Stussy’s post regarding our DNA being formed by our relationship with Shanks was terrific.
It took me back to the passage at the very end of the Communion chapter in Faith of our Fathers where Alan Edge sums up what Shanks meant to him.
I’ve gone to the trouble of writing it up as it seems so relevant to what Stussy was saying about how what Shanks meant to us still runs through us and I don’t think anyone has ever captured more closely what Shanks meant to us than Alan did in that chapter of his book.
And as you look back – with an obligatory wry smile of course – you realise that all the time Shanks had known what he was doing with us. All along he had been dealing in the purest of emotions. Ours. And his, too. Raw and undiluted. From the very start it had been him who’d been in the driving seat, offering us the bait of glory on the condition we could wring each other’s passions dry.
From our vantage point in the Kop, it was the best deal anyone could have offered us. Not surprisingly we bit his hand off. We became the willing participants in the destiny he was conjuring. We had to be. Otherwise the whole thing wouldn’t have worked. True, there was a hint of emotional blackmail involved. But so what! Selling our souls to Shanks was small beer compared to the rewards that might lie in store for us. Besides, ours had been a love at first sight. A true undying love, borne of implicit trust where we had each given ourselves to the other. Completely. There hadn’t really been a decision to make on either side. It had already been made somewhere else by someone with a far greater appreciation of such things than we or even Shanks could ever have been aware of.
And even now, sixteen years after his death, whenever I think of the man and I picture his wonderful uncompromising craggy face, that blunted nose and lilting half smile, the shorn hair and shining mischievous eyes and I imagine the unique vibrancy of how he spoke, the utter self belief and conviction and sincerity that underpinned everything he said, whether inspirational, flawed or simply outrageous, I cannot do so without a heavy tug on the heart strings and a glistening in the eyes, a resurrection of the emotions he stirred so deeply all those years ago. And though a rational part of me knows it shouldn’t really be like that, since like so many of us the nearest I ever got to meeting him was from my vantage point on the terraces of the Kop, the fact is it is akin to when I think fondly of my own parents and loved ones now also sadly gone.
In fact, to tell the truth, it’s a bit like that final scene in the movie ‘Shenandoah’ where James Stewart’s youngest boy hobbles down the aisle of the church on crutches after everyone had thought he was dead and, no matter how hard you try to fight it, the tears still well up and you have to bite hard on your lip so you don’t look daft. Just like James Stewart himself. That was Shanks though; a writer of one of life’s original scripts of which we were all privileged to have been a part.
No wonder we’re all such an emotional lot.