CUT THROATS & COCONUTS
When my grandfather took me to watch Cambridge United for the first time in August 1960, he warned me to watch out for cut throats and coconuts.
I possessed a vivid imagination nurtured by the adventure stories of Captain WE Johns, John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson, so my grandfather’s talk of cut throats was unsettling to say the least.
Talk of coconuts was merely puzzling.
The old man, wearing his flat cap and worn jacket over a maroon pullover in spite of the heat, parked on the Co-op car park on the corner of Whitehill Road.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Keep up, Rupert.’
I was lagging behind, looking for cut throats behind every corner, every back alley of every house.
‘Don’t call me that, Grandad,’ I said.
He seemed to think it funny to scare the living daylights out of a nine year old boy and then to cap it all by calling him by the name of a cartoon character from the Daily Express.
‘This is Cut Throat Lane,’ he said as we turned right and left behind the reassuringly normal front gardens of Elfleda Road, began to walk on a rutted track of dirt, stones, and occasional islands of abandoned wartime concrete.
I shivered.
‘It used to be called Cut Through Lane,’ he said, and grinned.
I relaxed.
‘What about the coconuts, then, Grandad?’
‘Hurry up,’ he said, ‘there’s only fifteen minutes to kick off.’
I ran to catch him up, caught his bony hand in mine.
‘Do you want a programme, Rupert?’ he said.
