Dr Hibee, Mr Jambo

Aidan Smith

My life began in 1973. Well, it actually began in 1957, but '73 was my big year, the year I properly grew into my long trousers. And if I remember right, the big boy's breeks were blue-and-grey checked Oxford Bags from C&A.

This was the year, after a few false starts, that Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure album properly got me into rock music. This was the year, after reading by rote for O-level English, that Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers properly got me into fiction. This was the year, too, that I got my first proper girlfriend. And this was the year that Hibs beat Hearts 7-0.

The game has assumed mythical status among Hibs fans who were in the sell-out 36,000 crowd at Tynecastle that New Year's Day, and also those who weren't but claim to have been there, and those who missed it but are still trying to do a Zelig and, like Woody Allen's great-moments-in-history gatecrasher, transport themselves to that dull, cold, utterly glistening afternoon, and squeeze in up the back.

I was there. I've got the programme and the ticket stub. I can half-shut my eyes and summon up the dog-eared photo-memory album containing a shot of the exact colour of the sky beyond the packed terraces of the School End. Hearts could have been three up before Hibs began the blizzard of goals which would shoot them to the top of the old First Division. Hearts were 5-0 down at half-time and my Uncle Don, bless him, felt moved to offer these words of encouragement to his son: "Don't worry, Johnny, Hearts will bring on Cammy Fraser in the second half, you wait and see."

It was an epochal result, inspiring wild abandon. Dad decided there and then to give up the fags. A month later, he took up snuff. The most embarrassed I've been in my football life were those moments, when other fans would nudge each other and point at the old man as he spooned another load from the whalebone box onto his wrist in readiness for a big snort. But so what? He was there with me for 7-0.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUND IN DERBY LORE:

There was the time that Hearts, fearing another annihilation from their regular first-footers, are supposed to have got the fire brigade to drench the Tynecastle pitch so it froze, causing the game to be postponed.

The bitterness never leaves you. In 1990, after Hearts tried to kill off Hibs, some Hibbys boycotted Tynecastle. Fourteen years later, they've never been back.

Passions run high. To look after the wheelchair-bound at matches, you might think that only tolerant, placid individuals need apply. Last season at Easter Road, following a red-card decision against Hibs, a carer jumped the fence of the disabled area to run on to the pitch and attack the ref.

Those in public office are not above the relentless squabble. In Edinburgh's City Chambers in 1995, a Hearts faction of Labour councillors, including the Lord Provost, tried to push through a cryptically-worded motion concerning the colour of the official livery for the capital. Hibs-supporting Labourites scratched their heads. "Pantone 201? What colour is that?'' they asked. "It's... Pantone 201," came the reply. This was an attempt at painting the town maroon by stealth.

The young study history and learn. In 2003, the 30th anniversary of that match, the Hibs captain Ian Murray, not even born when it happened, took the field at Tynecastle with 7-0 etched into his hair with green dye.

And the beaten never recover. For my friend Gordon, January 1, 1973, was his blackest day as a Jambo - even worse than being in Dundee 13 years later when Hearts blew the league title.

24 OCTOBER. HEARTS 2, HIBS 1

Herriot, Brownlie, Schaedler, Stanton, Black, Blackley, Edwards, O'Rourke, Gordon, Cropley, Duncan. These are Turnbull's Tornadoes, the greatest Hibs team of my fantime - the 7-0 team. In the film version of Irvine Welsh's Granton Star Cause, a radge gadgie played by local comic Alex 'Happy' Howden is being given one by his wife who's equipped with a fearsome strap-on. As 'Happy' grips on to the imitation marble fireplace in their manky flat, he recites Eddie Turnbull's brilliantly-realised vision of total fitba', presumably to heighten the sexual ecstasy.

Or maybe he's just trying to think about nice things, wonderful things, to make the pain go away. This is why I'm chanting the swashbuckling line-up, so that I don't have to contemplate how the buggering hell I'm going to get through the first proper derby of the season being stuck in the Jambos end. "Herriot, Brownlie, Schaedler... " And of course, I have to say it to myself. I can't let them hear me.

Beanie pulled down tight over my face, even though it's a mild autumn afternoon, leaves orange and yellow and tumbling softly in the whispery breeze, I have a new route to Tynecastle and my first match-day companion. My brother Sean is offering me moral support for what promises to be a testing day and it's his idea that we walk most of the way along the Water of Leith, Edinburgh's excuse for a river, so that we avoid contact with the Hearts - and Hibs - hordes until the last possible moment.

We have to agree beforehand how we're going to behave during the game, which is ridiculous considering the gloriously unpredictable nature of football, and how the sport subsists on spontaneous reaction from the crowd. We cannot urge on Hibs, obviously, and if Hearts score, we will have to stand up amid the thunderous acclaim going on all around us and... clap? Cheer? Taunt the Hibbys?

This kind of depends on the fans we find ourselves alongside today: they could be real head-cases and we'll have no option but to join in, demonstrate our Jamboness with extreme prejudice.

Now I'm thinking: why didn't I get a season ticket? At least that way, by this stage, I would be on muttering terms with my near-neighbours in the Wheatfield, and if I'd already revealed to them a habit of acknowledging good play by the opposition - a cunning plan with today in mind - they would not be surprised. In fact they would probably be expecting it, no matter that today's opponents are Hibs, "the wee team".

For this is our intended tactic, the method by which we subliminally support Hibs, and the only way I am going to get through today. I cannot be vocal for Hearts. Obviously. And I cannot be silent, either. Brilliant! I feel like Dickie Attenborough in The Great Escape, shortly after the big break-out, holding on to a tremendous secret. No, no, not Dickie, because, after drumming into the other PoWs how they could not drop their guard, not even for a second, he mucked up and was an easy catch for the Gestapo.

We get in early enough to see the warm-ups. All over one half of the pitch, the Hearts players engage in games of three-a-side keep-ball using only one touch. The patterns are like Spyrograph, the ball retention impressive. The ground is filling up and over at the Hibs end, the fans are goading their hosts about their current financial plight and the enforced move to Murrayfield.

No Hearts in Gorgie

There'll be no Hearts in Gorgie

And ...

It's coming down

It's coming down

Tynie's coming down

Sean nudges my leg as all this is going on and I feign a scowl in the hope it's noticed by the Jambos close to me, but inside I'm laughing my head off. This is easy. And then the game starts. The bloody game. Right from kick-off, Hearts replicate their one-touch training routines and this gives them an immediate edge.

Hibs, in their kinky coloured boots, can't get going. They haven't put together a single move worth my exaggerated, grudging credit, so I try another tactic: slagging off bad play by Hearts. But there isn't any of that either. The Jambos get right behind the team in the ascendancy and it's dispiritingly impressive to see players and supporters in perfect harmony, inspiring each other. It's a closed feedback loop and I'm trapped in the middle. Then Hearts score, Patrick Kisnorbo gets it and... what the hell do I do now? From the bottom of my trainers, I try to summon up an ecstatic expression. Imagine a gravedigger in an Ingmar Bergman film, sucking a lemon in a thunderstorm - that's how happy I look. The whole stand is on its feet, hugging, cheering and - what a horrible sight - twirling scarves. Sean and I give grudging applause and he pretends to be a ventriloquist's dummy, like Lord Charles, grinning dementedly through gritted teeth: "Gluddy glastard!"

I feel like a fraud. I feel I've let myself down, my father down, the entire Hibee Nation down. Life in the Jambo Village just isn't going to work. I mean, how can I pretend, how am I ever going to learn to love, the sight of a sclaffed goal for Hearts against my team of nearly 40 years, scored by a balloon more suited to Aussie Rules than the beautiful game?

Then the Jambos in front of us start up a chant: "Oh the Hibees are gay... " I've switched off watching the match and I'm waiting for the second line to kick in; it never comes. "Oh the Hibees are gay/Oh the Hibees are gay... " The outers occasionally turn round and urge the rest of the stand to "sing, ya bastards!" and I'm thinking, come on, you've gotta get through this. "Herriot, Brownlie, Schaedler... " But even I get bored with this mantra after a while so I start assembling random lists...

- The Great Escape - Who Got Away, Who Didn't.

- Forgotten Children's TV Classics (Rag, Tag And Bobtail, Hector Heathcoate, The Magic Boomerang).

- All The Girls I've Loved Before.

- Great Lost Sweets (Hmm, bit obvious that one).

- Best-Ever Derbies (More like it).

Then, bang on cue, to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys' Go West, the Hearts fans sing "4-2, and you blew it", goading Hibbys about the 2003 derby when they surrendered a two-goal lead with strikes in the 98th and 152nd minutes of injury time. Hibs wet their knickers that day and while I wouldn't say this lot are doing the same, they are allowing themselves to be bullied out of what I presume to be their usual game plan by a Hearts team who expect to get a result; Hibs are merely hoping for one.

I feel like I'm in The Singing Detective, played backwards. Unlike Dennis Potter's hero Marlow, who compiles a litany of boring things ("A speech by Ted Heath, a particularly long sentence from Bernard Levin, a Welsh male-voice choir... ") to numb the pleasure of being greased off by a pretty nurse, I'm thinking of stuff I love so I don't have to acknowledge the awful truth that is Hearts' pumped-up domination of this game. Now I'm counting the power points in my flat. All the Hibs youngsters look terribly puny, as if they need to sign up for a Charles Atlas correspondence course in body-building and it really is men against boys. Steven Pressley versus Steven Fletcher is a contest that's a long way from even-Stevens. This has not been a controlled performance from the Hibs kids. They've been Brat Pack flops in a movie with one of those generic, lazy, unexpressive two-word titles like Maximum Force and Sudden Impact except theirs would be called Premature Ejaculation.

That was awful. Not the game, the whole sitting-on-hands, biting-of-tongues, suppressing-of-reason for being, denial-of-Hibbyness hell. If your team's result dictates your mood for the rest of the weekend, then derby outcomes can determine your state of mind right the way through until the return match. Even now, even after divorce and death in the family, it can bend and shape the character you thought was fully-formed long ago. As a kid after a derby defeat you can't think of anything but revenge. The re-match can't come soon enough. So what, then, a derby win you cheered but did not want?

Some people prefer their heroes to be brilliant but flawed. After For Your Pleasure, Roxy Music sold more records, but thrilled less. I still read every new Martin Amis from cover to cover on the day of publication, but even the great man admits that every author ends up repeating himself. Oh, that Hibs repeated themselves! Since 7-0, they've given us, precisely, the Skol Cup. Hey Faither! What did you used to say to me? "Oh ye of little faith", was it? You should have been at bloody Swinecastle today!

On the walk home, Sean and I wonder what the old man would have made of the match. "As a Jambo, you mean?" He's always taunting me like this. Because of our grandad's Gorgie connections, he likes to believe that both our father and our father's father were Jambos, and that after I declared myself a Hibby, Dad was forced to live a lie, which he took to the grave. We'll probably never know the secret, having lost touch with his side of the family long ago. Was his younger brother, a doctor last heard of as living somewhere in deepest Africa, even still alive?

If Faither's football back-story was cloudy he was always clear-sighted about visual art and knew what he liked, particularly among the Scottish stuff. He was a fan of the New Glasgow Boys of the 1980s, the movement which produced Peter Howson's grunting, bull-necked foundry-workers and stevedores and Adrian Wiszniewski's wan, floppy-fringed mummy's boys.

Today, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that Hearts were a Howson painting, Hibs a Wiszniewski. Today, perspiration triumphed over inspiration, style over sinew, brawn over brain, athletics over aesthetics, attrition over attraction and haymakers over playmakers. OK, so we claim the moral highground, but we've left the three points at the bottom of the hill. And yes, "we", for me, still means Hibs.

Back at my flat, Sean and I watch a delayed transmission of Man U vs The Arse but the so-called "Game of the Century" - the one that would finish in Pizzagate, the Old Trafford food-fight during which Arsene Wenger challenged a soup-spattered Sir Alex Ferguson to a square-go - passes in a nanosecond. I take none of it in. Mentally exhausted from having to internalise so much emotion, I go to bed at 8.30pm but can't sleep because of the knots in my stomach.

And the pain in my heart.

With apologies to Stanley Kubrick and that scene in The Shining when Shelley Duvall stumbles across Jack Nicholson's literary labours, just before he turns into the mad axeman... I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts. I hate Hearts...

• Aidan Smith is senior features writer for Scotland on Sunday. HeartFelt: Supping Bovril From The Devil's Cup is published by Birlinn Publishing and is available now from all good bookshops or via www.birlinn.co.uk, priced £9.99.

Taken from the Scotsman