Coach trip to Wembley story - Readers Digest condensed book version.
1971, Leeds RLFC (no bloody stupid animal names then) win the semi-final against, whoever, Monday evening after school me and two mates stand outside the ticket door (no office, just a door to get served through) and buy three cheap standing tickets for the final.
Get home and told me dad, he told me I couldn't go, showed him the ticket, he stared at it for a long time then asked how the bloody hell did I think I was going to get to Wembley, me being 14 at the time and all.
He finally pulled some strings (my uncle worked at Headingley) and got us three tickets on the supporters club bus.
We turned up at some outrageous early time on the Saturday, like about 4am, no-one else left Leeds as early as we did that day and from the minute we boarded the bus it was obvious to the three of us that we were the youngest passengers, or driver, by a score of at least 60 years - and the bus was even older.
Mr Daimler probably hand made our bus himself and it soon became obvious why we had left so early, actually it would have been more reasonable to have left on Friday, or even Thursday, top speed on the newly built M1 motorway was nudging 30mph and the whole bus shivered like a shiteing dog at those incredulous speeds, the noise from the engine was deafening and the old codgers spoke in sign language and lip reading like the women in wool spinning factories do.
A card was passed around the bus advising us on what to do in case of zeppelin attacks and the old codger sat next to me took great delight in showing me the 2oz of boiled sweets he'd managed to buy from a spiv on a street corner, for eight hours we chugged down the M1 stopping at every single service station for the old lads to take a prolonged leak or to empty their bags depending on how far in the grave their left foot was, all wore long grey overcoats that smelled like wet dogs and flat caps that had once been any other colour other than the greasy black that they were now.
Our bus had a reserved parking slot in the coach car park at Wembley, it was a slot reserved for vintage buses and all of the other coach drivers came over to look at it and reminisce, we didn't realise we were part of a museum exhibit, the bus and most of the old lads being the exhibits - we were told to be back at the bus no more than ten minutes after the final whistle because it was going to take bloody ages to get home and the driver wanted to get a head start on all the fancy new coaches, he needn't have bothered for they all overtook us on the North Circular minutes after leaving the stadium.
Miraculously we arrived home the same weekend, my dad and my uncle had granted themselves a lock-in in the players bar and so were well p1ssed by the time we parked up in the southstand car park, the drive home in our Vauxhall Viva was made almost all the way home on the correct side of the road and with not too many red lights jumped, my dads number plate was on the "He's ok" chief constables list since he too was a member of the players bar lock-in club.
I've been back since, but never on a bus.
