Parky: My Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page A

year under the unexpected weight of food. Men I otherwise saw in their working clothes and pit muck turned up in tight blue suits and Co-op shoes, and aunties with new hair-dos seemed suddenly aware of what they’d kept under their pinafores all year long. The air was heavy with Soir de Paris and the promise of mischief.
    The sharpest memories of Christmas in those days are the football matches. It seemed to me that Barnsley never stopped playing football over Christmas and I never missed a match.
    Christmas matches were different altogether. In the bus going to the ground, men would be wearing new scarves and gloves and they smoked cigars instead of Woodbines. In the ground the normal smell of stale beer was replaced with a whisky aroma from a thousand miniature bottles, which were produced from inside pockets and offered surreptitiously to the man next door in the way they might proffer a glimpse of a dirty postcard.
    In fact, two or three games would be played over the Christmas period and often the players appeared as imbued with the Christmas spirit as the spectators. There was one famous Boxing Day game when one of our team, a man not unknown in certain licensed premises in Barnsley, set the ball down for a free kick and, as he walked steadily backwards to prepare his run-up, collided with the low wall separating the pitch from the spectators, and fell backwards into the crowd. He was caught by spectators who later swore he fell asleep in their arms. Much later, having been revived, he stumbled making a tackle and fell to earth holding his leg. As our trainer ran on to the field someone shouted, ‘Don’t revive him! Bury the sod!’
    Christmas games were derby days – Rotherham United, Sheffield Wednesday, Doncaster Rovers and, best of all, Chesterfield. In those days before crowd segregation, the anticipation of going to a match was in standing next to visiting fans and hearing their take on the game. Playing for Chesterfield at the time were the Capel brothers. Tommy, the really gifted one, was the captain. Chesterfield were awarded a late penalty and Tommy Capel selected his brother to take the kick to win the game. He shot hopelessly wide whereupon one Chesterfield fan standing next to us turned to his companion and said, ‘Nepotism. That’s what lost us the game, bloody nepotism.’
    None of us knew what he meant. We didn’t laugh, mainly because we thought it had something to do with incest. It wasn’t until we got home and searched the dictionary we got the joke.
    The next ritual on my father’s calendar was the start of the shooting season. Every year, the mine-owners would gather with a few cronies and shoot our wildlife. They continued the slaughter even after the mines were nationalised. We lived opposite the gamekeeper, a small bow-legged man called Athey Crossley. He was the man who killed the pig for us every Christmas. My father was employed as a beater and from a very early age I went along with him. When I was big enough I was given a pick handle to try to bash the rabbits we startled as we clumped through the countryside towards the guns. The rabbits were ours to eat if we were successful.
    It always seemed to me incongruous that we should be walking towards the pithead gear and slag heaps of Grimethorpe Colliery for the amusement of armed men, while deep down, beneath our feet, miners were getting coal. One day, walking through a field of stubble towards the guns, before my dad took me down the pit, I asked him what it was like deep underground.
    ‘Blacker than a crow’s arse,’ he said, and left it at that.
    It was when it came to summer holidays my father’s gift for creating drama out of the commonplace flourished in the most spectacular manner. We took our holidays in August, Barnsley Feast Week, when the whole village upped and went away like some Indian tribe moving reservations. The destination varied. The majority went across the Pennines to Blackpool, the rest headed for the east