A supporter recalls many cherished memories watching his beloved team, first with his dad and then with his daughters, at their Upton Park ground, which is now to be redeveloped as flats

This season my family will be losing an old friend: West Ham’s Boleyn ground, commonly known as Upton Park. The club is moving to the Olympic Stadium at Stratford and the old ground will become flats, and part of my family history will be erased. Once people had village churches to bind them together, but now they have football stadiums. Three generations of my family have been Irons’ supporters, mainly through my – possibly misguided – influence.

When I started going to matches at the age of 11 in 1970, my dad (who had previously shown no interest in the game) and I stood on the cavernous terrace of the North Bank. Before kick-off we bought paper bags of Percy Dalton’s roasted peanuts, still in their shells, sold by a man wearing a white coat.

Our position was just behind the right goalpost, where you could see the sweat on Bobby Moore’s forehead and smell the Ralgex on the players’ legs. For a suburban Essex boy it was astonishing to watch the police chucking out swearing skinheads in high-leg Dr Martens. Even the adults were calling Leicester’s Frank Worthington a wanker. It was dangerous urban territory. Once my dad had his wallet pinched out of his back pocket during a game. Ever after, he used a safety pin to secure his wallet in his jacket.

My dad became a convert and attended games on his own after I started to go with my teenage friends. But we would often meet on the District line home and after evening games share a pint in Upminster. You could sometimes see my dad’s white summer jacket behind the goalpost on The Big Match after Sunday lunch.

We both saw West Ham win the FA Cup at Wembley in 1975 and 1980. As my dad got older, he moved to a seat in the East Stand. Football became welcome neutral territory during my teenage years as we clashed over politics and his desire for me to go into farming. If nothing else, we could always discuss the length of Bobby Ferguson’s goal kicks.

My mum only went to one game with us and was appalled by the swearing. In 1986, when my parents moved to Norfolk, I took over my dad’s season ticket in the East Stand and it felt like an initiation into adulthood.

When I became a parent myself, it was time to initiate my children into the Upton Park cult. The key was not to force them to support West Ham, but to take them to easier kids-for-a-quid home matches and hope they became fans by osmosis. I convinced my wife – who strangely prefers watching dressage to football – that it was a form of childcare.

My elder daughter, Lola, went to her first game when she was nearly five. She was entertained with “sloppy egg, chips and beans” in Ken’s Cafe and then wine gums during the match. Using all my parental discretion, I explained that the chant the fans were singing was actually, “you dirty northern custards!” She asked a lot of intelligent questions such as, “Daddy, why is he saying West Ham are useless?” and whether if a defender took out a ladder and put the ball on the roof, it would be a yellow card.

I remember taking my younger daughter, Nell, to a game on her sixth birthday and her hopeless tears when West Ham lost at home to Watford, only to be pacified by a new Hammers’ hoodie from a stall in Green Street. She asked why they were calling Marlon Harewood “an anchor” when he missed a penalty. We played like anchors quite often that season, though when I confessed that we were definitely going down, Nell insisted we’d survive and we did indeed pull off an incredible escape. At other games, fired up by primary school mathematics classes, she would speculate that West Ham would win “infinity–nil”. It would certainly boost our goal difference, I suggested.

When they were younger, the girls sent me touching cards commiserating on relegations and congratulating West Ham on play-off wins. Lola asked if I’d be sold, too, after one painful relegation, and Nell cried when Alan Pardew was sacked, believing that he had literally been placed in a sack. Best not give the chairman ideas. When she was 10, Nell sent her favourite player, Robert Green, an eloquent letter asking him not to leave. He ignored it and was subsequently relegated with QPR.

At Ken’s Cafe, Carol behind the counter always had a word for my daughters as they took their numbered tickets. Our trips were combined with trips to the Newham Bookshop, where we bought Horrid Henry and Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, and the Who Shop in Barking Road, which had a museum entered through a Tardis door and Doctor Who Lego figures. When we stayed late, we would occasionally see star players driving off in Chelsea tractors with dark-tinted windows.

The Boleyn ground is mingled with memories of my parents’ deaths, too. While my mum was in hospital in King’s Lynn, a Uefa cup tie against Palermo at Upton Park provided welcome normality after a week of hospital visits. My mum had just been moved from intensive care, but died suddenly two days later. On Boxing Day 2006, I took my dad, then 80, to his final home defeat against Portsmouth and he became tearful in Ken’s Cafe thinking of Bobby Moore coming out of the player’s tunnel and my mum who had died a few months earlier.

When I was at his bedside after he had a sudden stroke later that year, I was at least able to tell my dying father that West Ham had won a League cup tie against Bristol Rovers, though typically our latest signing, Kieron Dyer, had been crocked. Talking about West Ham and Bobby Moore felt more comfortable than any deathbed confessions.

My son, the football fan Read more

After my parents died, I researched my family tree and discovered that my grandfather Sidney, who died before I was born, grew up a few streets away from the Boleyn ground and would surely have attended games before becoming an officer in the first world war and moving out to join the middle-classes in Essex. So perhaps four generations of my family have been seduced by an underachieving East End side.

Despite the fact they have never seen West Ham win a major trophy, my teenage daughters have continued to attend games at Upton Park, singing I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles at the kick-off and enjoying the fine cuisine of Ken’s Cafe. “Dad, have West Ham been replaced by aliens?” asked Lola, now a sixth-former, not unreasonably, when we raced into a two-goal lead against Liverpool last season. Fourteen-year-old Nell was impressed to meet Trevor Brooking, a star from “the olden days” before mobile phones, in the Newham Bookshop. After matches she wonders why the carpets in the Boleyn pub are always sticky with beer.

My daughters were more opposed to the stadium move than I was and, for all my arguments about improved transport links in Stratford, they can perhaps sense their childhood – and the forbidden food of Ken’s Cafe – fragmenting on the altar of increased match-day revenue figures.

Will it be the same in Stratford, even if we are playing next to the Westfield shopping centre, which my younger daughter loves? Lola will be on her gap year, but I’ve managed to get Nell a bargain £99 under-16 season ticket. Even so, long after Upton Park has become a housing complex, there will be part of London E13 that remains for ever West Ham in my family. The memories of skinheads on the North Bank, peanut sellers, dodgy chants, fry-ups, the odd glorious victory, home defeats and missed penalties will take a lifetime to fade and die.

• Pete May is author of Hammers in the Heart: A Lifetime of Supporting West Ham and blogs about West Ham at hammersintheheart.blogspot.co.uk