Nat Gomorrah: a life in football, part 1...

As he reaches the landmark of fifty years with the club, let's celebrate the career of Nat Gomorrah, the best centre forward ever to pull on a Hurlmere Harriers shirt. To the players of today, unaware of the club’s history, Nat’s just an old geezer with a gammy knee and a nose like an over-ripe strawberry. The guy who washes their kit and re-marks the pitch with quicklime. But to those who have followed the peregrinations of Hurlmere Harriers, around the Vauxhall Cars Beezer Homes Sherpa Van Division (North West), Nat Gomorrah is a living legend.

Nat was born with football boots on: a difficult birth by any standards. They were tough, those wartime years, especially in the Gomorrah household. Nat was the youngest of nine children, so, with never enough clothes to go round, the kids had to take turns playing out.

The Gomorrahs got by the best they could. Nat’s mum traded sexual favours with homesick American GIs for life’s little luxuries, like bubble-gum and nylon stockings: reckoned, at the time, to have been a fair swap. Money was tight, and so was his dad. He’d be down the pub, pissing away any spare cash he could find, and, in the process, providing an unfortunate role model for the impressionable Nat.

As a lad, Nat would spend hours dribbling a ball around the furniture of the cramped little house in Hurlmere. He learned how to nutmeg the wash-stand, and leave the sofa standing, before side-footing the ball between the legs of the kitchen table. “The boy’s a fool”, his dad would say, as Nat pulled a grubby vest over his head and practised his post-goal celebrations, “I’m off down the pub”.

Nat was playing a kickabout game in the park when he was talent-spotted by Brian Shoulder - then manager of Hurlmere Harriers - who selflessly devoted his Sunday mornings to watching young lads at play. Impressed by the lad’s precocious skills with the ball, Brian encouraged Nat to come to the ground for a trial.

Blessed with an educated left foot, Nat proved to be a natural goal-scorer. His right foot couldn't even manage a CSE in woodwork, but, hey, that's football for you. In next to no time he had risen through the youth team and the reserves; when he made his debut in the first team, back in 1950, he was just a gangly youth of fifteen, wearing borrowed shin-pads.