I WAS born in Wiltshire but brought up in Birkenhead. My dad’s from Manchester. My mum’s from Bristol. For years this was my elaborate response — usually followed by an explanation of where Birkenhead was — to the question “Where are you from?”

I never said I’m from Liverpool, and partly this was because I was being transparent. I didn’t want to lay false claim to an identity, to pretend that I came from the home of the Beatles and the Mersey Sound Poets, from that fervently religious city of two mighty football clubs, two mighty cathedrals.

But there was something else. I didn’t feel I truly belonged anywhere. For as long as I could remember I’d felt in some profound and unalterable way an outsider. My long-winded answer was a way of saying I’m from everywhere and nowhere. And like all outsiders, I often managed my loneliness by stubbornly refusing to belong, no matter how strongly belonging was being offered.

A childhood spent across the water from Liverpool had shaped me in all kinds of ways, but I wasn’t sure how much I really wanted to identify with that city. There was a voice in me — a calm and measured voice, perhaps a little aloof — that wondered whether Liverpool was, as many people suggested, an unhealthily sentimental city, obsessed with past glories and committed to a narrative of having been “hard done by.” This voice only grew stronger when I left Merseyside in 1984 to study in Oxford. I didn’t quite trust all that raw emotion.

Hillsborough changed that. Hillsborough forced me to come off the fence, and say where my allegiances lay.

Hillsborough, a single word; I don’t need to say “The Hillsborough football stadium disaster.” You know what I mean when I say Hillsborough.

The bare facts are that on April 15 1989, Liverpool were due to play Nottingham Forrest in the semi-final of that year’s FA Cup, at the neutral venue of Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium.

Poor communication and huge errors of judgement by senior police officers meant that as the match started, thousands of Liverpool fans were funnelled into the already overcrowded standing terraces at the Leppings Lane end of the ground — terraces that were caged in with high mesh fencing to prevent pitch invasions. Ninety-six fans — the youngest only 10 years old — were crushed to death.

In the days and weeks that followed there was a concerted campaign by South Yorkshire Police, various politicians and some parts of the media to shift the focus away from the failures in policing the match. A general belief among certain sections of society (that all football fans were essentially yobs and potential criminals) was reinforced by specific stereotyping, whereby Liverpool, with its far-left city council, had long been portrayed as inherently rebellious and anarchistic.

While lip service was paid to acknowledging the dead, this was done within the classic framework of demonisation: a small minority are allowed an exceptional status (as saints or tragic victims) that confirms rather than contradicts the overall classification. The fundamental message was that the Liverpool fans — loutish, irresponsible and drunken — were primarily to blame for what had happened.

At the centre of this smear campaign was the publication by The Sun of lies leaked to it by South Yorkshire Police, which culminated in the notorious front-page headline “The Truth” and below it three bullet points:
- Some fans picked pockets of victims
- Some fans urinated on the brave cops
- Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.

But “The Truth” wasn’t editor Kelvin MacKenzie’s first choice. Until Rupert Murdoch overruled him he’d wanted a headline that fully expressed his own beliefs about just what Liverpool football fans were. He’d wanted to use the words “You Scum.”

At Anfield on Friday April 15 this year, the final large-scale memorial service for the 96 will be held. The long campaigned-for new inquests into their deaths are drawing to a close, and the families of those who died feel that now is the time to mark a point of closure, at least in the wider domain.

I started writing the poem Scum last summer, then put it aside. When the first lines of the poem arrived I felt overwhelmed with feelings, but then a voice — maybe that old, cool voice — came in, questioning whether I had any right to tell this story. I’m not a Liverpudlian. I don’t know anyone involved personally. I’m not, in any proper sense, a football fan. However, in January this year the feelings broke through once more. I stayed up half the night completing the poem, not fully knowing what was driving me to write but trusting the fervour all the same.

Perhaps somewhere I understood that my lack of direct connection was precisely the point. Only by being willing to take an imaginative leap into another’s existence, however different they may seem, can we temper our innate tendency to dichotomise, to make some of our fellow humans “other”, and — by extension — less human than we are.

It’s been said that if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. Returning to that opening question and answer, I’d add to that that if you don’t, at times, stand somewhere, all you’ll ever know is falling. I come from Merseyside. I say it now without hesitation.

You can read the poem Scum here.

Alan Buckley’s second poetry pamphlet ‘The Long Haul’ is forthcoming from HappenStance. He works in Oxford as a psychotherapist, and as a school writer-in-residence for the charity First Story.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter – [email protected]
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