February 3rd, 2022. Today I turn 22.
Two years ago today, I was heading up to Scotland with my parents. My dad and I loved climbing this mountain in Assynt called Stac Pollaidh and dad had long-talked about wanting to climb Suilven. So we headed north to a little house on the coast, our favourite place to stay as a family. My dad’s birthday is on the 11th, a week after mine, and on the day he turned 56 we climbed up a small peak and looked out across the desolate landscape together in the biting wind.
The day after, my parents set off to visit a friend, leaving me at the house to potter around and look out at the ever-changing scene. When they hadn’t come back by late evening I figured something was wrong, I couldn’t get hold of either of them and as it drifted towards nighttime I could feel my nerves fraying.
Eventually, they did trapse back through the door with stories of a surprise visit to the hospital… My dad had had his phone switched off for the entire holiday to this point and had missed calls from the hospital back in London urging him to go directly to the nearest A&E; they’d discovered a pulmonary embolism on a scan done just before we left.
There would be no more walking that holiday. No Stac Pollaidh climb.
We rushed home and things immediately got more serious. The pulmonary embolism was the softener to the knockout blow of terminal pancreatic cancer. Sometimes when you sit in these rooms with doctors looking around nervously, you begin to know what’s coming. Eventually it felt like we had to force it out. Tell us. Get it over with.
They did and my world fell apart.
Because this wasn’t the beginning of the story. Six months earlier we had sat in similarly stuffy rooms before being told my mum had MSA. A terminal illness that affects balance, movement, breathing, digestion and bladder control. MSA is an indescribable horror; slowly taking over everything you know and love about a person. It rips everything to shreds and leaves you alive long enough to suffer every second of it in full.
I hadn’t really adjusted to this news very well. I’d stepped back from work and lost my relationship, a four year long companionship with someone who I cared for with my whole heart. I was a wreck. And I remember hearing the news of my dad’s impending death and looking at the white walls and saying “Okay, it’s okay.”.
That would be the only internal conversation I really had for a long time afterwards.
Okay, it’s okay.
11 February 1964 – 20 April 2021
On the 20th of April 2021, my dad died at home with his family around him. It wasn’t a peaceful death. I held his hand and cried as silently as I could. Fighting not to shake, not to waver, because I had resolved to be one thing and that was strong. For him, for me, for all of us.
And afterwards, I checked myself into every mental health support system I could find and I fought to be the person my mum needed me to be. I planned a funeral and I learned how to be a parent. MSA had left my mum entirely dependent on those around her and I wanted her to live the fullest life she possibly could, regardless of if that meant sacrificing much of my own.
On the day of my dad’s funeral, I organised and I witnessed but I didn’t really experience. Not until I stood in front of the 30 people we were allowed to welcome into Honor Oak Crematorium and read out a poem about the gift my dad gave me in sharing his love of football.
Proper Football
I used to like going to the football.
The faint smell of onions as chants wafted up from the rear carriages
Of the train carrying us to our weekend.
There was something about the atmosphere of the street –
Whether it was the excitement, the camaraderie, or the dull undercurrent of menace
I’ll never be quite sure.
A wise man once told me on one of those days
To stand on the shoulders of giants.
And they were my giants back then:
Parker, Diamanti, Tevez, Benayoun-
And back in the corridor outside the flat it was the FA Cup Final,
Diamanti had just cut it back to the edge of the eighteen-yard box.
The commentator screamed my name as I thwacked the inflatable ball into the front door
For the 247th time that evening.
Though I never did like football training all that much.
Something about Sunday mornings –
Expectations, impressions.
Once, so desperate to impress,
I kicked the ball as hard as I could at the goal from five yards out
And damaged the ten-year-old female stand-in goalkeeper’s wrist.
Mortified as I was,
I’d subsequently be banned for five games
And slink off to the sidelines to cry from shame.
And when telling this story before,
I always seemed to omit that those five games
Would be over in half an hour.
Anyway, I miss that old football.
The relegation six-pointers on March Saturdays,
The faint sound of “oohs” as we nipped away from the ground a few minutes early.
Now the football is flyovers, security queues,
Airy trains with a smidge of legroom.
I could be on my way to work,
You wouldn’t know the difference.
Though we’d still shuffle along
Each weekend arguing about the formation, the tactics, the manager-
We’d of course conspired to throw away another two-goal lead at home
In the final minutes after failing to keep the ball in the corner-
And there I go
Half wondering what you’d be saying,
Half dreaming of days gone.
Scott Parker doing his three-point-turn in the centre circle;
Proper football.
And after it was all over, after those moments of strength in the face of great adversity, it was time to confront some home truths. I wasn’t the person I had been trying to be for a long, long time. I loved my dad but we were never able to create an environment where I could truly blossom and learn to both accept and love myself. I wish he could see me now.
It’s time I told you something.
I’m non-binary and pansexual. Unapologetically so.
Sharing this has been an incredibly difficult decision to arrive at. I don’t think my gender identity or sexual orientation should make a blind bit of difference to anything at all. But it does. I knew it did when I stood in Block 131 and everyone around me launched into a chorus of “Chelsea Rentboys!”. I knew it did when I stood in the Shed End and everyone enthusiastically belted out “Joe Cole’s a queer!”. And I knew it did when I sat in a cab from Birmingham Moor Street to Villa Park with other West Ham fans as they joked about a visibly emotional man crossing the street having “… fallen out with his boyfriend”.
These things have never offended me though. I went to an all-boys naval school, I’m pretty impervious to casualised homophobia. But I shouldn’t have to learn to be unmoved by the ignorance of those around me to feel that I fit in somewhere. I shouldn’t have to shrink and stand in silence when I can’t join in with a chant because it’s homophobic. And I shouldn’t have to feel that I can only come out after my dad’s death.
So, no more of this. Football is a space for everyone. I write poetry, I’m queer and I fucking love West Ham. And if me sharing this makes things even a smidge easier for the next LGBT+ teenage football analyst then I’ll have achieved something more important and meaningful to me than anything else.
Jack x
Jack Elderton 