This article was posted by albiedog on the lfc.tv site a crackin read
You Boys Pen followers might like to read the following extract from 'Faith of our Fathers' which fondly lampoons memories of the Pen.
"Useful though all my other early excursions may have been in cementing my initial Redness, my serious initiation, as with most other Reds fans at the time, came in the Boys Pen .or the Pen, as we termed it. which occupied an enmeshed rear corner of the Spion Kop terracing next to the main stand.
The Pen was truly an awful place. Whilst many other grounds in the late fifties/early sixties had special enclosures for young fans equivalent to the Pen, it is unlikely whether any of them could have come anywhere near matching the Pen’s ghastliness.
Thing was the Pen was the type of place where today you would forbid young lads from attending unless they had committed a serious criminal offence. Or, at the very least, had revealed distinct masochist inclinations. To term it a jungle, would be an affront to any self-respecting lion, sabre-toothed tiger or orang-utan, many of whom, as it so happened, actually used to frequent the Pen in its more genteel moments.
William Golding used the Pen as a watered down synopsis for the savagery of Lord of the Flies and Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange was based on the antics of some of its more amiable inhabitants. Those who maintain law and order began to disintegrate only in the late seventies patently never spent a Saturday afternoon on the steps of the Pen. Had they done so, their views on the relative utopia of life in the likes of Moss Side would have made interesting reading. Provided, of course, they’d survived to tell the tale.
The Pen, in short, was total anarchy.
In 1961 at the age of ten we began our careers there. By that time, going to the match with your dad was considered seriously cissy. Going with your mates on the other hand was definitely the cool thing to do. So, with entry being just ninepence, the Pen was the only affordable way to watch the Reds whilst at the same time retaining some degree of credibility.
Needless to say, many were the times later on when I longed to have taken the cissy option. Though don’t get me wrong on this score. I am talking figuratively here. I didn’t actually want to be a cissy, if you get my drift. It’s just that things would have seemed a little safer if I’d have stuck with my father. I suppose what I’m saying is that the Pen was a nightmare for anyone halfway normal, which category at that time at least, I just about scraped into.
As far as we could see there were broadly two types of Pen inmate. Thugs or desperadoes. As young scruffs ourselves we were all reasonably well versed in the usual street and playground escapades. The Pen, however, was ridiculous - Britain’s own version of Dodge City.
The first hurdle would come on your initial trip up the long winding stepped ramp from the turnstile next to the bank of Kop turnstiles on the Lake Street side of the ground. Here some of Fagin’s budding racketeers [and I don’t mean Joe’s lot!] waited to accost you, demanding your money or your life. Most times we chose life but soon learned thereafter to keep our return bus-fare hidden under a brick on wasteland outside the ground whilst half of the time wondering whether that might be where we would one day end up ourselves if one of the inmates so decreed.
Once inside, there would be other gangs ofmarauding parasites to contend with. Some looking for easy money. Others for an easy fight. The problem was the Pen was only ever partly full so there was always plenty of room for these Neanderthals to roam around seeking out young innocents like us. You prayed for them to find some other poor souls to pick on but, regrettably, we seem to have been viewed as an easy target and so, as often as not, we’d be approached by these budding baboons.
Now adults like to pride themselves in offering the right advice for such circumstances. Stand up to bullies and they will back down, my dear departed mother always used to say. Underneath they’re nothing but cowards.
Oh you really think so do you ma Cowards eh. Well I know it might be a bit late now but here’s a bit of practical feedback for you mother dear. Maybe it was like that for you soppy girls back in the twenties and thirties but these guys had clearly never read the same rule book for bullies that you used to swear by.
Fact was these fellas were as hard as nails. Any resistance tended to make matters worse as we found out at the cost of repeated confrontations and maulings on our early visits.
On one occasion they even took a shine to the shoes my mate Amo was wearing. A brand new pair of chisel toes he’d only just got from his mam’s catalogue. His pride and joy they were. They just piled in and whipped them off him and left him there with a bloodied nose and crying in his stocking feet.
The poor so d then had to go home like that and his parents had to carry on paying out each week for his stolen pair as well as a new pair to replace them. And the worst of it was they had to be those awful naff rounded toe ones nobody liked so they wouldn’t get pinched again! Poor Amo.
Looking back, we really must have been masochists to have put up with it all. I mean it wasn’t as if anyone ever held a gun to our heads to make us go. Which I guess even now is tempting fate a bit in the context of the Pen. So it was all effectively self-induced torture. Yet still we went.
Even so, I daresay many people in the game may scoff at all these bleatings. No doubt they’ll claim that if it’s real terror you’re after then look no further than Plough Lane in the late eighties when Wimbledon came up to Division One and frightened every one to death. To which I’ll say bol locks! Fact is you only had to go there annually while we had to endure the Pen every fortnight. Also you had a referee and two linesmen to protect you. And you got some respite at half time. Also you never had to walk home in your stocking feet. In fact, the only thing they ever stole off you was three points. There’s no comparison, really.
Undaunted by the Pen’s intimidation but still desperate above all to see our Red heroes, we experimented with ways of mitigating the confrontations. The easiest of these was sticking as close as possible to the solitary police bobby who from time to time patrolled this seething cauldron. In time we came to look like frightened kids holding their teacher’s hand in a playground.
At other times, abandoned by the bobby, we would spend virtually the whole game in a frantic escape attempt, scaling the Pen’s railings in a forlorn effort to reach the Kop like scores of others similarly oppressed. The railings must have been twenty feet high and the scene would resemble a mass break out from Butlins holiday camp. Some actually managed the feat. In fact, I believe there were some escaped from Butlins, too. Most of us, however, would get so far and then hang on quivering for dear life for the rest of the game, praying for the final whistle when we could come back down to the safety of an empty pen.
Eventually ? mercifully ? we found the most reliable saviour of all. This was the cousin of one of our lot. He was a prominent member of one of the gangs and allowed us to tag along with them. From then on, the Pen didn’t seem quite such a bad place as we viewed it in relative safety through different eyes and were able to concentrate on the match rather than our backs.
Still, it was always a precarious existence and it was with great relief when, a year or so later, extra jamjars, pop bottles and pocket-money together with six inches extra height at last enabled us to bid good riddance to the Black Hole of Anfield and join the ranks of civilisation on the Kop.
So, at the end of the day, did our nightmare in the Pen teach us anything
Well I suppose the peculiar brand of nihilistic existence that was the Anfield Boys Pen cannot possibly have any lessons for fandom in a broad sense. Clearly, if fans everywhere had to go through the Anfield Pen experience then professional football would long ago have ceased to exist due to plummeting attendances. I mean let’s be honest here, would anyone truly fancy a guaranteed weekly mugging,
Then again, as far as young Liverpudlians were concerned, what it did provide was an unwitting re-affirmation of their faith. Basically if you learned how to survive the Pen’s horrors, dodge orang-utans, hang on to your footwear and bus fare, live to tell the tale and still retain the desire to watch the Reds, then you truly were a fan. Perhaps, then, in that sense, the Pen was not so bad after all and maybe there is some good in everything.
I must admit though, I for one, did not join those who shed a tear when they eventually dismantled the monstrosity and rehoused it, and the pick of its inmates, in Alcatraz, the Pen’s spiritual home. Then again, as a bit of a closet cissy, I would say that, wouldn’t I"
