Tom Duckett sheltered from the rain in the farmhouse doorway, a rubberised mackintosh round his shoulders, hunched over as he tried to keep his pipe alight. Soon there would be a short European twilight, but still visible ahead of him  now was a landscape unrecognisable as farmland: all dips and hollows, mud pools, the odd broken tree or shattered hedgerow, and, in places, unidentifiable lumps.

It was a fair distance to the place they still called Hill 60, though it no longer had the advantages of height; the mines and the long range batteries had seen to that.

Gunner Duckett knew the call would soon come to get back to their guns and take aim on the invisible. The ears, still retaining the noise of last night’s bombardment, would register the tinnitus of nonstop explosion, the spotters would signal from above, while his battery adjusted the range and tried to hit the German planes as they approached with their noisy mechanicals.

This Passchendaele was a place where dreaming of tomorrow could seem pointless, if not foolhardy, yet looking back at friends lost, and terror revisited, was even less  attractive.

He was a man more practical than imaginative, yet it was hard not to think of Rose and those two little girls at home, to wonder at the possibility one day of walking in Newsham Park with them, sticks thrown for the dog, a moment where he looked down and she looked up and their eyes exchanged happiness.

And maybe, one day,  a boy to complete the family. Saturday afternoons with him watching Everton, taking home fish and chips for the girls.

Was that not what they were fighting for? Surely there had to be some reason?

Tom was my grandfather and had joined the Royal Garrison Artillery with his cousin, Jim Donovan. They were like brothers, the same age, and since his father’s death when he was ten, Tom and his mother  had lived with the Donovans.

Initially deployed on coastal defences, they later  ended up on the Western Front. Gunner Duckett would be lucky and return home in January 1919, Corporal  Donovan would fall in France, just five weeks before the Armistice.

However,  Tom would be heartened with the birth of a son, Thomas, on January 29^th 1920. He was a no nonsense Lancastrian and would have welcomed a boy into a household of females.

But young Thomas, or “The Boy” as he was forever known in our family, died, at less than a year old, at Christmastime in 1920, and Tom, Rose, and the two girls had to bear that sad loss.

(When the second world war commenced in September 1939, Tom and Rose’s first thoughts were relief, because, had he lived, The Boy would have been among the first to be called up.)

However, a few years after their loss, in 1928, there was some joy to be had from Everton’s performances. Going into the last game of the season they were  league champions, and now all attention was focused on their phenomenal leading goal scorer, Dixie Dean. Three goals against Arsenal in the final game of the season would take his total to 60 league goals for the season in 39 appearances, a new record, which still stands.

Tom Duckett was understandably excited  by the prospect, but could not suppress the thought  that he should have had an eight year old son with whom to share the experience, not to mention his cousin, Jim. After all, half the delight  in reminiscing is having someone with whom you can relive the experience.

Maybe he could take one of the girls?

This was something of a revolutionary idea. Contemporary football  crowds would be overwhelmingly male and  working class  and not considered suitable for the “fair sex”.

The older girl, now thirteen, took after her father – outgoing and confident – but she was increasingly interested in clothes and dancing and he couldn’t see her wanting to go to the match.

However, the eleven year old, quieter and closer to her mother, might enjoy the opportunity to spend time with her dad, and so he suggested the outing, and she said yes. 

He felt self-conscious  as they headed up the hill from Kensington to Goodison Park but the excitement  of the occasion soon outweighed any embarrassment.

Which is how my mother was in an attendance of over 48000 who saw a 3-3 draw, the record achieved by a powerful Dean header from a corner just eight minutes from time. The crowd predictably went wild and then the championship trophy was awarded after the game.

Though my mother retained a love of sport throughout her life, that was the only football match she ever attended – but she was still speaking  about it sixty years later. And Tom Duckett had a pal with whom he could reminisce.

Goodison Park has seen its last first team game before Everton move to their new stadium at Bramley Moore Dock. It seemed important to me to visit one more time and to share the experience with my son and also my oldest school friend.

So why was I keen to visit Goodison?

I am a Hibernian fan, born in Edinburgh and following the tradition of my father’s family. In my teens, I lived around twenty miles from Goodison, but chose to follow local team, Southport, in the third and fourth division. So, while retaining a soft spot for the Blues, I can’t claim to be a supporter.

In addition, like most stadiums, though not to the same extent as many, Goodison Park has changed since the 1920s – I doubt my grandfather would recognise it, though elements of the original Leitch main stand remain, and Goodison was always a four sided ground.

It’s not fundamentally, then,  an attempt to stand in my ancestors’ footprints. Football, like the society in which it exists has changed so dramatically that it would be foolish to suggest I could recapture anything of their experiences.

What I am celebrating, I suppose, is something to do with relationships which might otherwise be impossible to capture.

It is all about connection.

When I stood in that main stand looking down on the pitch, I was thinking of my mother’s childhood, her relationship with her father, and how the loss of a baby child can affect a family dynamic.  There was a nod also to the fourteen year old me, attending three World Cup games here, seeing Pele, Garrincha, Eusebio in a world of football long disappeared.

The past, of course, is a foreign country – but what we bring back from our wistful visits there can be important – a kind of emotional duty free.

Though my grandad died when I was five, I can remember him, and, as it is for most of us, my relationship with my mother is a lot easier to quantify now than it was when she was alive.

Visiting Goodison Park gave me a locus for understanding the relationship between my mother and her father; it gave me a space to focus on the uncle I never knew, and how his loss would always affect the family. I will never know if he would have been uncle Thomas, Tommy, or Tom. How would he have taken to my supporting Hibs and Southport? Or would he have been interested in football at all? A life of just over eleven months leaves so many questions impossible to answer. He was born on the same day of the year as me; the connection has always been there.

I was not seeking to imagine Grandad and Mum at the ground, but there is comfort in knowing they had been here, and that they had shared those same emotions of supporting a football team, watching them play, the feeling of belonging, that I do today with my son.

And there is where we find the continuity.

When we walk out of  the tunnel on to the pitch side, Everton’s traditional entrance tune is played: “Z Cars”. I get a tightening of excitement in my stomach. This is not to do with the football club; this is me taken back to being a ten year old in our living room watching the start of this amazing new police series. It’s set about twenty miles from our house, not London, as they usually are; the actors have Liverpool, Lancashire, Scots and Irish accents – like real people we know; these cops have recognisable problems, and we are able to see the link between poverty and offending.  Predictably, the Tories and the Police don’t like it – which kind of sets the seal on its success.

As much as any “beat boom”, this programme represents the start of the sixties for me, an early understanding of drama and storytelling, the power of a well written script. Its creators – Troy Kennedy Martin, Allan Prior, John McGrath – would influence  my love of drama throughout my life. Like a Pavlovian police dog, whenever I hear that theme, my ears prick up, my stomach tightens, and I’m anticipating excitement and intrigue. Imagine a programme so good it retains that power – through its theme tune – for over sixty years!

And I look round the arena of this ground, this blue heaven. It’s like a ball kicked over a garden hedge and then returned by an invisible neighbour – what you put into the stadium is surely given back.

I can hear the shouts and chants of a thousand games, the stamping of boots on wooden boards to keep warm, I see the sway of the crowd, the fug of cigarette smoke,  the arms aloft at a goal, the heads shaken at a missed chance. All that has happened here remains, and all the people with their hopes and dreams, their failures and successes, their loves and their loneliness, their worries, fears and joys, their 90 minute escapes from a life less than perfect – they are all still here, faint but unmistakeable echoes in the highest corners of this beloved old ramshackle coliseum.

And I think of my grandad – that tall, erect, bluff Lancastrian – who went from being music hall comedian, ‘Tom Little’, to a gunner, carrying memories of what happened to Jim and so many of his mates in Belgium, and then came home to face the joy and then loss of a son. I think of him as an ARP Warden on the high roofs of Liverpool, watching the buildings burn in the May Blitz of 1941, and wondering how the world could let it all happen again. I see his red cheeks and grey hair, this postal supervisor, and wonder how such a man dealt with his grief – maybe it was here at Goodison Park, where the battle was over a football, and defeat only meant the need for an extra pint or two, and when the comfort of the Saturday routine became blessed.

I think of my mother, her twenties spent in the damp of an Anderson Air Raid Shelter in the back yard, the horrible shrieking of the bombs, the fear of the morning discoveries, the losses, the destruction, the canary singing in its cage in the flattened remains of a neighbour’s house; the way she copied Lord Haw Haw’s accent on the crackling radio: “Tonight we will be coming to bomb Saxony Rd, Adelaide Rd, Leopold Rd, Empress Rd”…..the familiar streets around her in Kensington. And, looking at the floodlights, I remember how, even three or four decades later, her voice would quiver as she recounted her fear of having to find her way home in the total blackout by feeling her way along the walls of the streets.

And I think of The Boy, who never made it to Goodison, and all he might have done and seen if he had been given the chance. And, again, my mother’s memory, shared some sixty years later, of standing with her sister in the window of their home, watching their dad carrying out the tiny white coffin in his arms to the carriage with the black plumed horses, her farewell to The Boy.

And my pal from school is next to me: sixty two years of friendship. He has humorous tales of his grandad as a Liverpool copper on duty here, but his thoughts must surely be of his dad and brother, for so long his companions in this place, no longer here for that post match drink or discussion.

And, to avoid tears – enough of them at Goodison in the last few years – I smile at my son, a football journalist who has inherited my worrying interest in remote lower league stadiums and the people who inhabit them, now and in the past. I can’t count all the times we have shared football experiences, the ups and downs, the hope and despair, the tears and the laughter. How very blessed have we been to spend those moments together, in love and companionship.

This is what a football stadium offers – especially one as venerable as the Grand Old Lady. It provides the geography of memory, a physical location in which to place the emotion in our hearts. And if, like Goodison, it should cease to exist, then the physical memories move forever into our hearts, and remain.

It’s all about our humanity.

I turn and walk down the tunnel, feeling content that I’ve seen the place for one last time.

Whatever I’m feeling now, it surrounds me.

To be honest, I don’t know if it’s about me, my mother, or my grandad.

Actually, I think it’s about The Boy.