September 2026 is ENGLAND AS IT WAS month at the PorPor Books Blog
Book Review: 'Believe in the Sign' by Mark Hodkinson
'Believe in the Sign' (203 pp.) was published by UK's Pomona in 2006. Author Hodkinson is the owner of Pomona and has written a number of fiction and nonfiction books, many dealing with soccer (hereafter referred to by its English moniker, 'football'), and coming of age in the North Country.
'Believe in the Sign' takes its title from the Latin term 'Crede Signo', which is the motto of the Rochdale, UK football club, 'The Dale.' The book is a memoir of Hodkinson's youth, growing up in a Rochdale public housing project called Ashfield Valley:
The round started at Ashfield Valley, an estate made up of three-storey flats running alongside the canal. They were like something turned inside out and its guts put on show - corrugated edges, twisted metal, stones set in concrete. The disaffected were scooped up like cockroaches from all corners of town and let loose in the flats and on the landings: the unemployed, the sick, the single-mothers, the passing-through, the druggies, the dossers, the boozers, the thieves, the down on their luck. Tenants had to lie and say they lived elsewhere to avoid the stigma of Ashfield Valley; stores refused credit otherwise.
[ Notably, in his Acknowledgements, Hodkinson thanks Trevor Hoyle, whose novel 'Rule of Night' (1975) is the Ur-text of any Rochdale Bildungsroman. ]
Hodkinson's family was solidly middle-class and thus Mark was able to attend football matches at Spotland, the dilapidated stadium ('pitch' or 'grounds') of the Rochdale club.
'Believe' chronicles Hodkinson's devotion to The Dale over the interval from the 1974 / 1975 season to the 1979 / 1980 season, mixing accounts of matches, players, coaches, and sports journalists, with life and times in and around the city. Hodkinson's attachment to the club is genuine despite Rochdale's pitiable record in the Association Football Club (AFC); The Dale were regulars in the 'Fourth Tier', a classification given to teams that are not unusually competitive in the world of English football.
'Believe' is an interesting book, mainly in that it avoids the saccharine mindset that so pervades American memoirs of youth and sports, particularly the genre of baseball memoirs ('The Boys of Summer' by Roger Kahn, 'Praying for Gil Hodges' by Thomas Oliphant, and 'Wait Till Next Year' by Doris Kearns Goodwin, for example). Hodkinson doesn't shy from imbuing his memoir with a gritty, clear-eyed sensibility that is rarely present in American memoirs. For Hodkinson, devotion to The Dale was a means of advancement into the world of writing for a living, a rarified profession for a proletarian English boy coming of age in the 1970s.
While there are a few English idioms that went over my head: Stimoral gum, Cherry B (some kind of beverage ?), bobble hat, 'Moggy lad', and 'sent off', overall the narrative was comprehensible to me as an American. With its mix of humor, pathos, and deep down, indeed, Belief, 'Believe in the Sign' is an engaging read and deserving of a Five-Star Rating.
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