It had been cold and foggy outside so getting on the train, everyone was still wearing thick winter coats and scarves. I had a big empty suitcase with me which I parked in a doorway and sat in between two men, one of whom shifted to let me sit down but was engrossed in a game on his phone involving moving pipes around the screen. The other guy was wearing a Doctor Who kind of scarf and had a shock of receding curly hair. Two women sat opposite talking in an Eastern European language, looking us over rather disdainfully.
I went for the guy with the scarf. He was quite sullen, gazing straight forward. Good day so far? I asked. “Yeah alright, you?” he responded, his face brightening. I told him I’d just got out of the house. “Where are you going?” he nodded at my suitcase. I told him I was heading up to Sheffield for a night but I was not about to get on to talking about how quick the bloody trains are again, so I quickly asked him back. “Work.” And where’s that?
He worked at a Premier League football club he said, “with young people on the community outreach programme.” Interesting job, I said. “What do you do?” he shot back quietly. I’m just a barman, I said, serving the community in a different sort of way. I often have to have this kind of jokey exchange, swapping little nuggets of information and laughing which I think serves to build up trust between the two of you.
I asked him to tell me more about his job, asking if he did a lot of work in schools. “Yeah we do, we use football to kind of draw people in. It’s about getting to know young people. I do a lot of employability training with them.” So you use football to lure them in and then trap them? “Yeah,” he said, laughing, “It’s one way of drawing them in.” He kept glancing around at stations like he was worried he’d miss his stop if he became too involved in the conversation.
So what are the young people (I noticed him carefully using this phrase so I followed suit) you work with like? Are they difficult? “Well, I’ve done a lot of work in prisons lately,” he said, “and that’s quite tough. I hate it actually, but it’s ultimately quite good.” In prisons? I asked. I was a bit taken aback that a Premier League football club would have an outreach programme in prisons. With kids is an easy one but I would’ve thought working with criminals might be a bit too spiky for them. I didn’t say that though.
“Yeah that’s probably where I find it most rewarding.” He didn’t quite sound sure about this and I wondered if he was trying to convince me or himself. “It’s quite hard for me because I come from a middle class background and I find it difficult to relate to some of those young people because they don’t have that background that I’ve had, like I’ve got parents that are still together. So it is difficult.”
I suppose we’re all the same at the end of the day though, I said, thinking about how I would approach a situation like that. He seemed a bit quiet, I would have expected it required a certain level of loudness and force. Maybe he had the seriousness to pull it off. “Yeah, there are other people who I work alongside and they’ve been that person on the estate, they’re the ones who go out and find people and be the first point of contact. Increasingly I’m going out more to meet people first of all. I’ve been working there for six years now.”
“Well, this is me, have a good time in Sheffield,” he said suddenly, seemingly quite surprised to be at his stop, and got off.
London Talking 