streams, me a Cathy, him a Proddie, with both of us going through big changes and new awakenings of youth and pubic hairs.
After the character forming battle hardened rough and tumble of life in the Bronx battlefield of Pallister Park, green and leafy Acklam was literally a breath of fresh country air. It was a veritable urban paradise for raggy arses, surrounded by farms, paddocks of wheat, cowshit, woods and babbling brooks. It was part of paradise built into the then patchwork quilt of the Yorkshire countryside.
Best of all there were loads of new muckers to gang with as we caroused around our new world, a world full of adventure and discovery.
The world of our spotty youth was more naïve, a much gentler place but like on every Teesside housing estate at the time, football was the one and only king, England's '66 glory still fresh and fuelling young imaginations.
After the concrete and wooden garage door pitch of Pally Park's Kelfield Avenue cul-de-sac of my formative years, suddenly we had various grassed venues to play out our fantasy games - freshly mown Nirvana in green suburbia.
"Bags I Bobby Charlton, I'm Frannie Lee, Big John Hickton for me, hatrick on it's way so I'm Geoff Hurst, I'm in goal so bags I Banksy..."
Me and Harry plus all the new Kader gang used to kick lumps out of each other and it carried on for years during day long games of twenty-a-side ebbing and flowing non stop across our chosen pitch. Like our version of heaven on earth in all weathers, we just didn't care.
It was all healthy, innocent, good-natured fun with the odd argument instantly sorted by a quick punch-up, a hand-shake, a kick up the arse off the older lads and on with the war. Good times shared and everybody kept obediently in line by the hierarchy of the estate policed by your peers, a back hander and strong parenting.
A memory punctuated by some rose-tinting?
Probably, but my perception is my reality. I will say that HarryC was a very popular easy going lad and as now always ready for a laugh and a joke. He was also a very canny footballer, preferring to play up front, getting into the box with his infectious cajoling all action nature.
He played for Whinney Banks then later Acky Hall and even got the call for Boro Boys but, as even Harry admits, he wasn't up to it physically when compared to the likes of Chrissie Kamara, my old St.Pius X schoolmate, who was the best player in Boro schools at the time along with Buster Loadwick.
Harry's style of play would have made him a cracking Paul Scholes type of player in the hole, that's of course if the ale, fags and eye-catching women hadn't taken their toll.
Forward a few centuries to the other side of the planet.
After God knows how many pints of Heineken's finest in the Grosvenor, a pub just round the corner from Harry's hotel, we gassed about old times while watching the third day of the third test unfold on the big screen while the real thing unfolded, literally, up the road at the WACA with England flattering to deceive.
We watched bathed in sultry steamy heat in the beer garden as the Barmy Army poured up Murray Street while the Sun poured through grey clouds. Pockets of them still singing and chanting while filling every empty spot the pub had left, thickening the atmosphere of the place instantly.
We sensed a hope from some and a resignation from others as we mixed and cracked on with all and sundry. Maybe the heat had taken its toll of the wonderful Barmy boys but while Pietersen and Flintoff were there at the crease, hope wheedled into every conscience. "Maybe just maybe!"
The next day I'd arranged to pick Sir HarryC up from his gaff, a flash marbled hotel in the centre of Perth, the Mercure, to give him the guided tour of this wonderful town perched on the expanses of the Swan river and it's stunning white sand beaches stretching thousands of kilometres up and down the Indian Ocean coastline.
To say I was a bit rough when I woke up is a massive understatement but eventually I gently expunged a mother of a hangover, which of course was partly sponsored by Harry the night before. I gingerly watched as England's Flintoff and Pieterson were starting to put together a partnership which gave hope where hope just surely didn't exist.
They looked very good as I borrowed the wife's Merc and cruised into the city. As I pulled up in the car an agitated bouncy Harry said "Erimus have you been watching the cricket!?"
"Yes Mate and I think we have a chance!"
"Fuck the tour let's got to the Raffles and watch the rest of this epic!" Harry answered.
I put the radio on and in the space of the short traffic stilted journey out of Perth, we lost three wickets. Me and Harry were gutted to say the least so did a mini tour, cruised Cottesloe with it's bikini stunners, had a few beers at the classy Raffles, then had a BBQ at my place washed down by Crownies while chewing the fat before I saw him off in a taxi at midnight. A friendship renewed and strengthened like time had stood still.
I really enjoyed the time with the lad. Good company, very nice bloke, great crack, and he is a genuine salt of the earth character and you'll soon find him carousing in a dedicated "Salty Sea Dog Bar" near you, very shortly.
Cheers Harry!
I didn't think I'd be writing this with England literally on their knees getting a good roistering off the Aussies and already handing over that symbolic little urn. Three Lions Nation galvanising glory turned to total ignominy in the space of fifteen months, or to be pedantic 463 days.
Thankfully, I kept my gob in check so don't owe too many cartons to gloating Ocker mates but will have to put up with the verbal retribution I probably deserve over the coming weeks. Now it's set up for that other Lothario, Shane Warne, to spread the glory a little further with his 700th test wicket at his home ground, the theatre of Aussie dreams, Melbourne's iconic MCG. It's as inevitable as the sun rising.
Another milestone on this very page of a smaller number, as I post my 50th article on ComeOnBoro.Com. Here are a few memorable quotables from the first fifty.
It was, on my part, a euphoric elation tinged with a sadness, a regret. If only.
To have been stood there with you all, celebrating, on the tiers of the magnificent Millennium that amazing day, watching the formation of history unfold, teary eyed, next to my Dad with the players parading silver-ware would've been, 'I'm ready to die' Nirvana. But, we can all dream. That's why we are what we are. BORO.
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Australia counter attack at every limited opportunity but Dukes is being marked so tightly by Uruguay's Lugarno that at first I thought the big man was wearing a sky blue anal probe!
Second ET period begins with 83,000 predominant Ockers finding their collective voice! The ref castigates Uruguay's coach and loves the limelight - give him a fucking mirror! Guus Hiddink's head is twitching like a tortoise looking for lettuce! It's getting tight and very scrappy and it's tenser than my foreskin during my first hard-on!
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For a start, I bet you didn't know that Quasimodo, the infamous hunchback of Notre-Dame was actually a Jardie, a scaffolder from the cobbled back alleys of Jarrow no less.
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Now talking of booze, Newcastle Brown Ale that famous beer of the Toon, is a veritable world icon brewed for the Jardie Republic from virginal pure melt water from the upper reaches of the Tyne itself. But what gives Broon it's unique flavour is that it apparently contains the very essence of Geordie, an ingredient I can reveal is actually made by distilling Tyne water and coal silt through the old boots of Wor Jackie Milburn and passing it over a bed of Alan Shearer's dried faeces. Which probably explains the pale brown colouration & very unique flavour!
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You can always tell a Geordie but you can't tell him nowt!
You can have a fishy on a little dishy when the boat comes in, along the Tyne into the valley of the deluded!
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Colour TV didn't exist, well not in the salubrious cul-de-sac of Kelfield Avenue in the steely suburban Pally Park where they could smell the rent man coming from miles away.
Was it over the line?
The reaction in our house and our neighbourhood resoundingly and emphatically said YES!!! Yes! And more Yes!
Raggy Arses dancing round the back gardens for five minutes before we composed ourselves and went back to the musty comfort of the lounge carpet to watch the rest of extra-time as a diminutive Ginger dynamo, Alan Ball, ran for ever with his socks around his ankles, sweat and shear guts staining his red cotton England shirt.
"Some people are on the pitch they think it's all over! ... It is now!" Wolstenholme intoned, as a ridiculously fresh Geoff Hurst hammered the ball into the roof of that famous net to add to his other couple of beauties, a hat-trick in the World Cup final.
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England, yawn, played like the Boro on a double-dose of Mogadon in the depths of last January while we were in the middle of our abysmal total shite spell. In other words, McClaren style overly cautious and boring against fairly average opposition in Paraguay. How the hell anyone with half a brain, can employ two of the best scoring midfielders on the planet in such negatively defensive and cautious roles is beyond me and a few million other Englishmen. At least Lampard managed a few shots but Gerrard, arguably the most influential midfielder in European football, was so deep lying he kept tripping over Goalie Robinson's bloody water bottle!
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After what felt like hours but in fact was only a minute, the two men dropped to their knees apparently exhausted and embraced, hugging each other like lost brothers, both crying tears of joy.
Billy broke the spell and spoke; "Son, you are the chosen one, you know what you must do, now go forth and make this club great again!"
Gibson stood first and pulled Billy to his feet before shaking the old man's hand and turning sharply on his heels purposely striding back along Ayresome Street.
Hope I've entertained in that time and here's to fifty more!
Enough Said,
ErimusRed.
BACK TO PETER HOLMES' LETTER FROM AUSTRALIA INDEX
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