Out from the shadows: Adrian Tempany on life after Hillsborough

By the time the game kicked off at 2.59pm, Tempany was still conscious but only just. He was unable to move and he was in shock. Around him people were crying, people were gibbering, people were turning blue. Around him people were dying. Others were close to death. And so, he realised as he struggled to breathe, was he.

It is May 2016 and the man Tempany is recalling the boy he was and what that boy lived through. "I think about it every day," he tells me. "You can't eliminate these memories from your mind so you have to somehow learn to live with them."

Adrian Tempany is 46 and for the best part of 30 years has been carrying the trauma of a single day in April 1989 around with him. That trauma saw him drink too much, and get in trouble with the police.

He has seen the game he loved change dramatically. He has seen the country he lives in change too, not always for the better he might say, in the wake of that day. He has written a book about all of these things. It is a harrowing, angry read but it is also at times surprisingly hopeful.

But then hope is possible now. In April Hillsborough Inquest verdicts put paid once and for all to one of the biggest conspiracies in British postwar history. The lies that had been told about the fans on that day were confirmed to be just that. And as a result, for the families of those who died on that day and for survivors like Tempany, a weight has been lifted.

"It feels like a huge cloud has just been removed from my head," he says. "It's extraordinary Teddy. It's only really sinking in. It genuinely is life-changing."

"The trauma will always be there and the memories of it will always be there. But people haven't really grasped that justice isn't just a legal instrument. It's hugely important to people's mental health. We knew the truth. We were trying to get it out there for decades. It puts a huge strain on you mentally."

On that day in April, 1989, Tempany survived because the police eventually opened a gate in the perimeter fence. The game itself was stopped at 3.06pm. But by then it was too late for many. The inquest heard that some 41 people might have lived if they had received treatment in time. As it was, only 14 people were taken to hospital that day and 94 fans – men, women, children – died on that afternoon. Two days later Lee Nicol, a 14-year-old boy from Bootle, had his life support turned off. Tony Bland, 18, suffered critical brain injuries and was in a coma for four years before his life support was switched off in 1993.

Other cities – like Bradford and of course Glasgow – have suffered similar losses over the years. But this was the greatest tragedy in British sporting history. That would have been burden enough. What followed made things so much worse.

The grief and horror of that day were compounded by the fact that the fans were blamed for the disaster by the South Yorkshire police, by Sheffield Conservative MP Irvine Patnick, by the editor of the Sun Kelvin McKenzie who ran stories of fans urinating on policemen and fans stealing from the dead (stories that the inquest dismissed out of hand) under the headline "The Truth".

Men and women who had simply gone to a football match to support their team were traduced and vilified for failings that they had no part in. It would take the best part of 30 years for the truth to emerge: that the Hillsborough victims were let down by the failures of the police operation and the ambulance services on the day, by Sheffield Wednesday club for their failure to maintain the ground and by the FA for letting them do so.

On the day itself the police instigated a cover-up which would continue for decades, a cover-up which saw them lie, lie and lie again as to what happened in Hillsborough until the independent inquiry into Hillsborough in 2012 finally forced them to apologise to the victims' families and accept their culpability.

And then during the inquest which started in Warrington in 2014, lawyers for the South Yorkshire force began to drag up the same discredited stories of drunkenness among Liverpool fans that the force had apologised for two years before.

On Tuesday, April 26, however, the jury at the inquest ruled that the 96 victims were unlawfully killed and that the supporters had not contributed to the disaster.

For the best part of three decades, the lies about Hillsborough stood. And now, finally, they have fallen. "It's an incredibly liberating feeling," Tempany says. "I know a lot of survivors and I've seen a lot of them since the verdict. They all look younger. They all look healthier and they've all said the same. It's genuinely life-changing. I think what we can now do is look forward to getting on with our lives."

Until this year it has been a matter of coping for many survivors. In the years after Hillsborough, Tempany admits he struggled with that. He drank too much, got into trouble. "By 1996 it was on the verge of ruining my career because I'd been arrested twice in the 1990s for just basically losing my temper with police officers. I was charged twice with public order offences and put in a police cell overnight. I refused to sign the charge sheet both times.

"But on the second time they released me and a policeman sat me down before I left the station and said, 'Look, what's your problem?' And I said, 'I was in Hillsborough in 1989 and I hate coppers.' And he said, 'Well, I can understand that, but if you keep doing this you're going to ruin your life.'

"I really owe that bloke a drink. I walked out and thought, 'He's right' and from that point in 1996 I got my head down. And that's really when I began to deal with it."

Others have found it harder to do so. "I know about 12 survivors. Two of them have tried to kill themselves. Others are still struggling with serious issues." But now there is a chance that they can put the past behind them.

Was survivor guilt ever an issue for him? "For about four weeks, yeah. Because I had people dying within feet of me and I literally couldn't lift a finger to help because I was paralysed from the neck down.

"But within about four weeks I could see what was happening in the national media – that we were being blamed. And if that media coverage did one thing for me it stopped me at that point having any more survivor guilt because I knew they were trying to fit us up. And I wasn't going to have it."

Tempany's book, And the Sun Shines Now, first published in 2014 and now extensively reworked for the 2016 edition, is not a memoir as such. It is a book about football and culture and the body politic. It asks: beyond the tragic losses of 96 families, what did we lose as a result of Hillsborough? What did the game of football lose?

At first glance, not much, you might think. Scottish football fans may look south of the Border and envy the largesse, the glamour, the soap operatics of the Premier League which began in 1992.

"I think the game as an entertainment spectacle is far better now," Tempany concedes. "But it's the stuff around the game. What we've seen is a commercialisation of the game. It's like wallpaper now. It's on Friday night, it's on Saturday, it's on Sunday, it's on Monday. It's been devalued and I'm afraid as an experience – especially for men, for young men in particular – it's not what it was. It's sanitised. It's corporate. It's quite dull really."

It's a game that has been taken away from the fans who went to football in the 1980s. Young working-class men priced out of the game and missing the communality of the terraces.

"I resent the way the disaster was used to gentrify the game," Tempany says. "It was all based on a dishonest premise which was that they needed to replace the football fans of the 1980s and we also needed to get rid of terraces because those kinds of football fans plus terraces was a disaster waiting to happen. That's not true. People didn't die at Hillsborough because terraces are inherently unsafe. They died because the Leppings Lane terrace was unsafe."

"What I think it comes down to is the whole narrative around Hillsborough was false in 1989," he continues. "It was the end of the 1980s, a decade that had come to be seen as hooliganism and a real blight on football. This is the exclamation mark right at the end of the 1980s, isn't it? Hillsborough. Something has to change. Everyone agrees with that. But Lord Justice Taylor got it right in August 1989 because he said the disaster was the fault of the police, the club and the FA, and not the fans.

"If that narrative had been accepted, what does it do? It basically says to people, 'Yes, we've had a decade or more of problems but actually this was the biggest one of all and what was it about? It was nothing to do with the fans. It was the gross negligence of the police, negligence on the part of the club and failures by the licensing authorities and the FA. So hang on, maybe these fans who have been complaining about the conditions have got a point.'

"What should have happened then was that the fans should have been given a voice, a stake in this new football settlement."

Tempany is not a conspiracy theorist. He doesn't believe there was a deliberate plan to squeeze the working class out of football's support. "A lot of the change was organic, a lot of it was incremental. But the direction of travel only went one way. The fans were denied to put forward their own case."

If he had a voice, he says, he'd like to see the reintroduction of standing areas in football grounds as is the case in Germany. "I think football is a very important area for men to socialise in and men need that. They need somewhere to go to let off steam."

When we speak it's in the wake of Muirfield's decision to exclude women members, which met with understandable opprobrium. Tempany is arguing for the reintroduction of a male space into football grounds. That's a difficult sell, I suggest. "Yes it is and I feel quite strongly about it. But I don't think they need to be mutually exclusive. You can have a predominantly male environment but that doesn't mean to the exclusion of women."

Not everyone shares his view on this, he knows. The Hillsborough Family Support Group, he adds, are against the return of terraces.

But Hillsborough asks much bigger questions of us than the fate of the game of football. It is a story about the establishment covering up its own. Isn't it time to trace a line back from Hillsborough to Orgreave and the behaviour of the South Yorkshire police towards the striking miners on June 18, 1984?

And from Hillsborough, you can follow a path forward, one that takes in the establishment of the Premier League, and Rupert Murdoch's subsequent domination of the media landscape in the UK via Sky.

Would The News of the World have got away with Hackgate, Tempany wonders, if Kelvin McKenzie had not got away with The Sun's misleading and offensive coverage of Hillsborough for so long without censure?

"I don't think any British paper has gone lower than that in defaming people and distorting the truth," argues Tempany. "And he got away with it. There was no sanction for that ever so what happens is you've got a newspaper or a proprietor who is allowed to run riot and these are the seeds of the hacking scandal really."

If there is any consolation, Tempany believes the cover-up after Hillsborough could never happen again.

“The narrative was in the hands of conventional media. If it happened now, the truth would be out within weeks. Look at Ian Tomlinson. When he was assaulted at the G20 protest [in 2009] by that police officer and later died ...

"And within days someone turns up with phone footage that nails it. They can’t keep the lid on this any more. Social media really has changed everything.” (An inquest found that Tomlinson had been unlawfully killed by Met constable Simon Harwood, who was later found not guilty of manslaughter.)

The past is another country. In 2016, finally, the Hillsborough survivors no longer have to live there.

And the Sun Shines Now, by Adrian Tempany is published by Faber, priced £14.99.