It was while finishing my last football book Death in Grimsby that the blinding flash of light took place - a Road to Damascus experience if you like - which led me here.The moment, to be precise was Monday, 1st April 2019… the day I heard the news that my boyhood Brighton & Hove Albion hero Kit Napier had died just 12 hours earlier at his home in Durban, South Africa, aged 75.There was a loud howl inside my head, as if part of my life was gone!I was an impressionable 11-year-old kid in 1967 when I first saw Kit play, and for me, he was everything you wanted from a football hero… elegant and lithe, with tousled dark hair, fleet footed, devastatingly fast, a provider and a scorer of goals, a genius at riding tackles and ghosting past opposition defences in one move. He could also deliver amazing in-swinging corners and scored directly from two of them against Barrow and Bury in March and December 1969. Even if games were tough, you could bet your last sixpence that Kit would score. At times, he might look a little lazy but then he’d throw in a body swerve or a burst of pace and be away from whoever had been given the unenviable job of marking him.Like all childhood heroes, I thought he would live forever. So when he died, I suddenly realised, that like all of us, he was mortal; and when I got to know his family over the ensuing months, I discovered he was full of human flaws as well as a football genius.Then slowly, I came to realise that several of the stars from my first few seasons at the Goldstone Ground had also passed on - some well before their time.Gone was fans’ favourite Charlie Livesey; midfield creator Nobby Lawton; the goal-poaching Bobby Smith; mercurial winger Wally Gould; Jimmy Collins, Mel Hopkins and most recently, the human battering ram of a centre forward, Alex Dawson.They were now all ghosts of the Goldstone’s Field of Dreams.Some months later, at the formal launch of my book Death in Grimsby at the Caxton Arms in Brighton, I stopped and chatted with the club’s official historian Tim Carder. I had not seen Tim for many years, and we talked non-stop about everything Albion related as well as his recently published book Brighton & Hove Albion and the First World War. Long forgotten names such as Pom Pom Whiting, Jasper Batey and Charlie Dexter seemed to fall in the space of our conversation as their tragic brief lives had fallen on the battlefields of Belgium and France more than 100 years earlier. All were legends of our football club.It was then that the penny finally dropped, and the blinding light of the previous April started to make sense.In something akin to WP Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, which inspired the movie Field of Dreams, this was our moment in time to bring home our own ghosts.And there were hundreds of them!Wet Socks and Dry Bones is not an objective encyclopaedia of all things Brighton & Hove Albion. Instead, by its very nature, it is my own subjective collection of 50 stories of some of the most outstanding ghosts of the Goldstone era.I hope you enjoy reading and remembering as much as I have researching and writing.
