Bill Naughton - The Goalkeeper's Revenge and Other Stories

London: Puffin, 1983 (first published 1967)

Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: I was telling somebody, with great enthusiasm, about a brilliant story I once read about a bloke who saves a penalty from a star striker at his school. That story was 'The Goalkeeper's Revenge', and I wanted to read it again, so I ordered this for a few quid via eBay.

About the author: Bill Naughton was born in Ireland in 1910, moving four years later to Bolton. Undertaking a variety of back-breaking manual work before starting a writing career, Naughton hit it big when his radio play Alfie Elkins and his Little Life transferred to the stage and thence to film, becoming Michael Caine's signature character. The prolific Naughton had two more plays and a novel turned into films and he was garlanded with prizes. Naughton was a prolific writer and playwright, passing away in 1992 on the Isle of Man.

Plot: Thirteen tales, including the titular story, of working-class mischief in 1930s Britain and Ireland.

Review: The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

So does L.P. Hartley begin his best-known work, The Go-Between, and as a resource for the lazy blogger it’s an invaluable piece of writing. Not only is it absolutely true, but contains a shorthand to let everybody know that yes, I intend to discuss portions of my own history, so you’d better damn well sit down and eat my childhood, even if it’s stodgy or bitter.

Yet for all my own familiarity with that sentence and the myriad times I’ve appropriated it, if you were to ask me what The Go-Between was about, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, and after looking it up I’m mildly astonished to learn that it’s a book about a man’s reminiscences of his loss of childhood innocence as he moves through a class-ridden Victorian England. And, you know, Hartley is right, in an almost literal sense: the England in that novel would probably have no conception of how to fit itself in the Great Britain of the twenty-first century, and neither us to them. For all the familiarities (a long-reigning monarch, relentless technological innovation, poorhouses and epidemics), there are hundreds of ways we’d be unable to explain why the country is shaped in the way it is. How do we explain the loss of Empire? How do we explain oligarchs owning half of the capital, or a rail project taking decades to come to fruition? How do we explain not being the greatest country on the planet anymore, and that we perhaps never were?

In the century since the setting of The Go-Between, it’s easy to assume that given the opportunity to go back, we’d be greeted in much the same way that you may have done in Medieval Britain, that our knowledge and innovation would look so outlandish to even Victorians that there would be no way to bridge the cultural gap. But that’s a revision too far, given the questing nature of the age, and one only has to pick through a pop-cultural touchstone like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything to see that we would be as much a fascination as a fear.

Progress, in all aspects, happens as slowly as it does quickly. To pick an aspect entirely at random, consider the mobile phone. My first mobile was given to me as a Christmas present in 2000, and I was a fairly late adopter. Mobile technology had been around in Britain since the late 1980s, of course, but in the twenty years hence, I’ve been through perhaps a dozen handsets. That first Vodafone of mine I last saw in a museum. 

What I’m trying to put across with that is that when progress improves our lot, we have no problem as a species moving on without a look back. But when that progress seems to happen without our personal input, it’s a fertile breeding ground for nostalgia, and also sometimes promotes that feeling that we’ve somehow willingly given a part of our innocence without realising its worth. It’s then that we tend to fall back on childhood, much like Hartley’s protagonist, searching for those amber-preserved days which seemed somehow more worthwhile: before all the stress, before all the worries.

So tales of childhood are always going to be a popular genre, as Hartley must have considered. Strangely enough, many modern memoirs of childhood focus on recollections of abuse or difficulties assimilating into other cultures. Both are perfectly valid genres, but these didn’t seem to exist when I was a young reader. Childhood even for me was capers by The Bash Street Kids or Winker Watson, where glory was celebrated in sweets and opprobrium dished out by the slipper. This is one of those unstoppable progress things, I suppose; admitting life might be harder for kids than comic books made it appear. You can even see that in films like Toy Story, where genuine life-threatening peril exists hand in hand with emotional growth. Anything which makes us more open and honest with each other is probably a good thing, on balance, but I do wonder if the days of Pigeon Street are gone for good.

But still, my childhood was a world away from the one depicted in The Goalkeeper’s Revenge and Other Stories, the collection by Irish author Bill Naughton. A slim volume which was perfect bridge literature for me as a young lad, the baker’s dozen of tales within are Naughton’s window on the world of the 1930s of the North, save for one excursion back to his native County Mayo.

Naughton, whose major claim to fame (and what fame) was writing and subsequently adapting the play Alfie, eventually starring a breakout Michael Caine, was born into Irish poverty before his family crossed the sea to a probably as-hard life in Bolton. Eventually to become a prolific writer after a series of manual jobs, Naughton published The Goalkeeper’s Revenge in the early 1960s, the book entering into regular reprints. The version I grew to love was a hardback with an almost Modernist cover, of a diving ‘keeper allayed in lime green brush strokes on black.

Even in the late 80s, when I must have first read it, The Goalkeeper’s Revenge seemed impossibly old-fashioned, its tales of big tops and bags of hot peas and football on cinder pitches and strikers in hobnail boots completely alien to my cosy world of Saturday morning television and beanbag races. It would have been recognisable to my own grandparents, and although we never closely examined it, my Granddad’s tales of the inestimable gang member Cyril Funge seemed to only confirm it. Funge, sporting a name which could have only have last existed in the 'thirties, may be long gone, but his name lives on in my memory in a way a politician’s never will.

It also seemed a hard life; a life in which fun is there to be bought by the halfpenny as long as time and responsibility allowed. There seems no reason to doubt this: Naughton’s background in coal and textile must have been onerous, and Britain between the wars arguably had more in common with the Victorian age than say, the time the collection was put together. And yet people held fast to that hard world for longer than you’d imagine; well into the 1970s, Laurel and Hardy were having chart hits, and as impossible as it sounds now, there would have been people who flew on Concorde who were alive before the Wright Brothers took their first flight. Nostalgia isn’t only for the modern, as this collection goes a little way to illustrate.

The titular tale is a shaggy-dog story of a resourceful non-achiever, Sim Dalt, who lives for keeping goal and is pushed out of his school team on account of his academic record. Just before the match for the School Shield, the fantastically-named Bob Thropper, the alpha striker, demands Sim be dropped if he’s going to be enrolled at a special school. “A cracky school lad play for us? Ee, sir, that would be out of order!”

As will be obvious just from that small quotation, Naughton isn’t big on either political correctness or Received Pronunciation, and The Goalkeeper’s Revenge is woven with the evocative tongue of both the North-West. Abundant apostrophes sprout in place of dropped plosives; punches are “licks”, pockets clink with tanners, bobs and brass. At times, it’s like a Morrissey fever-dream with a hint of Ron Manager: hot roasted spuds, varnished Indian clubs, pies leaching rich gravy and buxom hairdressers wielding cut-throat razors.

Back to Sim, and his life takes an interesting turn when he’s recruited by an amusement arcade for their Beat The Goalie stall. The enterprising Sim is a roaring success, slipping the odd coin into a specially padded pocket from which his boss never hears a clink. In its denouement, Sim is faced off by the now-professional Thropper, who is unable to beat Dalt even with his proper boots. Years later, Sim would take his winnings and become a board member of Hummerton, Thropper’s team, with the power over his former tormentor’s career.

You only need to read that story to recognise what a masterful storyteller Naughton was. Yes, the slang may not read well in isolation. Yes, it’s a simple tale of ingenuity and pride over big-headedness and ignorance. But in the space of six pages, Naughton creates a life: a hero, his antagonist, his quest, his revenge. In two and a bit, the time it takes for Thropper to go from star-striker to also-ran, Naughton ramps up the tension three kicks: the first as the bet is converted from pence to pounds (he relates Thropper’s penalty style, in itself a masterful piece of economic description); the second as Thropper darkens and hisses for his boots to be fetched, and the final attempt, as the ball flashes through the air and is seemingly past Sim, before the white-faced ‘keeper quietly tells everybody he’s closed while clutching that saved football to his chest.

In a way, ‘The Goalkeeper’s Revenge’ is less representative of the book as a whole, because although it starts in childhood, it plays out over a number of years, whereas the great majority of the stories are vignettes of pure childhood, from the crime caper of ‘Seventeen Oranges’ (kid gets caught at the docks with the fruit and eats the evidence, peel and all) to the fatal karting accident related in ‘Spit Nolan’. Perhaps only ‘Maggie’s First Reader’, a story about a woman who becomes obsessed with books late in life, stands out, and its place at the end of the collection seems like something of an add-on.

But for all that, this world is no bed of roses. Naughton’s stories are populated by consumptives, shut-ins, mutes and potential murderers. There are terrible car accidents and botched operations, fatal fires and lies left uncovered. Even though these stories aren’t overtly moralistic, a fair few of them couch a lesson of hard truth within them, whether it’s standing up for yourself (‘A Real Good Smile’) or that a good story will take you far (‘A Good Sixpenn’orth’). They’re good little nuggets of children’s literature, but as worthy of that Pixar adult/kid interface, I’d wager.

Perhaps the oddest in the collection, that aforementioned trip back to Mayo, is told in ‘The Fight on the Mountain Road’. There’s nothing much to it - a twelve year old lad is beaten up by a gypsy boy for his peat, and retaliates the next time it happens because he’s motivated by the work he had to put in to get the fuel - but it’s the least child-friendly of the collection, and could belong to any time over hundreds of years. It’s also the most obviously teachable lesson, going so far as to spell it out: “what a man works for, he’ll fight for.”

It’s a strange digression, not without worth, but that journey back to Ireland comes across almost like Naughton’s own sense of nostalgia coming through. You can’t say it doesn’t belong, given it comes between stories involving death and hospitalisation, but the tone of it is quite atmospheric, almost smoky and mystical, and much in contrast to the scrappy little misadventures of the wide-eyed little narrators in Naughton’s other choices.

So given it’s set almost a century ago, is the world of The Goalkeeper’s Revenge too much of a foreign country to understand? Well, no, and it’s for one chief reason: no matter the time or place, kids are kids, and kids will always be surrounded by tall tales, greed, want, shortages of cash, getting into scrapes and having stories which grow with the telling. What Naughton revives here is how exactly we grow and process triumph and disaster. These things are universal, beyond time, and a story told well is a story understood by all. The past may be a foreign country, but history, like language, often comes from very similar roots. That’s why if I had a kid, I’d make time to read them this.

Will I keep this book on the bedroom floor?: I have no problem keeping hold of it, but I'd much prefer to hand it over to a younger reader.

Chris Stanley