The following are "postscripts" written about some of the stories in

Beautiful Games

Postscript to “Dangleboots and the Day After Tomorrow”

This was the first short story I ever had published, in 1982. Then it was just called “Dangleboots.” I was asked to contribute a story to The Methuen Book of Sinister Stories. To start with I worried more about my story being sinister rather than about football, so it’s strange that it ended up about football and not at all sinister. The word “sinister” made me think of a really scary story I once read called The Tool. Sadly, I forget the author’s name. In it, a man staying in an inn close to the sea goes for a walk. He finds a strange object, a sharp flint of the sort that Stone Age men used for hunting. He picks it up and takes it home. That night he has strange dreams. Next day he goes for another walk and finds, in the very place where he picked up the flint, a man’s dead body, horribly beaten and mutilated. He runs back to the inn and gives the alarm. Next day he goes for a walk again, this time taking the flint with him. A man bars his way on the footpath: he is suddenly unreasoningly angry and sets on him with the flint. When the man is dead he realises that it is the very man he found yesterday. There’s only one solution. The flint has devilish powers which have transposed the two days and taken away the man’s memory of the first.
I wanted to use that idea. But the figure of Andy Matthews (“Dangleboots” himself) and the little dangleboots, which now hang from the mirror in my car, wouldn’t go away, so the sinister idea of the first story became the magical idea of the second. I liked the idea so much that some years later I extended it into a novel called Dangleboots. So the short story “Dangleboots”, slightly revised, became the first chapter of the novel and gained its new title. It’s the revised version which is used here.
Postscript to “The Substitute”

This was the first purely football story I wrote, for my collection of ghost stories The Shirt off a Hanged man’s Back, published in 1984. Like many of my football stories it deals with the past coming to life in the present. I’m very conscious that football has a long and honourable history and our game is the way it is now because of many generations of clubs and players.
When I was a boy, I supported our local team Winslow United, then in the old North Bucks League. They were, to put it kindly, not very good. They had bitter rivals just up the road, Buckingham Town. I grew up and left Winslow but when I came back I found Winslow United was now a rather classy little club playing in a much higher league on a ground with a stand, floodlights and proper dressing rooms instead of having to change behind the hedge. I couldn’t help thinking of Winslow United as they were and as they are now and slowly a ghost story developed.
Ronny Willard is based on another 16-year old player who played for Winslow and who was really superb. He’d signed, not for Man U as in the story, but for Spurs. One morning, just after he was seventeen, he was killed on his motor bike going to work. I well remember the shock and grief throughout the town. Now I remembered him and wove him into this story of the generations, memories and a ghost out to do his best. And in this story we beat “Buckingham Town”! By the way, in those days only one substitute was allowed.
You might notice that this story contains the first whispers of Haunted United.

Postscript to “As Long as it Takes”

Another story with its roots in a real past - and it’s back to Winslow United again. I was about twelve when Winslow United Minors (under-18s) reached the final of the Anstey Minor Cup against Wendover Minors on, as I remember, Aylesbury United’s ground. Winslow attacked continuously but were thwarted by a brilliant goalkeeper. They scored just once, to equalise a really soft goal. In the replay, exactly the same happened: early soft goal, incessant pounding, brilliant goalkeeping, last minute equaliser. Thanfully there were no penalties to decide the game in those days: if there had been he’d have saved the lot.
In this story, once again, the past reaches into the present, because football traditions last for many years and old players and long-finished games never die: they come to life again as soon as memory asks them to.

Postscript to “Proud Preston”

I was asked to write a football story for Christmas. Football and Christmas: how could I make them come together? Then I remembered when I was a very small boy listening to the radio on one Christmas morning. In those days there was a full League fixture list on Christmas Day and I heard a commentary on a First Division (Premiership nowadays) match taking place in London. One team was Preston North End: the other, I seemed to remember, was Arsenal. How could I make a story out of that?
Firsr of all I had to establish what it was that I’d heard. So I rang Preston North End FC and was put through to Mr Ian Rigby, the club historian. He had every fact and figure at his fingertips. Yes, Preston had played in London one Christmas, 1946 in fact, but it wasn’t against Arsenal it was Chelsea. So that was it. 1946. World War 2 only finished the year before. Most football grounds were filled with soldiers, sailors and airmen back from the war. Some were happy, others had fallen on bad times. There was a story to be made out of this – and about what it means to love football - and once again it became a ghost story.

Postscript to “Haven’t You Forgotten Something?”

There’s no better way to look for a story than to trawl through your own memories. Usually these memories provide no more than the little spark that sets something in motion which turns out completely differently. Sometimes, though, the whole experience cries out to be turned into a story with only a little tweaking needed to turn it into a proper story shape.
So, in a very real sense, Danny is me. I used to arrange the matches with nearby towns and villages and pick the team (it was amazing how people played in the positions I decided to without arguing, because I was scared stiff of most of them). We went on our bikes to away games. It all worked well – except, very nearly, for that very first game. I do not know to this day what possessed me not to tell anybody that I’d arranged for us all to cycle over to the dreaded Buckingham next morning, but I did and was only saved from a fate worse than death because everyone liked the idea. But sadly we lost. And we never dyed our shirts Portsmouth blue either. Our mothers wouldn’t let us.

Postscript to “Janey”

I’ve always been fascinated by the way certain stories keep appearing in different forms over and over again. This is especially true with ghost stories and I love them too. The idea of the ghost coming back to sort out unfinished business is a particular form of ghost story which has appeared over and over again and always satisfies the reader because it seems to answer to something very deep inside us. I’ve read many, many other versions of this story and at first I was sad because I wished I’d thought of the idea and now I couldn’t use it for fear of people saying I’d copied it. Then I realised it wasn’t the circumstances, it was the idea that mattered. “Haunted United” and “Proud Preston” are examples of that sort of story.
But what if everyone, both readers and characters, are expecting it and at the last moment it doesn’t happen. An intriguing idea, which I tried to work out in “Janey” – and in doing so became fascinated by this indomitable little character without whom the boys are useless.

Postscript to “Following Pompey”

It’s not my fault than I’m a Pompey fan. It was my father who was to blame. As a young man he worked in Portsmouth Dockyard and never missed a match at Fratton Park. Although by the time I was born he lived far away from Portsmouth, he bequeathed this passion to me. As Uncle Cyril says, you don’t choose your team, they choose you. One of my most treasured possessions, until it fell to pieces because I read it over and over again as if it was a book, was the programme for the 1939 Cup Final against Wolves (Pompey won 4-1) - and how well I remember those two triumphant championship seasons, 1948-9 and 1949-50. After that, though, how horrifying Pompey’s descent into oblivion was. But now they’re back at the top where they belong. For now, anyway!
The secret of being a Pompey fan – or fanof any team for that matter - is to be inexhaustibly optimistic however dreadful things seem at the time. This applied to Uncle Cyril, just as it applies to Ross, the team he plays for and the team he supports. And the past can help the present and the future: that’s why even at the worst, cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

“Dangleboots and the Day after Tomorrow” was first published in The Methuen Book of Sinister Stories, edited by Jean Russell. Methuen, 1982. This revised version was published in Dangleboots by Dennis Hamley, Andre Deutsch 1987.
Copyright Dennis Hamley 1982, 1987, 2004

“The Substitute” was first published in The Shirt off a Hanged Man’s Back, nine tales of the supernatural by Dennis Hamley, Andre Deutsch 1984
Copyright Dennis Hamley 1984, 2004

“As Long as it Takes” was first published in Football Fever, edited by Tony Bradman, Transworld 1998
Copyright Dennis Hamley 1998, 2004

“Haven’t you Forgottten Something?” was first published in Football Fever 2, edited by Tony Bradman, Transworld 1999
Copyright Dennis Hamley 1999, 2004

“Proud Preston” was first published in Nice One, Santa, published by Scholastic 1999
Copyright Dennis Hamley 1999, 2004

“Janey” was first published in Football Fever 3, edited by Tony Bradman,
Transworld 2000
Copyright Dennis Hamley 2000, 2004

“Following Pompey” was first published in On Me’ Ead, Santa, published by Scholastic, 2000
Copyright Dennis Hamley 2000, 2004

“The Devil in Him” is published here for the first time.
Copyright Dennis Hamley 2004

Cover design by Charles Fenoughty
Photograph of Portsmouth at the 1939 FA Cup Final by courtesy of The Portsmouth Evening News
Team photographs of Ware Youth FC and Bury Rangers Youth FC by courtesy of Mrs Jackie Maddison and family