They call them “plastics” these days, but they’ve gone under many names over the years: glory-hunters, cup-hunters, May-wonders, one-season diehards, Match-of-the-Daydreamers, Ferguson Televisions, Fickle Prats, SW6000s, Revie’s bitches, the Scouse-in-his-house, Arse an’alls, the Double bubble, Half-day Wednesday, all the way back to Suddenerland and Hey! Preston. Back in the fifties, we were still calling them Bakelites, and Wolves, it must be said, had more than their fair share.

Now it never really mattered to me whether a chap had supported the Wolves for a day, a season, a decade or a lifetime. Neither did I care whether he was born within the sound of the bells of St Luke’s, how he pronounced ‘grey peas and bacon’, or, for that matter, whether he could digest grey peas and bacon (though on that matter I do have one simple rule: if you can’t digest it, don’t bloody eat it). True, as the last of the Stafford Road diehards trundled down Fox’s Lane and up the Waterloo Road during the cup run of ‘49, it was natural to feel a certain resentment, but when it came to converts further afield, why not? Armchair fans could be generous hosts and helpful allies on tricky away days, and, let’s face it, accent and dialect matter very little when you’re all cheering an away goal.

‘Eh yiw frum Wolv’ramptin?’ said a little voice as I alighted the train whose loco stood hyperventilating before it’s next dash onwards.

‘Yes we are,’ I said, lifting my trilby to the old lady in greeting. Jack Dudley and ‘Chimdy’ Potts joined me on the platform and followed suit.

The woman turned to walk with us and the nasal voice recommenced. ‘It’s mah kneebour. A wunder if you can help meh?’

‘Your neighbour?’

‘Aye. He’s mad on Wolves.’

‘Since when?’ asked Jack (who didn’t quite share my spirit of inclusiveness).

‘Ooh, years now. A good five years.’ I didn’t need to glance over at Jack to know that he’d be rolling his eyes by now.

‘What’s his problem?’ I asked.

‘Well, we don’t have many Wolves fans around where we live: Pike Hill. There are some over a bit further west, oop bah cemetary. But they in’t very, sociable like…’

‘What, does he want to join us for a drink?’ I asked, looking for a pub as we stepped out of the station.

‘He would. I know he would. It’s just that…’

‘I’ll buy him one.’

‘Very kahnd, Ah’m shooer. Nor. Problem is he warn’t leave ows. Freed o’ bein’ bollied.’

‘Bullied?’

‘Since summer o’ sixty. Warn’t leave ows.’

We stopped short. Being pipped to the championship that year still held a vicious sting. A hat-trick of titles, it would have been, and the first double of the modern era. ‘Took it hard, did he?’ I asked.

‘Aye. Warn’t leave ows.’

‘Lambs’ kidneys fo’ hotpot.’

We agreed to look in on him. There was plenty to see. Mrs Glover watched on with a kind of maternal pity as Norman tried to switch his weight from one enormous buttock to the other, on the three-seat sofa into which he had somehow been squeezed. ‘Greengrocers don’t deliver,’ he said by way of explanation, ‘Butcher does but it’s all cheap cuts.’

‘You not working, Norm?’

‘No.’

‘What do you expect him to do, Gonby? Crush cars at the scrap yard?’

‘That’s enough of that, Jack.’

‘I knoo ah’ve put on a bi’ o’ wheat…’

I looked at the mantle. It was a relief. Next to a carriage clock, the photo of a much thinner man wearing Norman’s spectacles looked back at me. ‘Is it just scratchings the butcher sends you…?’

‘Bit o’ tripe. Lambs’ kidneys fo’ hotpot.’

‘Can you still get through the front door?’

‘Prob’ly not. Don’t reelly want teh.’

‘Got any clothes?’ he currently wore a king-size bed sheet tied around his neck like a barber’s cape.

‘No.’

The room fell silent. I thought about the pub.

‘What d’yer think?’ said Mrs Glover, nervously. Norman shifted his wait towards her. Towards pretty much everything, in fact.

‘Well,’ I said, lighting a Senior Service, ‘I’m no doctor, Mrs Glover, and I’m a Wolves man through and through. I don’t know what I should do without me babbies, and so what I’m going to say, well, you need to understand it doesn’t come out easily. It’s no glib refrain, like the offhand remarks Harry Lumm uses to avoid buying a round.’ (Jack and Chimdy hummed and nodded in recognition at this remark) ‘For that reason, I think you should both listen, and listen carefully.’

A muffled sound came from toward the door.

‘Could you pull your stomach over towards the window, please, Norman? I think Mrs Glover is trying to say something.’

Norman heaved a stone of midriff up from the floor and over the arm of the couch.

‘You’re pathetic, mate, to be honest….’

‘Very well, Mr Gonby,’ said the less-obstructed Mrs Glover, ‘That’s all reet, Norman, in’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Norman, his eyes looking floorwards, their gaze obstructed by masses of fat loosely pertinent to his pectorals.

‘I think he should stop supporting the Wolves,’ I said.

‘Never!’ said Norman, raising his blubbery arms with such force that Chimdy and Jack hugged their overcoats tight against the draught, ‘I’m Wolves thriu and thriu!’

‘But what good’s it doing you?’ I said.

‘It dun’t matter! It’s a passion! I can’t control it!’ his voice raised in volume and pitch, and his eyes pleading with me for recognition. I turned to Jack Dudley. He knew what he had to do.

Lighting a cigarette, he surveyed the bedsheeted figure, ‘You’re pathetic, mate, to be honest,’ he began, ‘You have nothing at all to do with Wolverhampton Wanderers, or with Wolverhampton,’ a gust of Senior Service accompanied these opening shots, like the rumour of an arson attack in some textile warehouse or paper mill. Or a fireworks warehouse. ‘You’ve never even stood on the South Bank, let alone gone where the real fans go. We talked more Wolves on the train in from Preston than you have in your lifetime. I’ll bet you pronounce Trysull “Try-sull” and “Whitmore Reans” “Whit-more Reans.” You and your kind make me sick! They’re called “Wolverhampton Wanderers” for a reason! Their victories are our victories! Mine! Gonby’s! Chimdy’s! Not Dave from Shoreditch’s! Not Klaus from Düsseldorf’s! Not Madame Marie-Charlotte of the Dix-Huitième Arrondissement’s! And not fat Norman from bloody Burnley’s! One of these days you’re going to have to get used to that — might as well be today. Yow ay welcome. I mean, what made you think you would be? I’d rather watch the game with Gonby and Chimdy here, surrounded by Burnley fans, than fill an entire Bee Hole End with one-game-a-season diehards like you. Not that we’d get anybody else on there, once we’d shoved you in through the exit gates.’

‘But…’

‘I haven’t finished yet,’ snapped Jack, drawing deep on his cigarette, ‘I work in a tyre factory. You ever been in one of them?’

Norm shook his head, still gazing downwards. I thought he might start to cry.

‘You know when you’m a kid, and you walk into a shoe shop or a carpet shop, and you have to catch your breath because of the smell of rubber? It’s like that, but a thousand times worse. First time you go in, you think everybody’s keeping a secret. “They’m playing a trick on me,” you think, “pretending they can breathe when it’s obvious that nobody could possibly breathe in here.” You think they’ll open the doors in a minute and get some fresh air in there. But they don’t. They never do. And when you finish your shift you look like a tyre – black everywhere, even under your clothes. I get through that every day thinking about the Wolves. I replay Saturday’s game in my head, and imagine next Saturday’s game. I remember the greatest goals I ever saw, the greatest passes, the greatest tackles. That’s how I get through eight hours without going spare. And then, when I finish, I head straight to the pub and talk about the Wolves.

‘What do you think about? Norm? The colour of the shirts? How many letters are in the name? And who do you talk about it with? Mrs Glover here?’

He was crying now, plump tears finding deep valleys across the fat frown.

‘Ooh, I dun’t mahnd him talking about futeball tiu meh…’

‘Shut up, Mrs Glover — I’m not talking to you. Norm, you chose the Wolves because we were winning. What’s the best Wolves can give you now? Confirmation? A reminder? You might have to wait, you know. It might take twenty years, or thirty, or forty. But when they win something for us, by which I mean: the people that actually support them, they’re giving us a once-in-a-lifetime gift. A moment of true joy. If I never get it again, I’ll know I lived. That’s something you’ll never experience, and I pity you and the rest of your pathetic kind. Where are your parents?’

‘They’re dead.’

‘Well, they’d be ashamed of you. Mrs Glover’s ashamed of you. Gonby’s ashamed of you, and he doesn’t even know you. I mean, even people who spend their lifetimes waiting, and who never win anything – Blues fans, Stoke fans, Walsall fans, Stafford Road fans – at least they had a dream worth having. You’ve got nothing. You only chose us because we were champions; every year we’re not champions is a year of failure for you. You failed, Norman. You failed at being unoriginal, — imagine that! To fail at jumping the queue, at swapping a lifetime’s ambition for a smug grin on a Monday morning. How does it feel, Norm? How does it feel to sell your soul for small change, and then spend the small change on absolute crap?’

Norman didn’t answer. The carriage clock next to the photograph of the happier, slimmer Norman, ticked, and the room fell still under its metronome.

‘We’d better be going,’ I said.

‘What time’s kick-off?’ asked Mrs Glover.

‘Ask Norman,’ replied Jack, ‘He’s the Wolves fanatic, right Norm?’

Mrs Glover saw us out, leading us down the stairs as Norman sniffled and sobbed behind us. It was a relief to reach the pavement, though the November air was bitter.

‘Thank you ever so much boys,’ said Mrs Glover, effusively, ‘I really appreciate it.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ I replied, wrapping my scarf around my neck, ‘I think you’ll see a change in him over the next few weeks.’

‘What was all that about?’ asked Jack with a frown, once Mrs Glover had gone back inside.

‘Never mind,’ I said, starting to walk, ‘I think I saw a pub up here on the right.’