Read an Excerpt
We All Live in a Perry Groves World
My Story
By Perry Groves, John McShane John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2007 Perry Groves and John McShane
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84454-452-3
CHAPTER 1
Let's start, as they say, at the beginning. I'm a Cockney, born at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London – known to everyone as Barts – on 19 April 1965, and brought up in Bow in the heart of the East End. Barts is a famous hospital, just down the road from St Paul's Cathedral and the Old Bailey, and being born there certainly gave me a better start in life than my dad had.
He's Arnold John Groves – 'Ginger' to his pals; I'll leave you to guess why – and he came into the world at an open prison in Epping in Essex. Before you jump to the wrong conclusions, it was March 1940 and Londoners had been evacuated because of the Blitz, so the prison was being used as a hospital. He later met my mother, Patricia Kathleen Healy, descended from a London-Irish family, at a local dance in the East End, and in the due course of time I came along.
I turned out to be an only child, so you'd think they could have made a better job of choosing a name for me. Mind you, although it's bad enough going through life with a name like Perry, it could have been a lot worse. My folks were big fans of the actor Pernell Roberts who played Adam in the popular cowboy series Bonanza on TV. They actually toyed with the idea of calling me Pernell for a while. 'Pernell Groves' – the very sound of it gives me a chill! Heaven forbid, but given their liking for the show they could have called me Little Joe or Hoss, two other characters in the series, so it could have been worse. Just.
Thankfully, they chose the lesser of the two 'P' evils and plumped for Perry, not Pernell. When I eventually started playing for Arsenal, The Times newspaper, no less, said my name sounded like the address of a cider company. Better that than Pernell Groves, though – fine for a cul-de-sac in Sidcup, not so good for a football star.
We had a family tradition of footballers. Dad's uncle, Vic Groves, played for Arsenal from 1955 to 1964 and captained them for a spell. He was the Gazza of his day – without the booze, drugs or tears, if you see what I mean – and even played for England at amateur and youth level. Great-uncle Vic was the first Groves to play in Europe, because he played for a London XI that took on Barcelona in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup Final in 1958 in the days when it was one city (rather than one club) against another. European club competition was virtually unheard of then, but later it became the UEFA Cup.
Vic was part of a fine team at Highbury in the 1950s. Internationals like Dave Bowen, Jack Kelsey and Tommy Docherty were all in a good side who took some beating back in the days of the £20 maximum wage, proper short-back-and-sides haircuts and when the main group of 'foreigners' in a side inevitably came from Scotland.
Dad had two other uncles, called Reggie and Bunny Groves – Bunny was the better player – and my father himself was an old-style bustling centre-forward, although he never played professionally.
By the time I came along, my parents were living in Monier Road in Bow, London E3, right in the heart of the East End. It was a two-up, two-down house, with a toilet out the back and a tin bath in front of the fire. No, I'm not making it up: I can just about remember being in that bath with the fire roaring away. This was a quarter of a century after Hitler had tried to destroy east London with his bombs, and 25 years before the yuppies moved in to finish the job by sending property prices through the roof. Monier Road is still there, but our house was demolished long ago to make way for a factory.
One of my first memories was of having a little 'Mr Rusty' tricycle that I would pedal around on. Back in those days I'd happily set off to the café down the road and someone would buy me a milkshake until Mum or Dad came to fetch me. They knew I'd either be in the café or at the grocers near by. Nowadays, there would probably be a full-scale air and sea search for a missing four-year-old, but, as the song goes, it was all so different then.
You might be thinking that I'm about to start one of those East End childhood sagas, but you're wrong. Things were about to change dramatically. Dad, who was working for URS as a lorry driver, decided he wanted to move out of London, so, when an opportunity for families to move to Suffolk as part of an overspill move came up, he went for it. We could have gone to Haverhill, but decided instead to move to Great Cornard about a mile from Sudbury, so close that some people think of it as a suburb.
It's not one of those twee chocolate-box villages but it's nice enough and, at the last count, had a population of around 8,000. Our house, at 16 Hawthorne Road, had – luxury of luxuries – an inside toilet and bathroom and a coal bunker out the back. Many of the houses there were built around squares with a nice patch of grass in the middle, and we were among the first to move in. Pretty soon, the houses began to fill up, mainly with families from London – that or the occasional elderly couple.
School was the nearby Pot Kiln Primary and it was there that I learned at a very early age that I was different from most other children. Life can be tough for A Boy Named Sue, as Johnny Cash used to sing, but it can be pretty horrible for a boy with red hair too.
Like my dad before me, and quite a few others in our family, I was a carrot top. Describe it how you like – auburn, strawberry blonde, rusty – it doesn't make any difference, a ginga is a ginga is a ginga. The first thing to know is how to pronounce it. It's not with soft 'g's as in gingerbread, but with a hard 'g' at the start and in the middle, so that it rhymes with singer. I was a ginga then, I was during my playing career – from my mullet days to my trademark Tintin look – and I am now, although it's a little bit thinner on top.
Children always pick on someone who is different. In those days there were no ethnic minorities in Suffolk, so gingas were the minority and the kids would play 'get the ginger' because of my red hair. I never got beaten up, but they would take the piss out of me. It taught me at an early age that you have to be independent, believe me.
One of my earliest football memories is playing at the school under the eyes of the woman games teacher (who was actually called Miss Game), a spinster who looked about 98 but was in reality only 50-ish, when I was about six or seven. She would be dressed in her skirt and what looked to me like little slippers.
In one game, I didn't pass to this lad who was on my side who was absolutely useless and she asked me why. I've never been one to lie when put on the spot, so I told her the truth. 'He's crap,' I said. She stopped the game and said to me, 'Do you realise the upset a remark like that could have on other people?' I told her no, because I didn't. Then she made me pass the ball to him. It was a great lesson to learn. First it taught me that football is a team game – you can't do it all yourself. Second, it made me realise that it's not someone's fault if they are not as good as you are at something. As long as they try their best, there isn't much more they can do.
I loved football: I remember just wanting to play it all the time. Dad would take me to Great Cornard recreation ground, where we would play. Nothing too unusual in that, you might say – dads play football all the time with their lads, but it was different with mine. Most dads let their kids win. Well, not my dad. He was like Competitive Dad from The Fast Show. There was no letting the ball dribble through his legs on purpose and then pretending I was too good for him. We'd put some clothes down as goalposts and he'd go in goal and he never let me score if he could help it. He would dive all over the place to save my shots. You'd think we were at Wembley rather than on a little patch of grass in East Anglia – Gordon Banks, eat your heart out. If I was to score past Dad, it would have to be on merit. There were no charity goals on offer during my shoot-ins.
I don't know what a psychologist would make of that these days, and I don't care. All I know is that it made me a better player because I realised from a very early age that you have to fight for everything. I'm the same with my two sons Lewis and Drew now: they must earn everything.
I remember I had two balls – no jokes please – that I treasured. There was an orange plastic 'Wembley Trophy' one and a proper white leather one that I used to carry in netting and clean after every game. Soon I started playing for a local team, the Cornard Dynamos, which was run by two men, Eddie Merton and Peter Thurlow. I was playing in their under-ten side by the time I was six. The problem was they wouldn't allow me to play in their league games because I was too young. It would have been a breach of league rules.
My best mate was a lad called Warren Brown and day after day, winter or summer, we'd play football together until it got dark. That's all I wanted to do. I was happy as long as I had a ball to kick around. Talk about football crazy.
When I wasn't playing football, I was watching it. It's not like it is now with virtually every major game shown live or in highlight form on one TV channel or another. Once you've finished with the Premier League or Champions League, it's easy to catch up with the latest results from Spain, Italy or wherever. But back in the early 1970s it was very different. A glimpse of top football then was as rare as dirt on George Graham's highly polished shoes would be a few years later.
So Saturdays were special for me. Mum and Dad would go to the pub, the Maldon Grey, with their pals Mick and June Brown and I'd stay in with Prince, our springer spaniel, for company and watch television all night. I can remember the programmes even now: detective shows like Cannon or Starsky and Hutch – followed by the highlight of the week, Match of the Day with David Coleman and Jimmy Hill.
They always seemed to be showing Leeds United, Liverpool or Sheffield United who had, for one of the few times in their history, a decent side with a genuine class act in an English international called Tony Currie. He looked like a pop star with his flowing, long blond hair, and I loved the way he played, especially his 'foot-overs' where he'd put his foot around the ball which was practically revolutionary in 1972. I'd try to do it myself outside our house and practically broke my leg!
It was bliss watching those Division One – as it was then – games. They wouldn't show all the matches, because they weren't allowed to, so I, like football fans all over the country, made the best of what we got.
After the football had finished, I'd stay watching the box and the night's viewing would end with the Michael Parkinson Show. Mum and Dad might still be down the pub having 'afters', so I'd stay glued to the set and when the dot eventually came on as TV closed down for the night it would all be quiet – and I'd shit myself with fear. These days, social services would be breaking the front door down, but I was as safe as houses and I loved it, the fear and all.
About this time, I had to make a big choice – whether to support Manchester United or Arsenal. Now you might think it was a foregone conclusion that I would plump for Arsenal, but it was a close thing for a time – well, I was only seven. My great-uncle had played for Arsenal, Dad was a 'Gooner' through and through, and most of the men in the family were Arsenal supporters. But I've always been one to look in the mirror when I am passing and I liked the look of the Manchester United away strip of the time – white shirts and black shorts – and I could just picture myself wearing that in years to come. So for a while I guess I supported them both, strange as it sounds now. I could even have ended up supporting United – perish the thought! Fortunately, I was saved, but I'll tell you about that a little later.
Life was OK in Great Cornard, and for holidays the family would go in force to Ladbrokes Holiday Camp at Caister, near Great Yarmouth. We'd spend a week there – Mum, Dad and me, Uncle Ron and Auntie Sheila, cousins Marina and Denise, and Nan and Granddad, Tim and Doll. We'd have three or four chalets for the family, and me and Dad would play sport all week. Marvellous.
They always had a dads' game for the fathers and he loved to take part in that. He was unbelievably competitive and wanted to win, although at least he was a team player. At that age, I was all 'me, me, me'.
My first game in proper kit for the Dynamos came when I was about seven. We played at Wells Hall Primary School and we ran out in the old Birmingham City blue and white strip. Dad bought me some shin pads and a pair of black with yellow stripes Adidas boots, 'Franz Beckenbauer Supers', for about £14 – and four or five different sets of screw-in studs. I always fancied myself as an inside-forward, but I was the youngest player on the pitch so they put me on the right wing.
Life with the Dynamos gave me an early taste of the highs and lows of football. We were losing one game 8–0, all the other players were bigger than me and I'd seen so little of the ball standing out there on the wing I might as well have been the linesman. (Some things never change!) Then, miracle of miracles, someone actually gave me the ball. I woke up just in time to control it and sent in a cross that the goalkeeper came out to collect. He missed it, the ball hit a mound, bounced and went in the net.
I didn't know what to do. I was overjoyed. Dad was on the touchline and had seen my first goal. I felt so happy I started to cry. It was that feeling of elation, just to touch the ball and then score ... it was an indescribable emotion. Let's put it this way – I never felt like that again until I started shagging. Yes, it was as good as that.
We ended up losing the game 10–1, but I didn't care. I was just happy that I'd scored. Weird as it might sound, that attitude stayed with me throughout my career. Yes, there were times when you ended up on the losing side and you felt sorry for yourself and disappointed for the team and fans. But the main thing I cared about after every game was how well I had played. If you ask other professionals if they feel the same, a few of them – the honest ones – will tell you they do. The bullshitters will tell you the opposite.
From that day on, I had an ambition – I wanted to be on Match of the Day, I wanted to play football full time. It was nothing to do with the prospect of earning big money as a professional footballer – that wasn't even a consideration for me. It was simply that the thought of it was the most exciting thing in my young mind.
The next season I started to play regularly in the Dynamos' under-ten side, usually against lads two or three years older than me, and I played for them for three years. Once we had three lads – Tony Jupp, Andy Scott and Eddie Doyle – selected for the league side, which was made up from the best players in the league. Although I was younger than them and they were our three best players, I was still disappointedly looking for my name on the board when it was announced they had been selected – I just wanted to be in the representative team.
Still, I would have a taste of the glamour side of the game and television coverage pretty soon – but not quite in the way I had dreamed of. We had a girl called Dawn Lawrence, who was eight or nine, playing for the Dynamos on the left wing and it got in the newspapers – a girl playing in a boys' side was a good story in those days. There was a lot of fuss about how she would have to change in a dressing room by herself before all the boys did and all that nonsense.
The next thing we knew Anglia TV had heard about it and came out to cover it – film crew, reporter, cameras, microphones, the lot. They wanted to film Dawn – who was a pretty good player as it happened – going past a couple of boy players, so me and my mate Warren Brown volunteered like a shot. A chance of early fame beckoned – and we blew it. Because when it came to the crunch we couldn't do it. We couldn't let her make us look stupid – you can't blame us. On the first three or four 'takes' in front of the camera, Warren brought her down – he wasn't going to let her pass, and I did the same.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We All Live in a Perry Groves World by Perry Groves, John McShane. Copyright © 2007 Perry Groves and John McShane. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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