The River Thames, murky and slow-moving, cuts through the heart of London like a stubborn scar, splitting the capital into north and south. Traditionally, wealth was never monopolized by one side. The affluence of Kensington and Chelsea in the west met its mirror in parts of the east, just as the deprivation of some northern boroughs echoed in the estates of the south. But East London—especially after the Second World War—carried a history etched in rubble and resilience.
When the Luftwaffe blitzed London, it was the East End that bore the brunt. Entire neighborhoods were flattened, and even decades later, reminders of the devastation lingered in broken brickwork and soot-stained facades. But with the ruins came a hardened spirit—tenacious, weathered, proud. To be born in East London wasn't a misfortune. It was a lesson in survival.
In 1986, Aldridge Hall turned ten. He was born into that same East London grit, a child of Canning Town, where the skyline was a jagged silhouette of cranes, gasometers, and tired council blocks. Compared to his counterparts growing up in the leafy avenues of Hampstead or the polished postcodes of St John's Wood, Aldridge had no silver spoon, no heritage sports club memberships, no foreign holidays to brag about. But what he did have, at least in this patchwork industrial borough, was something increasingly rare: stability.
His father, Arthur Hall, ran a modest glassworks near Beckton. It was a small operation—family-run, barely enough to employ a half-dozen men—but it put food on the table. Arthur, now in his fifties, was a stoic man with callused hands and a back bowed from years of lifting glass sheets. He had three sons. The eldest, Barnett, at eighteen, had already joined him at the factory. He worked with lead and etching tools, the kind of trade that was already beginning to disappear in Thatcher's Britain. There was no glamour in it. Barnett knew as much, and wore his future like a jacket too tight at the shoulders.
The second brother, Andrew, was thirteen—three years older than Aldridge—and still at school, though barely interested. He had the look of someone resigned to the same fate: a job at the factory, maybe a short-lived apprenticeship, followed by a life of physical labor and cheap pints at the local.
Aldridge, on the other hand, was a different story. A stocky, quick-footed boy with a restless streak and a mouth that often ran ahead of his mind. The family's trade gave him more than just security—it gave him access to something dangerous. Scraps of glass. Off-cuts, shards, slivers.
At night, when the estate quieted and the sodium lamps flickered over silent pavements, Aldridge would sneak out with fragments hidden in his jacket sleeves. He wasn't running with a gang, not officially. But he'd become infamous among the local immigrant shopkeepers for the mysterious late-night smashings of restaurant and corner shop windows. In a neighborhood where tensions were already high—culturally, racially, economically—it was a fire waiting for a match.
And one night in late May, he found it.
His target was a newly opened video store, tucked into a small unit just off Barking Road. It was run by a black man named Sander—a quiet, watchful figure in his thirties who had moved from Brixton after the 1981 riots. In East London, where racial prejudice was worn on sleeves and muttered on buses, Sander's very presence was a quiet act of defiance. He knew the landscape. Knew the whispers. He'd heard talk—unconfirmed, but enough to raise alarm—that someone had been targeting immigrant-owned businesses in the area.
So each night, after closing, he didn't retire upstairs to sleep like most shopkeepers. He stayed. Sometimes reading behind the counter. Sometimes just sitting in the dark, lights out, waiting.
Not out of fear. But preparedness. He was less afraid of petty thieves than he was of being made a lesson.
That night, Sander was waiting.
"Crack!"
The sharp sound of shattering glass echoed down the street as a stone punched through the windowpane of the video store. It scattered in a spray of jagged fragments, glittering briefly before hitting the linoleum floor inside. From the pitch-dark interior, a deep, startled voice exploded into the night.
"Oi! Who's there?!"
Sander's voice, rough and furious, reverberated through the empty street like a gunshot.
Across the road, Aldridge froze in place. He'd just loosed the stone and was ready to vanish into the shadows as always. But this time, the response came too quickly. No delayed reaction, no sleepy confusion. Just immediate, targeted anger. The ten-year-old turned on his heel and bolted, cutting across the road and ducking into a narrow alleyway between two rows of boarded-up terraces.
It was a cul-de-sac—an overlooked alley blocked at the end by a high brick wall. Panting, Aldridge backed into the corner, chest heaving, the sting of adrenaline running up his spine. Then he heard it—the creak of hinges, the soft grind of a door being pushed open across the street.
Footsteps.
He shrank further into the shadows.
Though he was born and bred in East London, Aldridge knew well enough how local dynamics worked. Most immigrant communities in the area—particularly African and Caribbean—lived in tight-knit groups, often clustering for protection as much as familiarity. White working-class locals, especially young ones like Aldridge, moved with a kind of unspoken entitlement in these areas during the day. And during daylight, he would've felt safe. Even emboldened. A local kid surrounded by other white residents could count on someone—anyone—to come to his defense if things turned ugly with outsiders, especially black ones. That was the reality of the time.
But it wasn't daytime. It was past midnight.
And Aldridge, suddenly small and alone, realized just how much that mattered.
Fear gripped him. He had no idea if Sander was coming alone or with others. No idea what would happen if he got caught. And now, boxed in at the dead end, he had only one way out: over the wall.
The wall was tall—too tall for most ten-year-olds—but Aldridge had always been nimble, and fear made him quicker. He scrambled up with hands scraped raw against the coarse surface, hoisting himself with all his strength. He cleared the top—but panic ruined his footing. As he kicked over the edge, his foot caught a loose brick. His body twisted awkwardly in midair.
He landed badly.
There was a sickening thud. His head struck the pavement hard. The alley on the other side was darker still. The only movement came from the trail of blood that began to seep beneath his matted hair before everything went black.
Across the street, Sander stepped out onto the pavement, still half in disbelief. His heart pounded from the rush of adrenaline. He paced, muttering under his breath, scanning the shadows. His presence—and the echo of the glass—had drawn attention. Lights flicked on in the nearby flats. A couple of doors opened.
And soon, someone found Aldridge.
A woman walking home from a late shift spotted the boy crumpled at the base of the wall. His face was pale, barely recognizable under the blood. Without hesitation, she called for help. An ambulance arrived minutes later.
Aldridge Hall was taken to the Royal London Hospital.
He spent three nights under observation. The injury was not life-threatening—a mild concussion, a gash on the scalp that required stitches, and some bruising—but what unsettled his family was his behavior after waking.
He said nothing.
Even with his father Arthur and mother Amelia seated by the bed, even with Barnett and Andrew trying to coax him into speaking, Aldridge stared at the ceiling in silence. On the second day, he pulled the covers over his head and refused to come out. At one point, Arthur became so distraught that he summoned the doctor in a panic, asking whether the boy had suffered brain damage… or if he'd gone mute.
But it wasn't his skull that had changed. It was something deeper.
What no one could have known—not even Aldridge's family—was that behind the pale face and bruised forehead now lived the soul of another.
A soul that did not belong to a ten-year-old London boy at all.
Somehow, impossibly, the consciousness of a thirty-year-old man from China had been dropped into this child's body. He had no idea how or why. Only that one moment he'd been in an orphanage dormitory in Shenyang… and the next, waking up in a hospital in East London in 1986, with a family of strangers calling him "Aldridge."
And yet, rather than panic, he embraced the old adage: "Since I'm here, I may as well make the best of it."
Three days later, Aldridge was discharged from the hospital. His homecoming was quiet. The Hall family had prepared a proper meal—meat, vegetables, potatoes, a little canned fruit for dessert. But the atmosphere was clouded by unease.
The boy who had once been a boisterous nuisance, who shouted on stairwells and came home with cuts from fighting or climbing roofs, had fallen silent. His mischief was gone. In its place, something sharper. More still. As if he had aged years in a matter of days.
No one pressed him. The family reasoned that perhaps the fall had taught him a painful lesson—that he'd learned the hard way and was simply growing up faster than expected.
Arthur muttered to Amelia, "He's probably just shaken. Let him settle. Better quiet than in trouble."
The city, however, had no time for introspection.
It was late May, and London's football heartbeat was louder than ever. Though the league season had ended, anticipation was already mounting for the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico, set to kick off on May 31. The pubs buzzed with speculation. Radios replayed commentary from the England friendlies. Newsagents stocked Panini sticker albums and special pull-outs from The Times and The Mirror.
For once, even the tabloid headlines took a break from domestic strife to rally behind Bobby Robson's men.
The national mood was oddly defiant. Though English clubs remained banned from European competition—a direct result of the Heysel Stadium disaster in May of the previous year—the appetite for redemption burned stronger than ever. Many in England felt the ban, imposed after the tragedy by UEFA but fiercely supported by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, had punished the wrong people.
"England's absence," one commentator declared, "isn't just a loss to Europe—it's a loss to world football."
The memory of Heysel lingered: the collapse, the stampede, the deaths. It had stained England's reputation, blackened the name of Liverpool, and cast a long shadow over domestic football. But with the World Cup on the horizon, there was renewed hope that the Three Lions might lift the gloom.
That summer, everyone in London—rich or poor, north or south, black or white—had their eyes on Mexico.
...
As dusk fell and the amber streetlamps flickered to life, Aldridge was led by his two older brothers into a local fan bar tucked behind the high street. The place was grimy and smoke-choked, thick with the stench of stale beer and damp coats. A jukebox wheezed out intermittent music no one really listened to. What mattered here wasn't decor—it was allegiance.
Barnett, the eldest, exchanged quick nods and muttered greetings with the regulars he knew. Andrew, still young enough to look out of place but old enough to want to belong, spotted a few familiar faces in a back corner. Aldridge, ten years old and visibly out of sync with the entire environment, followed in silence. No one noticed him, and he recognised no one.
Thankfully, after some brief greetings, the two older brothers led him to a quieter corner of the bar.
Aldridge kept his head down but his ears open. Around them, the chatter bounced off the nicotine-stained walls—loud, careless, almost always football. Some spoke of Millwall, the local pride and menace, while others turned to the approaching 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Occasionally, the name "Wimbledon" cropped up, drawing jeers or laughter depending on the crowd.
"Thugs, the lot of them."
The word didn't offend anyone. In fact, most seemed to revel in it.
Aldridge listened closely, eyebrows tightening. There wasn't much discussion about Millwall's actual league position, or tactics, or future squad prospects. Instead, the talk centered on brawls, riots, ways to humiliate away fans, and stories of police chases through South Bermondsey. Football, here, wasn't really about football.
It was about territory. Identity. Violence.
And East London, at that time, was infamous for it.
No surprise that two of the most notorious hooligan breeding grounds in the country were based here: Millwall and West Ham United. Their rivalry wasn't just intense—it was toxic. Millwall's fans, especially, took pride in their unpolished, brutal image. They were feared across the country and liked it that way.
Much like the fans of Leeds United, whose racist chants and far-right banners ensured their reputation remained one of the ugliest in British football, Millwall's following had no interest in shedding their label. They wore it like a badge.
Soon, the name Wimbledon started to get thrown around with unexpected admiration.
In truth, Wimbledon's rise had been astonishing. Within just three years, they had climbed three divisions and were now set to appear in the First Division the following season. It was a fairytale climb.
But for these fans, it wasn't the promotion they admired. It was the way they did it—brutally.
Wimbledon played hard, tackled harder, and their squad—led by the notorious "Crazy Gang" culture—thrived on intimidation. Their manager, Dave Bassett, didn't so much coach tactics as instill a siege mentality: fight for every blade of grass, kick first, ask later.
For Millwall fans, it was intoxicating.
Football? For them, that was a bonus.
The ideal match was something between a brawl and a rugby scrum, played with feet.
Aldridge, slumped in the booth, could barely conceal his disdain. He kept his thoughts to himself, but inwardly scoffed: Support Wimbledon? Please.
He understood the mood sweeping the country, this undercurrent of aggression and pride disguised as football passion. But he also understood what it cost. England missing the 1994 World Cup? That wasn't just bad luck. It was the consequence of a culture that had been allowed to fester—where brutality replaced brilliance.
Wimbledon's own trajectory would eventually betray its fans, he knew. Their relocation, their disconnection from the community… it was all coming. But for now, they were flavour of the month.
"Oi, give me a hand with this."
Barnett returned with a small stack of pint bottles—two beers and one bitter—and placed them on the table, sliding one bottle each toward his younger brothers. Neither Andrew nor Aldridge objected. In this part of London, ten and thirteen-year-olds sipping beer wasn't shocking. It was normal.
Along with the drinks, Barnett laid out a newspaper, folded open to the World Cup preview section. A match schedule listing all 24 participating nations had been printed across the page, grouped neatly into six.
On a separate sheet of scrap paper, Barnett jotted down four names with a ballpoint pen, then pushed the paper toward his brothers.
"Right. England to win it. Brazil second. France and West Germany to round out the top four," he announced with a satisfied nod. "What do you reckon?"
Andrew dropped to his knees beside the table, scanning the paper like it held the keys to a treasure map. He clapped in agreement.
Aldridge frowned.
He realised, a second too late, what this was really about.
"You're betting on this?" he asked quietly.
Barnett gave him a sheepish grin, as if caught red-handed. "Yeah. Put aside some savings. Five hundred quid."
"Five hundred?" Aldridge blinked. "That's two years' work."
"I know," Barnett replied, voice dropping. "Started with Dad when I was sixteen. Figured… why not try my luck?"
Aldridge exhaled through his nose, thinking.
In 1986, this sort of local betting was everywhere. Informal bookmakers ran their slips through pubs, barbers, even newsagents. Nothing illegal. Just dangerous to your wallet.
"You really think England are going to win?" he asked.
Barnett shrugged. "We've got Lineker."
Aldridge narrowed his eyes. "And Argentina have Maradona."
"Argentina won't even get past England," Barnett scoffed.
"Oh? You mean like in the Falklands four years ago? Yeah, we won that—but football and war aren't the same thing. If they were, Brazil wouldn't be a regular in every World Cup semifinal."
Barnett fell silent. That one stung.
The grudge between England and Argentina after the Falklands conflict was still fresh in the public psyche. Supporters viewed every clash between the two nations—on any pitch—as an extension of that war. But Aldridge wasn't swayed by emotion. He was thinking like a realist.
After a moment, he leaned in and whispered, "Lend me a hundred. I want to bet too."
Andrew lit up immediately. "Me too!"
Barnett sighed. He always tried to look after his younger brothers. Even when it meant watching his hard-earned savings melt away. He nodded.
"Alright. You're both in."
Technically, they said it was a loan. But they all knew it was closer to a gift.
"Then let's be smart," Aldridge said. "We don't just throw it all at the final result. We play the group stages too."
Barnett had initially hoped to win big by betting on the final rankings—champion, runner-up, third place, fourth. The payouts were huge. But now that he was thinking straight, the group stage seemed safer.
They huddled around the schedule together.
The format was simple: six groups of four. Two teams would qualify from each, with four of the best third-placed teams rounding out a sixteen-team knockout bracket.
They focused only on picking the top two from each group.
Aldridge didn't remember every detail from the 1986 tournament, but one thing was clear in his mind: Argentina would win it, and West Germany would fall just short.
He kept that to himself.
Eventually, he convinced Barnett to spread the bets across multiple outcomes. And for himself, he asked for his hundred pounds to be placed on a bold call: Argentina as champions, West Germany as runners-up.
All he could recall from history was that final match in the Azteca, Maradona's magic, and the infamous Hand of God. That was enough.
The odds, placed before the tournament began, were generous. Once the quarterfinals arrived, the payout would've dropped.
Andrew, for his part, held onto his hundred like it was made of gold. He placed small, cautious bets—only on the group favorites to qualify. No risks. Just the safe route.