The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

PETER CHAPMAN

Dedication

For Marie, Alex and Pepito,

my mum and dad,

Maria and Marie I.

Epigraph

‘… a nation of goalkeepers’

Napoleon I, speaking of the British (later misquoted)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1. A Determined and Heroic Defence

2. More Flash than Harry

3. In Swift’s Succession

4. End of Empire

5. Neck on the Block

6. Into the Fire

7. Booked

8. The Distant Orient

9. Death on the Cross

10. Highways, Cemeteries, Cleansing and Baths

11. The Demise of Old Industrial Britain

12. On to the Pole

13. Long Game

14. Um Goleiro Inglês

15. Nation of Shotstoppers

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1
A Determined and Heroic Defence

At the top of the street was a stretch of waste ground, a memorial in bumps and ruts to where the barrage balloon had flown. There hadn’t been another one for miles. Attached by cable to an air force lorry, it was lowered during the day, my mum told me, to be checked for signs of damage and deflation by the two airmen in charge of it. They sent it up again at night, its job to deflect any bombers that had overshot their main targets of the City and the docks. It had played its part in what all reports said had been a determined and heroic defence.

Ten years after the end of the conflict, signs of it were all around. Numbers 8 and 10, which stood next to each other on the canal side of the street opposite us, were a half shell of their original selves. From a padlocked gate in the railings, steps ran down into a basement area virtually covered with rubble to the pavement level. The weed-and tree-strewn interiors were home to a colony of cats, large enough in size and number to scare off the packs of stray dogs that wandered the street and surrounding area. The cats were fed by Mrs Clements, the elderly lady who lived on the top floor of our house. Three times a day she would rattle down four flights of stairs and across the road with tins of sour-smelling liver and fish relayed to her on their bikes by the competing catsmeat men of Frome Street and Camden Passage. In anticipation of her first delivery of the day, the cats would yowl through the pre-dawn hours.

A few doors down from us, all that remained of number 25 was a gap in the terrace. The 8 foot drop into what had been its basement was barred only by a few lengths of scaffold board and pole. The blind man on his way back home from work had no problem tapping his way past, but you wondered about the various male members of the Bray family who lived further down. On Saturday nights, they reeled and stumbled on their way home from post-licensing hours sessions in the York public house at the top of Duncan Street near the Angel. They shouted abuse at their wives, who attempted to remain a discreet distance in front of them.

Our street ran down from Colebrooke Row, which curved the quarter mile between City Road and Islington Green. Some Colebrooke Row houses had no railings around them, only stubs of iron a couple of inches long. My mum said they had been removed as soon as the war began, to be made into guns and ammunition. Both corners of Colebrooke Row and the street at our back, Gerrard Road, were wartime bombsites, used for bonfires on Guy Fawkes’ night. The stretch of waste ground where the barrage balloon had flown was right opposite the bombsites but never used for the occasion. This was possibly out of respect for the priest and nuns of St John’s, the red-brick Catholic church behind it, though no one openly made the religious connection. Irish and Italian families in the area threw rubbish and bits of unwanted furniture on the bonfires like everyone else.

Otherwise the Gerrard Road bombsites had no great use. They were certainly too rough for football or any other ball game. Encouraged by a fall of snow and reports that ice hockey was the fastest game in the world, I tried to emulate the Harringay Racers with two bits of wood knocked together by my grandad into a flat-bottomed stick. After two minutes trying to assert control over a few stones, I fell over and took a piece out of my right calf on some glass. I filled it with Germolene, a treatment my dad had applied after he had been bitten in the stomach one night by a large centipede when he was with the army in Sicily. A pink skin had formed over the hole in my leg by the morning. Harringay Racers disappeared no less miraculously soon after.

Playing with a ball in the street was largely confined to the walls of the houses at the very top. Both were used as factories and, for some reason long preceding the war, their windows had been bricked up. One belonged to Lowe’s the printers. My mum, who had been trained as a bookbinder, worked there on and off for some years. Mr Lowe had the shape of the Michelin man and the public demeanour of the Laughing Policeman. In slimmer yet grimmer times he had been a soldier with the Czechoslovakian army. After the Germans had taken over his country in 1938, his unit underwent a stage-by-stage retreat to England. He, his wife and two young daughters lived on the floor above his factory. They were Jewish. Other than sensing that no one else in the street was, I had little idea what this meant.

Mr Lowe spoke several foreign languages, including ‘Czechoslovakian’ and Hungarian, all of which strangely failed him when it came to swearing at his clients. Despite the fact they were often his fellow central Europeans, he did this very loudly in English. One of his better customers sold holidays under the name and advertising banner of ‘See Spain’, an exotic destination unknown to anyone in the area. Few who sought his services to print their brochures and baggage labels paid unless he went physically to shake the money out of them. He had to go through this process on most Fridays to get enough money in the bank to pay the staff’s wages.

He also swore at his staff but my mum and two or three other women who worked there – none of whom would have classified themselves as liberal on the subject of industrially colourful language – seemed only mildly offended. Should he cast doubt on their parentage or liken them to parts of the anatomy rarely mentioned at the time, he could be a ‘horrible man’. But to a degree he was excused the scorn which would be poured on locals who acted like this (the Saturday-night Brays, for example). It was assumed he could not have grasped the seriousness of what he was saying. It was the same if the people working for him were in his factory-come-house toilet at a time he wanted to use it. Mr Lowe would not retreat tactfully, as if relieving himself was the last thing on his mind, but wait outside and rattle on the door handle, shouting ‘How lonk vill you be in dere?’ He did not quite understand how we did things, which was to say, how they should be properly done.

This was entirely to the advantage of local kids when it came to playing up against his wall. He raised no objection. By contrast, the wall on the opposite corner we usually avoided. It belonged to a small engineering factory, populated by men in blue overalls who wore collars and ties beneath them as a symbol of the nation’s industrial standing. The foreman, in his white overall, was vigilant about the noise of ball on brickwork and would come out to complain that his workers’ concentration on their clanking machinery was being impaired. One day he caught me down the factory’s basement area after I’d climbed the railings to retrieve a ball. He threatened to call the police. I had no doubt he would or, for such a crime, that Scotland Yard would turn up in force.

We lived with my grandparents. My grandad was from the Exmouth Market, near Saffron Hill and the Italian area, where his mother had leased a shop and sold roast meals. The vicar at the Holy Redeemer church opposite – High Anglican, with nuns, mass and sense of mission among the toiling poor – challenged her on why she opened on Sundays. ‘Because it’s my best day, vicar,’ she said, ‘like yours’, which chased him off She had the same effect on my great-grandfather when he drank or gambled, and he’d flee for weeks at a time to a sister in Bedfordshire.

My nan was born just off Theobald’s Road in Holborn, a street or so back from the house where Disraeli lived. She spent much of her early life living in the City and Finsbury, near Smithfield Market and the Barbican, then later further north off the Goswell Road. Her grandmother was Italian, from a family she said sold ice cream – what they didn’t sell in the day was kept under the bed at night. My nan’s family was poor, not least because her father, a music printer, went blind when she was little, working by candlelight in the basement of the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand. When my grandparents married they moved across the Finsbury border into Islington, an advance of about a mile from their backgrounds.

My grandad earned most of his living in the years between the wars as a freelance bill poster, the mythical ‘Bill Stickers’. He worked alone, cycling miles with pastebrush, bucket and bills to beyond Hammersmith in one direction and the Burdett and East India Dock Roads in the other. A policeman once commandeered a milkman’s horse and cart to chase and arrest him in the Fulham Palace Road. The crowd outside a labour exchange shouted and converged on the policeman, who had to let him go. As big a threat was a rival cousin, whose gang would rip his work down. On one occasion they cornered him in a Finsbury mews and beat him up. Much of his bill posting work was for the Sporting Life. He also delivered papers and worked in Bouverie Street at the News of the World on Saturday nights, when the pay around Fleet Street’s machine rooms was particularly good.

In the absence of pension plans, each time he saved up enough he would buy a house as a hedge against old age. The average Islington price in the 1920s and ’30s was £200–350. He had three in our street, all on our side. Each was £50 dearer than houses bordering the Regent’s Canal opposite because of the problem they had with rats clambering up from the towpath. He had four others in Carnegie Street, one road over from where the canal came out after its mile-long journey through the tunnel that ran from Colebrooke Row to Bamsbury. My grandma’s oldest sister, Ada, who had played at the Collins music hall on Islington Green with Chaplin before he went to America (‘not a nice man’; he never spoke to her or the others in the chorus line), had lived in one of them. So had her son Teddy, who was a little older than my mum and a favourite cousin. All my grandad’s Carnegie Street houses, however, were destroyed one night in the bombing.

The London Blitz had started on a warm Saturday afternoon early in September 1940 when my mum and her sister were visiting Aunt Ada and cousin Teddy. He had a good job as a shop-fitter, which exempted him from military call-up since his skills were put to making rear-gunner placements on bombers. When the sirens sounded they didn’t want to be caught away from home, so Teddy walked them down through Chapel Market and along the small street round the back of the Agricultural Hall – a large building where farmers used to exhibit their prize animals and which had the look of King’s Cross railway station about it. At Upper Street by the Angel high pavement they stopped to watch the early moments of the raid. Planes were fighting to the south, away above the area of Moorgate and east over the docks. At the time it was a bit of a show. But the German planes were dropping incendiaries and, when it got darker, the sky over the City and river was alight. Then the real bombers came back.

In one of his broadcasts, Churchill – or the man who did his voice when he was away in the USA visiting Roosevelt-announced this as everyone’s ‘finest hour’. The family spent the initial month of raids in the basement, upright piano against the window. Stuck amid the machinery of the News of the World print room on the first night, my grandad wouldn’t believe how bad it was until he’d experienced it himself on the second.

From shortly after the first siren at about seven in the evening, to not much before 7 a.m. when the all-clear sounded, the house shook. Bombs landing nearby were both terrifying and of some comfort. Once one had exploded close at hand, the next in the string dropped by that plane would, reliably, be away and beyond. Much worse was the device at some point in the middle distance. The bomb straight after it could be the one to fall on you. The British guns continually fired back. (My mum said the sound was like that, two years later, of the Allied guns opening up at Alamein.) Maybe briefly you’d doze off. When you found yourself still alive after the planes had gone, it was impossible to imagine that, on looking outside, you’d find anyone or anything else had survived.

In the mornings my mother, who was seventeen, and her sister, my aunt Olive, who was younger by a year, walked to work down the City Road, picking their way through a chaos of rubble and firemen’s hoses. The City Road maternity hospital was among the bombed buildings one morning, its beds blown halfway out the windows. The teenagers worked at Waterlow’s in Old Street, which printed foreign banknotes. After a day spent staring at the face of Chiang Kai-shek, they walked home, had their tea, put on a pair of slacks and prepared for another night.

My grandad spent weeks looking for a location to get them out to, then was reminded of his distant aunt whom his father used to run away to from Exmouth Market. The family, including my mum’s one-year-old brother Keith, and other members like Great-aunt Ada, moved to about 50 miles away in Sandy, in Bedfordshire, where they found a place over a shop in the High Street.

Grandad stayed behind. Not wishing to join the crowd down the Angel tube, he offered to build a shelter in the backyard. Mrs Clements said she and her middle-aged children, Stanley and Lily, who lived with her on the top floor, would refuse to use it. So he converted the cupboard under the basement stairs. For a while the four of them shared this, crouched on two narrow benches. Stanley, who wore a detachable starched collar and was clerk to a firm of window cleaners in Camden Passage, sat with a suitcase on his knees packed for a hasty exit. He bemoaned my grandad’s lack of similar preparation, and fretted he could hear the rattles of the air-raid patrol men signalling a gas alarm. Grandad soon opted for the relative peace and comfort of sleeping out the raids in the ground-floor parlour.

Number 25 succumbed quietly one night to an inextinguishable incendiary. When numbers 8 and 10 opposite went up, the blast blew the front parlour window over the room, but grandad was out working in Fleet Street. A bomb just along from the backyard took six houses out of the terrace in Gerrard Road. Two bombs which landed on the corners of Gerrard Road set off fears of a gas explosion and everyone was evacuated to Owen’s boys’ school, 300 yards away. Mrs Clements, Stanley and Lily left in such a rush they forgot to take their suitcase and any money and grandad had to buy them a cup of tea.

A few raids later a bomb dropped down a ventilation shaft into the basement of the girls’ school on the other side of the Owen’s playground. Many of the several hundred people sheltered there were killed either by the blast or by drowning when the water mains burst. Coming out of the Angel tube next morning on her monthly visit to make sure grandad was still intact, my nan said the scene was ‘like a pit disaster’. Not that she knew it, but her youngest sister and one of my grandad’s sisters, Mary, were still to be pulled out. Both walked away from it alive, Great-aunt Mary with a stick thereafter. Off-duty soldiers were taking advantage of the mayhem to throw their pass books into the smoke and debris to fake their own deaths.

Grandad’s oldest sister, Polly, lived in Finsbury by the Ironmonger Row baths, an area not easy to survive in at the best of times. If you didn’t know the precise address of the person you were visiting, it wouldn’t have done any good inquiring of the locals – they’d assume you were the police or a debt-collector. On her own initiative Polly had gone down to the Northern line platforms at Old Street every night since a week before the war began. The tube was not officially being used for the purpose at the time, the government being reluctant to allow people underground during the raids lest they give the impression of a nation cowering in fear. Polly went down throughout the first twelve months of the ‘phoney war’ and, when the bombing started, was so petrified she almost had to be carried down. St Luke’s church, the few feet across Ironmonger Row from her house, had been destroyed as she resurfaced after one raid. She died towards the end of the Blitz for no obvious reason. Her heart had been none too good, and my grandad said he was sure she’d been frightened to death.

Our street’s great escape came when a 1,000-pound bomb struck the chimney stack on Siddy Bates’s house at number 40. Had it hit and gone through the slates of the roof, much around the house would have gone with it. The sudden and looming presence of the barrage balloon might have jogged the bomb aimer’s elbow the fraction required. I imagined the outcome. The bomb bounced off the stack – solid brickwork – and sailed into the air again. In a high arc, a tantalising parabola, the bomb flew towards the end of the 60-foot garden. But where would it land? Maybe an old, mythical goalkeeper stood down there, calmly watching as it dropped – flat cap, roll-neck jersey, positioned on his line, jumping at the last moment (actually giving little more than a nonchalant skip) to make sure the threat passed over. With his upstretched hand he’d have set the crossbar swaying up and down a couple of times, just to reassure all concerned he’d had it covered. Immediately beyond the garden and towpath the bomb fell into the canal, where it exploded beneath the brown and accommodating sludge. Next morning my grandma was on one of her visits. As she walked from the Angel tube, she said, the mud was splattered across the roadways, pavements and housefronts for streets around.

Her father died when the raids seemed to have come to an end. In his eighties, blind and in a wheelchair, he’d been either unwilling or unable to leave London and had sat out the bombing in his own private darkness in his house in one of the small Finsbury streets off Goswell Road. The family returned from Sandy for the funeral, Great-aunt Ada going to join her son Teddy, who had stayed on in Carnegie Street. Everyone assumed the bombing was more or less over, but the evening before the funeral saw one of the worst raids yet. Ada left quickly to go to the shelter at the end of the street but it was nearly full and there was nothing to sit on. Teddy ran back and was killed in a direct hit on the house.

From the Caledonian Road an air-raid patrol man saw him on the doorstep, coming out of the house carrying what he said looked like a chair. My mum and her sister were not allowed to see him. They later worked it out from what little they were told that he had been decapitated. His body was not in too much of a state, however, to deter whoever removed his wallet. It was assumed to have been one of the ARP men, ‘good people as a rule’ but in that area often market boys and bookies’ runners. Great-aunt Ada was left to come to terms with the loss of her father and son within a few days of each other. She came back to Sandy two weeks later and the family met her at the station, none of them with any idea what to say. All she said was, ‘We just have to start all over again.’

My mum and dad met soon after the family arrived in Sandy and were married fifteen months later. He had to be back at an army camp in the north of England the next day and was promptly sent to Africa and Italy for four years. She worked in the Naafi by the market square in Biggleswade, making 3,200 pounds of slab cake a day for the navy, army and air force. My dad said the army never saw any of it. After the war he moved back to Islington with her. War brides usually followed their husbands, but she had not exactly warmed to the country. Locals had sometimes wondered what Londoners were making all the fuss about and, worse, referred to the family as ‘evacuees’. As my nan, in a rare state of vexation, was keen to point out, they had not left London like hundreds of thousands had as part of some state-dependent evacuation programme: ‘We got ourselves out.’ My father was also easily persuaded that demand for a bricklayer would be nowhere as high as in London.

I was born in the first week of the National Health Service in July 1948, in a stately home near Welwyn Garden City. The story had it that Lord Brocket, its former owner and a Member of Parliament in the 1930s, had been led astray by Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain’s moustachioed champion of fascism, after which the state required an act of noble penance. No mention of this was made on the plaque later put on the lobby wall: ‘By the kindness of Lord Brocket’, it said, he gave over his Hertfordshire home to expectant women who, but for the destruction of the maternity hospital in City Road, would have been accommodated nearer home. I was born in the room above the front door, once the chamber of Lord Palmerston before he sent in one British gunboat too many and became fatally entwined with a maid on Brocket Hall’s billiard table. Lady Caroline Lamb, an earlier resident, served herself up naked from a large silver tureen on the birthday of her husband and prime minister, Lord Melbourne. While Melbourne was away on higher affairs of Georgian state, Byron probably passed through for a few grabbed moments of warmth and verse. My mother said it was a cold and sparse place. After the customary ten days of confining us there, and in the absence of ambulances or other transport, we took a taxi back to London.

At the upper end of the street, two adjoining houses lay between ours and the corner. They had been so shaken about by the bombs that two thick wooden props were placed diagonally from ground to the second floor to keep them up. Eventually the landlord accepted that the price of Islington property was never likely to rise and sold the freehold to the council, which promptly pulled the houses down. One of the families moved out to Ealing, where they had a garden. The demolition of the houses left ours at the top of the terrace. From here there was a sense of looking down and surveying the scene. The street sloped away gradually and became stranger the further it went. Our neighbours, up to about ten doors away, we knew reasonably well but even then people ‘kept themselves to themselves’. Two hundred yards away Danbury Street divided the street in two and was rarely crossed. Before the war the lower half had been called Hanover Street, until the London County Council decreed the name should be confined to a byway in the more prestigious West End. The road was united, to local disapproval. Our upper part of the street was different and believed to be better than the lower half. There was little in common between us, so no point in pretending we had the same identity.

I had to cross Danbury Street to reach Hanover school. Opposite was the Island Queen pub, where barrels were delivered through the trap door in the pavement from a large cart pulled by dray hones. Its front doors were thrown open at all times of the day. It looked a black hole of a place, with only vague shapes visible as you glanced in. It wouldn’t have done to look too long, since it was patronised by the very people from whom we kept ourselves to ourselves. Behind the school, around the banks of the canal, were the grey-bricked buildings of the British Drug Houses, the BDH. Viewed from our upper part of the street, they piled over the houses in the lower half like the bridge of a delapidated oil tanker. Chemicals in large green bottles bundled in straw and wire containers went into its entrance in Wharf Road. A smell akin to but several times more powerful than that produced when the gas board dug up the road rose out of it and over the school.

For our first couple of Empire Days we had to march in the infants’ playground and salute the flag. This flew from the pole of the BDH building across the canal, beyond the lock-keepers’ cottages. In my mum’s time at the school, Empire Day was a stirring occasion, with kids dressed in assumed styles of the dependencies. Her girlfriend over the road who had bushy, curly hair went as the ‘Wild Man of Borneo’. Now it was difficult to see the point, or the flag. It hung limp and damp, amid the more potent atmosphere let off by the BDH.

Shortly before the coronation, when my sister was born, my grandad had given my parents his house two doors away as a wedding anniversary present. He could neither handle nor afford the repairs any longer, so told my dad to take it and do it up. Before the war many houses had been occupied by single families but multi-occupancy became common as people bombed out of their homes were relocated. The family of four on the top floor were rehoused by the council, while the two old ladies in the property stayed. My parents had to persuade them to give up their gas mantles for electric light, which they’d refused as too expensive. Houses had been badly shaken in the war years. Even now it was a feature in the street for some people’s front doorsteps to collapse in on them in their basement kitchens or bathrooms. With my grandad’s help, it took my father two years working nights and weekends to get the house ready for us.

We moved into the kitchen and front room in the basement just before Christmas 1955 and my mum put up a tree. The bathroom beneath the front doorstep was very cold and it was easier to wash in the kitchen sink. The ground-floor front parlour where we slept was separated by two shutter doors from the room of one of the old ladies. On Saturday night she put on her hat and pin and went to the York for a drink (one or two, actually), and it was often after midnight before she’d shuffle back home, holding on to the railings where she could. At the end of our backyard and down was the Gerrard Road bombsite where languished the ghosts of six former dwellings. After heavy rain it filled with green slime and water to a depth of several feet. Known as ‘the tank’, it had the semi-official status of a poor-man’s reservoir and the fire brigade would turn up at it every so often to run through manoeuvres with their pumps and hoses. Kids milled around and housewives came to their doorsteps with the excitement. The firemen left the ‘tank’ reduced to a mudflat, with old prams and lengths of cast-iron piping sticking out, until it gradually recovered its general swampiness and sought to infiltrate the backyards nearby.

Number 25, as an abandoned gap of rubble and scrubland, was particularly vulnerable. A brother and sister, Mario Maestri and Elena Salvoni, lived with their families one house along. My dad would be called in occasionally to put down damp courses and otherwise strengthen its flanking walls. One evening I went with him to watch Mario’s new television. We didn’t have one. Apart from my grandad’s, Mario’s was the only television I was aware of in the street. On it was the rare phenomenon of a BBC outside broadcast, and we caught the last quarter of an hour or so of a football game between England and West Germany in Berlin.

The match was in the stadium built by Hitler for the Olympics twenty years earlier, the one where, my dad told me, Jesse Owens won his medals and Hitler stormed out in fury. Hitler and the Germans, of course, had got their further come-uppance when they’d tried it on with us. From the comics I bought on Saturdays at the Polish newsagent in Danbury Street, I guessed this stadium must have been the only part of the German capital not left in ruins. But since the war’s end we had been helping them get back on their feet and this game seemed to be a sign of our new friendship. It was the first post-war match between us in Germany. It was also the first football game I had ever seen. The novelty was impaired by the Germans appearing to be all over us.

One man was doing miraculous things to defy them. His name was Matthews. Not Stanley, forty-one, the wizzened legend of the right-wing. In late May, the season of league fixtures was over by nearly three weeks and he was coaching in South Africa. This was another Matthews, the younger Reg, a goalkeeper. He was tall, beaky-nosed, with a haunted look and hunched shoulders that seemed to stick out of the back of his jersey. A kind of smudgy light grey on the screen, this was the ‘traditional yellow’ jersey worn by England keepers. Its colour was one of the variations on a theme that was part of football folklore. Wolverhampton Wanderers, for instance, said my dad, did not turn out in gold but ‘old gold’. The England goalkeeper’s jersey also came in ‘coveted’ or ‘hallowed’ yellow.

German attacks were arriving in waves on Matthews’s goal. One shot, suddenly fired out of the mêlée on the edge of the England penalty area by a player the commentator identified as Fritz Walter, went with such force that it gave the impression of blowing Reg off his feet. As the camera jerked wildly left to follow it, he was horizontal, diving backwards and to his right, a yard from the ground, his arms thrust out the same distance. But momentarily suspended in this midair position, and with a snap as it hit his hands, he caught the ball cleanly.

The brilliance of it made me start and catch my breath. I had seen pictures of keepers in various moments of dramatic action, some diving to deflect shots with their fingertips around a goalpost or over the crossbar. In others they might be parrying the ball or, more rarely, seen in the act of punching it; my dad said it was ‘continental’ keepers who tended to be the punchers. But Reg did not tip the ball around or over his goal to give the opposition the minor satisfaction of winning a corner kick. Nor did he parry or punch the ball back into play to leave the German forwards with the chance of following up. His catch ended the danger in virtually the instant it had arisen.

The impact as he landed in the goalmouth might easily have been enough to dislodge the ball from his grasp and the air from his lungs. Having hit the ground it would have been understandable if he had stayed there a while, to gather his breath and thoughts, or take brief stock of any plaudits that might be on offer from his teammates or the crowd. Oh, and a good save by Matthews,’ the commentator was saying.

‘Good save,’ murmured my dad, in appreciation but without getting too excited about it.

There was no time for us to reflect further. Matthews had sprung back on his feet, as if the film of the previous moment had been put into reverse or he’d been attached to a large rubber band. He was racing to the edge of his penalty area, bouncing the ball every fourth step as required by the rules of the game. As he dodged past his and the German players, he looked concerned to rid himself of the ball as quickly as possible and, with it, all evidence of his save. He seemed embarrassed by the whole affair, guilty for having attracted attention to himself. As he released the ball from his hands and punted it upfield, the BBC man was only just concluding his comment, ‘… young Reg Matthews of Coventry City’.

Coventry I had heard of. Just about all children had. Like London it had really suffered the Blitz. Other cities were hardly mentioned: Hull, Plymouth, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, where relatives of my nan were bombed out twice before another direct hit killed them. Coventry was one of the rare nights in nine months of the Blitz, said my mum, that London had had off. She and the family had just arrived in Sandy when the bombers were overhead again, droning backwards and forwards. This time they flew on to the Midlands. Delivering his papers next day to the stand outside Old Street station, my grandad heard the man there complain what a bad night it had been. Next to no one – with the certain exception of Great-aunt Polly – had gone down the tube to take shelter and he’d hardly sold a thing. Coventry hadn’t had much of a time of it either.

While London stood for defiance and heroic endurance, we learnt that Coventry, which had been flattened, embodied the spirit of rising again. It seemed exactly right that Reg Matthews of Coventry should be bouncing up and down against the might of Germany on the television in front of me. He and his city were what the newspapers and my comics called ‘plucky’, whatever that meant. But his club I’d not heard of. Coventry City were not one of the big teams, the Wolverhamptons, either of the Manchesters, the Arsenals, Blackpools, Preston North Ends and Burnleys in the top division of the English league. Nor were they in the Second. Reg’s team were all the way down in the Third Division South, and even towards the tail-end of that. When the Fourth Division was set up three years later from the bottom halves of the Third Divisions North and South, Coventry City were founder members.

A goalkeeper from the humblest rung of the English football league was pitched against the Germans. Furthermore, the Germans were not any old foreign international team. They were holders of the World Cup, which they’d won two years earlier in Switzerland by beating no less than Puskas and the Hungarians. Reg Matthews could one week be up against the might of Gillingham at home, the next facing vengeful Germans away. From a foot-of-the-league battle with Bournemouth, he might suddenly have to face the flowing rhythms of Brazil. He had done, just over a fortnight earlier at Wembley, when England won 4–2 in the first game between the two countries.

Reg was typical of the British small guy, ‘plucky’ and plucked from a modest background to face whatever the world had to confront us with. Among the British national teams, England’s goalkeepers weren’t alone in affording their selectors the luxury of being able to reach down the divisions for someone of the highest calibre to defend the last line. Only Jack Kelsey of Arsenal and Wales was a keeper in the First Division. Ireland’s Harry Gregg played for Doncaster Rovers and Scotland’s Tommy Younger for Liverpool, both in the Second. When Gregg made his debut two years earlier, he’d been playing in Doncaster’s third team. It all went to prove that while others claimed fancy titles – the ‘World Cup’ itself was an example – we didn’t need to.

Reg Matthews’s clearance upfield in Berlin found an England forward, who put in a shot on goal. It was not a particularly strong one. With a couple of brisk steps to his left, the German goalkeeper could have picked up the ball. He opted not to move his feet, however, and dived. Actually, it was more like a flop. He stopped the shot easily enough, and there on the ground lingered, hugging the ball to his chest. You could see a white number ‘1’ on the back of his black jersey, facing the presumably grey Berlin sky. He kept glancing up, heightening the drama, soaking the moment for all, and much more than, it was worth. The misguided crowd cheered their appreciation and he even found time to smile in acknowledgement. ‘It’s a wonder he doesn’t wave,’ said my dad, no longer in an approving murmur but waving his own hand at the screen in disgust. ‘There’s the difference between us, you see. We get up and get on with it.’

When the German keeper finally did get on with it, I wished he hadn’t. His forwards resumed their assault on Reg Matthews’s goal, whereupon Walter materialised again to score. ‘And it’s Fritz Walter!’ shouted the commentator. ‘The Germans have scored!’ His voice conveyed what I took to be a distinct state of alarm. He compounded mine by adding there were only five minutes to go.

There was nothing in my cultural heritage to prepare for the likelihood that the Germans might win. None of my comics, nor any film I had seen, had anything but a recurrent collection of Fritzs leering their way towards comfortable victory, till ultimately beaten by their deficiency of character. When down we got up, bounced bombs on water, sent in pilots with tin legs, or chased their battleships to distant Norwegian fjords and harbours in Latin America. We might have a tendency to get in tight situations ourselves – trapped on narrow beaches, for example – but it only needed a chirpy British private to wave a thumbs-up at the encircling Germans and say ‘Not ’arf, for them to rush out with hands aloft yelling, ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’

Only five minutes to go was a time for us to be hitting the net, not them. But just as the unthinkable was having to be thought, the scoreline moved into vision, chalked by hand on what seemed like an old piece of black cardboard at the bottom of the screen: ‘West Germany 1 England 3’.

‘There we are, we’re winning,’ said Mario, who had noticed my concern (and who always supported England, even against Italy). Not having seen a game before, and because seven-year-olds did not instigate conversations in other people’s houses, it had not occurred to me to ask the score.

‘That’s right,’ said my dad, as unruffled by the goal as Mario. ‘The Germans have never beaten us.’ When I read reports of the game, it was true the Germans had dominated much of the play, but Reg Matthews had held things together at the back, while out on the field Duncan Edwards of Manchester United had created the few England attacks there had been. From nearly all of them we scored. The wider facts were that we had indeed, never lost to them. England and Germany had played four times – twice each at home and away – since their first match against each other in 1930. England had won three and drawn the other.

This helped explain the reaction of the German crowd. Far from regarding the goal as a late and meaningless consolation, they could hardly have cheered more when they’d beaten Puskas and the Hungarians those couple of years before in Berne. The TV picked out various areas of the Olympic stadium and the spectators involved in scenes of uproarious celebration. The camera swivelled sharply to catch the German commentator in similar rapture. ‘The Germans are going mad,’ said the BBC man, with more than a hint of a laugh and in tones which suggested that foreigners could be very funny people. The thought had occurred to me.

But their antics were understandable. In their historical rivalry with England, the Germans had adjusted to a low level of expectation. This goal was a goal, after all. It was the first, too, they had scored on home soil against England since the war. They had not won, they were not near achieving even a draw, but here in Berlin a German crowd had witnessed for themselves that they were at least back on the score sheet. The camera zoomed in on the crowd and people beamed, waved and roared straight back into it. They could have been shouting as one: ‘We’ve had your aid and your Marshall Plan, and we’ve even won the World Cup. But now we’ve landed one back on you, you watch us really get going with that post-war revival.’

They had also not merely scored a goal against England. For almost ninety minutes the Germans had bombarded us, only to be kept out by a characteristic last line. Their solitary success was futile as far as the result was concerned but, at last, they had managed to get something past a typically great British goalkeeper. For a German or any foreign crowd, this was worth celebrating.

Chapter 2
More Flash than Harry

My dad had played in goal when he was at school: ‘Always good with my own company,’ he said. From a country family of seven brothers, his two nearest in age died very young and he was used to getting on with things on his own. At the age of eight he suffered paralysis and nearly died from what people came to believe was polio. Over a period of weeks he fought a lone and fevered battle with the question of whether he was to drop off this mortal coil. The family and the town doctor didn’t expect him to survive. When he did, by their and his own reckoning, he had been those few yards beyond normal experience.

He liked goalkeeping for its occasional spectacular moments. At such times you went through the air knowing you were going to save what, to teammates and opposition alike, was an unstoppable shot bound for the corner of your net. The coordination of mind and body was enough to make you smile, even laugh, as you experienced it. But, overall, it was best not to flaunt things. They had to be done properly; in other words, not overdone. The best keepers were ‘spectacular but safe’.

In British goalkeeping, the first half of the 1930s was the era of Harry Hibbs of Birmingham City. Over five years Harry won twenty-five caps for England, seeing off all challengers for the position. He presided over a period which consolidated the British tradition of goalkeeping, and one which built on foundations laid by two keepers whose heyday just preceded his own. The weighty Encyclopaedia of Sport I received one Christmas, published by Messrs Sampson Low, Marston and Co. for the children of the kingdom, dominions and empire, cast its magisterial gaze back some forty years to pronounce that ‘among the greatest of all time’ was Sam Hardy of Liverpool and Aston Villa. Hardy had been England’s goalkeeper before and after the First World War and had a gift of calm judgement. As the opposition bore down on his goalmouth he was ‘invariably in position when the shot was made’.

When Hardy was transferred to Aston Villa in 1912, he was succeeded at Liverpool by Elisha Scott, from the north of Ireland. Scott ‘was strangely like him’ and ‘positioned well’. Over seventeen seasons to 1936 he played in thirty-one internationals, a number restricted because united Irish and (after partition) Northern Irish teams played games only within the British Isles. But Scott’s appearances remained a record till the Spurs captain and half-back Danny Blanchflower outnumbered them in 1958, when Northern Ireland teams were travelling the continent and playing in World Cups. In Scott’s time there was no need to travel for his skills to be put to the sternest test. ‘At times he defied the might of England single-handed’, said my encyclopaedia. There were few greater laurels it could have tossed at the man. British keepers were expected to be a match for the world; to defy England took something really special.

Both Hardy and Scott had another factor in common which qualified them for the ranks of the greatest. This was that they made no obvious claim for the title. They carried out their goalkeeping in a serious manner, motivated by the ideal of avoiding anything remotely extroverted. Much of Hardy’s brilliance lay in the fact that he was ‘hardly noticed on the field’. He was ‘as unspectacular in goal as he was quiet and modest off it’. Scott, too, was ‘modest and quiet’ with ‘nothing of the showman about him’.

Their way was in contrast to the keeper at the top of the profession in the period before them. At the turn of the century, the confidence of Victorian empire-building had swollen out of control in the shape of Billy ‘Fatty’ Foulke. Tall for his time at 6 feet or so, Foulke weighed in across a scale of 20–24 stone. In his career for Sheffield United, Chelsea and England, Foulke threw and otherwise put himself about, intimidating opponents and authorities alike. He stormed after referees to hammer on their dressing-room doors, if decisions had not gone his way. An increasingly bloated figure, his retirement was blessedly timed for Britain’s approach to the First World War. Hardy and Scott provided the mould of those going to fight it. Millions filed into the trenches of France and Belgium to stand and wait, and to be ‘invariably in position when the shot was made’. Sam and Elisha dutifully served the cause of being the first of the type: the British keeper as the goalmouth’s humble ‘custodian’.

Harry Hibbs followed in their stead, unflappably pursuing a one-club league and Cup career of over 400 games. His first international came in 1930, the year after some shocks to the system. As if the Wall Street Crash was not enough, England’s first defeat abroad deepened the depression. It was one thing to be beaten by the Scots – twenty-four times between 1872 (when the first match between the two countries was staged) and 1929 made this reasonably common; it was quite novel to be humbled by the ‘continentals’. In the game we had invented, Spain did the dirty, 4–3 in Madrid. This was equivalent to bullfighting’s finest rolling up at Wembley from the estancias of Castille, to be humiliated by a squad of upstart toreros from the backstreets of Huddersfield. Previous English excursions abroad had been mainly confined to taking the steamer across the Channel to France or Belgium. We took our own matchballs to counter the likelihood of foreign jiggery-pokery. How the Spaniards had won the match was a source of national perplexity.

Hibbs was cannily suited to handle the uncertainties of the epoch, a man to lift the spirit by steadying the nerves. My encyclopaedia approved his style as a subtle variation from that commended by my father. Harry was ‘safe rather than spectacular’. At 5 feet 9 inches, ‘on the short side for a goalkeeper’, he compensated by refining the brilliance of Sam Hardy to still higher levels. Hibbs was not just in position for assaults on his goal, but in the only possible position: ‘He gave the impression that forwards were shooting straight at him.’

There was something very British about this knack. It was a natural detachment from the turmoil that enabled ultimate control of it. Britain in the 1930s had withdrawn into itself, in an understated, poor man’s version of the old and sensible glories of ‘Splendid Isolation’. As Harry Hibbs surveyed the scene from his goalmouth, the nation observed gathering continental chaos. Hitler and Mussolini strutted and pranced around. Britain did not have the faintest idea what to do. This could not be easily admitted, least of all to ourselves, so it was important to conjure up the sense of a nation being quietly ‘there’, in the right place should the need arise. Hibbs personified the being there. Like Britain, he was also particularly good whenever required to face the strutters and prancers. Harry’s skills were most marked, said my encyclopaedia, ‘against a continental side which included a showy keeper’.

This was possibly a reference to the Spanish goalkeeper, Ricardo Zamora, whom Hibbs and England came up against at Highbury in 1931. Revenge for the defeat two years earlier was duly extracted to the tune of a resounding 7–1. Zamora, who came with the reputation of being world-class, had a miserable game. What prompted more ridicule was the news that he earned £50 a week, compared with Hibbs’s wage of £ 8 during the season and £6 in the summer break. But the implication that the England keeper was always at his best against a showy continental was stretching the point. His better games were not abroad. He was more comfortable at home, closer to base, something which was reflected in his style of play. In keeping with the times, Harry was not one to advance happily beyond his goalkeeper’s area and into the broader reaches of the penalty box. By and large, he stuck firmly to his line.

In Hibbs’s protective shadow, a new breed was emerging. Its members were obliged to display the classical certainties of the tradition, yet felt able to add a touch of goalkeeping rococo. In Glasgow, Jack Thomson of Celtic made his reputation when Scottish keepers were expected to be no less soberly dignified than those south of the border. ‘There was little time for drama and histrionics,’ said local writer Hugh Taylor. The keeper who tried to invest his game with colour was regarded with deep-rooted suspicion, he added, and had as much chance of a successful career ‘as a bank clerk who went to work in sports jacket and flannels’.

Thomson could twist and change direction in midair. He also applied an extra thrust to his dives, to reach shots which would have been beyond others. This gift was compared to the hitch-kick later used by Jesse Owens, which won him the long-jump gold medal and world record in Berlin. All this, of course, could only be employed when the need for something spectacular arose. Thomson’s talent was not confined to his agility. As Taylor noted, he held rather than punched or parried the hardest of shots and there was no keeper more reliable. He ‘inspired tremendous confidence in the men in front of him, always watching play, combining rare, natural talent with a mathematical precision that took so many risks out of his often hazardous art’. Tragically, not all of them. He was a regular Scottish international by the age of twenty-two, but was killed in 1931 after diving and fracturing his skull at the feet of a Rangers forward at Ibrox Park.

Other young keepers who struck a popular chord followed. In 1932, Manchester City signed Frank Swift, aged seventeen. Goalkeeper for the third team, he was on ten shillings a week, so thought it financially wise to retain his job as coke-keeper at Blackpool gasworks. When City reached the 1933 Cup Final, he and a mate with a motor-cycle drove down to watch. Big for the time at 6 feet 2 inches and 13 stone 7 pounds, Swift squeezed into the sidecar. They left in the middle of the night in order to make the trip and, in the rain, managed to go off the road only once. Manchester City were more easily brushed aside, 3–0 by Everton. Swift soon found himself promoted in City’s pecking order of keepers and, on £1 a week, able to give up the gasworks. He made his debut for the first team on Christmas Day. When he was knocked out early on by the opposition centre-forward, his trainer brought him round by mistakingly spilling half a bottle of smelling salts down his throat. But in the months after, it was injury to the regular first-team keeper that left Swift in line for selection, as City won their way through to the Cup Final again in 1934. As the time approached to face this year’s opponents, Portsmouth, the prospect left him on top of the world one moment, he said, the next in fits of despondency. He told himself he was far too young to be playing at Wembley. With a ‘terrible, sinking feeling’, he saw the team sheet go up, with his name at the top of it.

He aimed to go to bed early the night before the game but shared a room with his team captain, Sam Cowan, who sat bathing a poisoned big toe in a bowl of hot water. Cowan kept him talking till 3 a.m. Swift reckoned later this was to make him sleep late and have less time for pre-match nerves. They got the better of him in the Wembley dressing room. The sight of a jittery senior player having to have his laces tied, he said, turned him green. The trainer hauled Swift off to the washroom, gave him a slap round the face and a tot of whisky. He made it through the parade on to the pitch and presentation to George V. Just after the game started, Matt Busby, Manchester City’s right-half, turned, shouted and passed back to him, to give him an early feel of the ball and calm him down.

Portsmouth scored after half an hour, for which Swift blamed himself. There’d been a brief shower of rain, which normally would have prompted him to put his gloves on. But he’d peered up the other end to see Portsmouth’s keeper had left his in the back of the net. Not trusting his own judgement, Swift did, too, and paid for it when a shot across him from the right slithered through his fingers as he dived. In the dressing room at half-time, the Manchester City centre-forward, Fred Tilson, told Swift to stop looking so miserable about it. Tilson added he’d score twice in the second half, which he did. The second came with only four minutes to go. Suddenly Swift, aged nineteen, realised he might be on the point of winning a Cup Final.

The photographers sitting at the side of his goal began to count down the minutes and seconds for him. Seeing how tense he was, they may have been trying to be helpful. Equally, men of Fleet Street, they might have had their minds on the story. Swift started to lose control of his with about one minute remaining. With fifty seconds left he was thinking of his mother and if the Cup would take much cleaning. At forty seconds he worried whether the king would talk to him. At thirty seconds, Matt Busby smashed the ball into the crowd to waste time and a photographer shouted, ‘It’s your Cup, son’. As the whistle went he stooped to get his cap and gloves from the net, took a couple of steps out of it and ‘everything went black’.

Swift was the favourite of millions of young fans thereafter. Among them was my dad, listening to the game on the wireless. He was to leave school at the end of that term, a month before his fourteenth birthday. For Swift at nineteen to be in a cup-winning team was enough in itself to make him a Kids’ Own hero. His faint in the Wembley goalmouth only heightened this. Though he was a virtual Superboy of the day, he showed himself vulnerable to pressure like anyone else, a big kid after all. Laid out on the turf, he was brought round by cold water poured on his face and dabbed by the trainer’s sponge. He was helped to his feet and limped across the pitch and up the steps to the Royal Box to get his medal from George V. The king spoke to him through what Swift described as a ‘dizzy mist’ and, at greater length than was customary, asked how he was, told him he played well and wished him good luck. The king sent a message the following week, via the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Lancashire, inquiring after Swift’s health.

Throughout his career, Swift showed himself to be not only a large person, but also a large personality. He’d turn and wave to the crowd, acknowledge their shouts, even chat if the ball was at the other end. He applied an occasional flourish to his leaps or dives for the crowd’s benefit. These were ‘flash’, though within limits. A dive when you could keep your feet, or a punch when a catch was feasible, was not the thing. Swift’s principle, however, was that as long as it was safe, where was the harm in the bit of extra for effect?

Among British keepers, Swift pioneered the skills of throwing the ball, something he’d picked up from watching water polo. Crowds tended to feel short-changed by a keeper doing anything but clearing the ball out of his penalty area with a hefty boot. But Swift had enormous strength and huge hands – the length of the average person’s foot – with which he could pick up or catch a ball single-handed. He’d hurl it over half the length of the pitch, and guide it far more accurately than could be accomplished with a hopeful punt. An extrovert character, it was one of the ways he imposed himself on the game. Swift was generally good at making himself known, not least to referees whose decisions he felt unable to go along with. Against the football hierarchy, he also became a vociferous campaigner for players’ wages and conditions.

After his Cup medal, Swift’s club career reached another peak when Manchester City won the league in 1937. Runners-up were Charlton Athletic, whose goalkeeper, Sam Bartram, had a similar personality and style. Not quite of Swift’s physical dimensions, he was a tall and broad, red-haired character, who indulged in the flamboyant when opportunity arose. Much thanks to him, Charlton had climbed in successive seasons from the Third Division South, through the Second, to challenge for the First Division title itself. Swift and Bartram were identified as future rivals for a place in the England team and at one stage Bartram appeared the most likely contender. The season after Charlton ran Manchester City closely for the championship, he played for the Possibles against the Probables in an England trial.

Swift and Bartram had been born within weeks of each other a little before the start of the First World War. From, respectively, the industrial north-west and north-east, they grew up in regions feeling the worst of the post-war recession. The country’s mood was also steeped in memories of one awful conflict and the strengthening conviction that a worse one was on the way. The Great War had had the wonders of the trenches and ‘going over the top’; everyone knew the next war would bid goodbye to all that with mass aerial bombardment of the cities. Swift and Bartram were products of the widely-held view among ordinary people that there was little sane reaction but to laugh, make the best of it and pretend the worst was not going to happen. If ever the laughter had to be prompted a little, there were always characters around like Swift and Bartram to help its orchestration. Vaudeville keepers in their way, they played in response to popular demand.

In any of their off-duty pictures I later saw – team photos, head-and-shoulders portraits, or shots of them being introduced to one dignitary or another before a big game – they were always at least smiling. In accounts of their matches that I read or was told about, their presence dominated. Each was likely to rush from the keeper’s 6-yard box, to the edge or beyond the penalty area to clear the ball, forsaking their hands and heading it if necessary. This was a way of doing things much more familiar to keepers on the continent. It brought the keeper out of his remote condition and into closer touch with his team. Both Swift and Bartram were students of the style of Harry Hibbs – now nearing the end of his career – and sought advice from him on how it was all meant to be done. But notes taken, they moved far beyond the role of humble ‘custodian’.

Two weeks after my dad’s nineteenth birthday the war was declared, an occasion as stressful at that age as playing in the Cup Final. After listening to Chamberlain’s announcement, he went out in the back garden where his dad grew the vegetables and, as the phrase has it, broke down. His father followed and tried to help: ‘That’s OK, son, there’s nothing to worry about,’ he might have offered. ‘I passed through the Menin Gate and the various battles of Ypres. Nasty explosion at the Somme, of course, and this open hip wound still plays up. But I survived – when most of the Beds and Herts were wiped out, they made me sergeant major for a day till reinforcements arrived.’ But, in that moment, my Bedfordshire grandfather opted to stay quiet.

For two years my father’s bricklaying had him on such essential works as building the Tempsford aerodrome. A Stuka came for a few minutes one afternoon and strafed the hundred or so of them working up the sheer face of the cooling towers at Barford. The bombing of London had prompted my mum’s move to the country and they got married after he was called up into the Royal Signals. In Greenock he and several thousand others were put on ships which sailed west almost as far as Iceland. They weren’t told where they were going, up to the point the boats turned to plunge south. Through the Bay of Biscay the weather was so rough the convoy’s members were rarely in sight of each other. Maybe the conditions were a problem for the German U-boats as well. The next convoy out a fortnight or so later lost a third of its number. My dad’s ‘never saw a seagull’. Straight, more or less, from Sandy, Bedfordshire, he arrived at the Saharan fringes of North Africa, landing with the army in Algiers in 1942.

Across Algeria and Tunisia, the task of pushing back Rommel and his Afrika Korps allowed little opportunity for football or any other game but was carried out in a spirit not seen elsewhere in the war. The British troops viewed Rommel as a ‘good bloke’, a German but a fair one. This marked him as a man apart from the madness of his Nazi teammates. It didn’t mean whatever wit and cunning the ‘Desert Fox’ had could match ours. Near the Tunisian coastal town of La Goulette, shortly before my dad sailed from Cap Bon for Italy, he watched thousands of captured Germans march into their prison camp. This they did in immaculate order, seemingly perfectly according to character. Then they fell into weird nights behind the wire, when their mood alternated between crazed merriment and near riot.

The British army’s attitude to the enemy appeared to be as much a worry to the top brass, even after the Germans had been defeated in Africa and the Sicily landings completed. Maybe the official view was that the soldiers’ achievements might go to their heads. My dad’s company was called together in the almond grove where they were camped near Syracuse and, in line with a War Office directive, bawled out for their apparent misconceptions about Rommel. Not that they took a great deal of notice; there had to be some lone symbol of decency even in the worst of worlds.

All in all, my father said, he was lucky. His brother Reg was sent to Burma. At Kohima the British were besieged for weeks, separated by the width of the High Commissioner’s tennis court from the Japanese screaming at them on the other side. My uncle had injured mates pleading with him to shoot them and put them out of their misery. He was lying wounded in a makeshift hospital himself when the Japanese stormed it at one door and caught up with him after he’d got out the other. Injured by a bayonet thrust, he feigned death in the long grass.

In comparison, the Royal Signals was a doddle. My father had to master Morse Code and spent much of the day tapping it out. He’d applied for the Royal Engineers, thinking it wanted people from the building industry. In relief, when that came to nothing, his dad explained he’d have been constructing Bailey bridges across rivers and repairing phone lines in no man’s land, under what the army liked to refer to as ‘hot fire’.

But events had a way of springing themselves upon you, pulling you suddenly in. You had to beware of the unguarded moment. The German attack on Bari harbour in December 1943 came when we had got ‘too cocky’ and confident of victory. Everyone saw the single German spotter plane circling very high and watched the anti-aircraft fire chase it away. They thought no more about it till at night the aerial assault came in. The harbour was floodlit; the twenty-boat convoy, recently arrived was being unloaded. Two ammunition carriers went up and took fourteen other ships with them. One explosion, like the crack of a large whip, threw my dad 15 feet across his room, door and windows with him; this was 6 miles away along the coast in Santo Spirito. A chance hit,’ wrote Churchill, ‘30,000 tons of cargo lost.’ He didn’t mention the thousand killed among the Italian dockyard workers, merchant seamen and Allied military personnel. In the yard next morning victims, dead and alive, had turned yellow. The medics had no idea for days what they were dealing with, till word went around that General Eisenhower had ordered a consignment of mustard gas. Not that we’d have used it without cause, mind you. We just had it in case the Germans used it first.

During a plague of typhus in Caserta, north of Naples, my dad’s unit was billeted in the abandoned royal palace, with its water cascades and hanging gardens, while for several weeks the Allied advance was held up by the battles for the monastery at Montecassino. Driving through the streets in a truck, he saw an old man fall over and die. Some soldiers who ventured out on the town in their free time suffered the same fate. Sometimes there was nothing to be done, except withdraw, observe and wonder what it was that made such things go on in the world. A degree of separation, if there was a choice, afforded a perspective that was lost on the unthinking crowd. On Piazzale Loretto in Milan, he saw the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from their heels and urinated on by an angry mob. Weeks before, the same crowd might have been cheering them.

After the war, soldiers rarely volunteered their recollections. They only came out over the years. Experiences had either been too awful, mundane or similar to those of many others to merit earlier mention. Besides, the cities at home had had the bombs. Even Sandy High Street was machine-gunned by a German fighter, my nan having to launch herself into a shop doorway with baby and pram. Anyone who went on about moments they had endured abroad in face of the enemy, or how many of them they’d injured or killed, would have been a suspect personality. Few, too, were asked. Until prompted, my dad said little more than he had seen the eruption of Vesuvius, from Caserta, filling the sky with black smoke for three weeks in March 1944. As in the time of Pompeii, the prior impression had been that it was extinct. Further north in Siena he began to learn Italian by walking out from the city’s fort and reciting door numbers. He came home speaking the language well, one among very few of the quarter of a million Allied soldiers in Italy to do so.

Talking about the football, rather than the war, was easier. Games were played between stages of the Allied advance up the Italian leg. My father played in goal for 15th Army Group HQ and was nicknamed ‘Flash’, though only, he insisted, after his white blond hair. You changed in barracks or tents and, if playing away, went by army truck. Match locations ranged from the landing strip in Syracuse, to Rome’s Dei Marmi stadium, encircled by statues of emperors and gods. In the Comunale stadium in Florence, England were to draw 1–1 some seven years later and maintain their unbeaten record against Italy. In Bologna, my dad occupied the goal where David Platt volleyed the last-minute winner past Preud’homme of Belgium in the 1990 World Cup. His reports of the games he played in suggest he’d have probably saved it.

As for the spectacular moments, the most memorable was reserved for when the army had moved far north to the Yugoslav border to fend off Tito’s claim to Trieste. It was made in the small stadium in Monfalcone, on a baked-earth goalmouth full of large stones. A brisk advance by the opposition down the right-wing forced him to cover his front post. But the ball swung over to the fast-advancing centre-forward, who volleyed it hard towards the far corner. A Liverpudlian, naturally vocal, the centre-forward was shouting for a goal from the moment he hit it. My dad made it across the full 8 yards of his goal, diving to push the ball away with his right hand. The save was unique in anyone’s recollection, though others may have emulated it since.

Immediate thoughts of self-congratulation were tempered by the impact of the goalmouth surface on his knees. As my dad pulled himself up in pain, his opponent – driven by a fit of frustrated expectation and Adriatic sun – rushed in, yelling and hammering him with his fists around the shoulders and head. This incident was ‘comical’, which left me with the impression goalkeepers were not averse to gaining pleasure from the annoyance of others. But they also performed an important public service. Contrary to a common prejudice that it was keepers who, by virtue of their role and isolation, were insane, they showed that it was out there, in the wider, collective world, where madness was to be found.

At the start of the war, Frank Swift had signed up as a special constable in Manchester. He was put to directing city traffic, an ill-advised move, since his presence was more likely to attract a crowd than clear it. One congested day on Market Street, with his efforts achieving nothing, he waved a cheery ‘bugger this’ and went home. Like many top footballers, he became a trainer to younger soldiers who were about to be shipped abroad. My dad was trained by Roy Goodall, the Huddersfield Town and England half-back, and passed out as a PT instructor. This qualified him for a comfortable home assignment in one military gym or another but before one arose he was en route for Africa. Again, he said, he was fortunate. Many of the younger trainers who were at first kept back from service abroad, found themselves later pitched on to the beaches at Normandy.

Football at home ticked over, with teams raised from whoever was on hand on any given Saturday. Sam Bartram played in two successive wartime Cup Finals, one for Charlton, the other as a guest for Millwall. As the war moved towards conclusion, opportunity arose to put on exhibition matches for the troops abroad. Victory in Europe was on the point of being declared as my dad’s unit progressed to Florence, when it was announced Frank Swift was due in town. He was to play for a team led by Joe Mercer, the Everton half-back, against that of Wolves captain, Stan Cullis. It was to be an occasion for great celebration, till on the morning of the game, my dad and fellow signalmen were told to pack their kit and advance up country to Bologna. VE Day was an anti-climax. Each soldier was issued two bottles of beer, which he and his mates poured over their heads: ‘Bloody stupid, really.’

Full international games were under way at home more than a year later. It was obvious to many that the choice for the England keeper lay between Swift and Bartram. In conversation their names were mentioned in the same breath. Yet, in an era when the average forty-year-old didn’t have a tooth to talk of, at thirty-two they weren’t young. The England selectors had dallied with the idea of jumping a goalkeeping generation. Ted Ditchbum of Tottenham Hotspur, ten years younger, was the object of their attention. He had played well in big wartime games against Scotland and Wales, which suggested he was in for a promising international career. Unfortunately for Ditchbum, the Royal Air Force thought so as well. When he was posted to the Far East for two years, the selectors’ hand was forced. By default as much as instinct, they tossed the keeper’s yellow jersey, undersized for the part, into the huge grasp of Frank Swift.

He played commandingly in the first seventeen internationals after the war. For two, he was selected as England’s first goal-keeping captain. What he described as his own greatest day was when he led the team against Italy in May 1948. Originally England were to play Czechoslovakia but after February’s communist coup in Prague, the fixture was rearranged. The team went by air from Northolt, a dozen journalists in tow, among them former players like Charles Buchan, ex-Scotland and Arsenal and then of the News Chronicle. The mode of transport, however, was sufficiently novel for the Daily Herald’s man to opt to go by boat and train. The weather deteriorated over Switzerland, where the captain felt it necessary to stop and change planes. Swift described the rest of the journey over the Alps in a twin-engined Dakota as a ‘bit of a snorter’ and said he wasn’t the only passenger relieved to get off again.

The match was on Juventus’s ground in Turin. World Cup holders from before the war and in front of their own 85,000 crowd, the Italians were expected to win. While England had given themselves three days to prepare, the home team had been undergoing three weeks’ intensive training. Continentals clearly took this kind of thing very seriously. Furthermore, where England’s training in Stresa was open to view, recorded Swift, Italy’s was ‘at a mountain hideout’. In the England dressing room, there was no concealing the pre-match tension: ‘We knew what we were up against and changed quietly.’ Come the moment, Swift was unable to find the words for a captain’s speech of encouragement. Instead, each member of the team filed past and shook his hand.

Outside all was turmoil: loudspeaker announcements, with adverts and exhortations to the crowd, aeroplanes promoting everything from newspapers to cordials, and others swooping low over the pitch with cameramen on board shooting the scene. Hordes more photographers joined Swift in the middle for the toss. ‘Some standing on ladders, which they toted across the field, some lying on their stomachs,’ he said, ‘all of them arguing and gesticulating.’

England’s response to the apparent anarchy was to score almost immediately. Stan Mortensen raced to the byline and beat the Italian keeper Valerio Bacigalupo from what seemed an impossible angle. This was to the ‘astonishment and chagrin’ of the crowd, said Swift, which prompted their team to storm back. ‘For twenty minutes they threw everything at us with bewildering inter-passing and brilliant speed.’ Shots, overhead kicks, headers, the lot ‘flew at me from all directions’. Probably the most startling was from the Italian centre-forward, Gabetto. Eight yards out, he didn’t turn or take aim but back-headed the ball. A British keeper couldn’t have anticipated that kind of thing and the surprise and speed of it beat Swift. The ball hit his crossbar and bounced down just in front of the line, near enough to have the crowd screaming at the referee to give a goal. When play switched to the other end, Swift invited one of the photographers crowding behind the net to step around into the goalmouth so he could show him where the ball had landed. The fellow accepted the offer and quickly took a photo of the spot. His colleagues would have followed, said Swift, if the Italians hadn’t been straight back on the attack.

The England captain stopped everything he had to, though handed the compliments to his team. His defence was ‘rock-like’, not least Jack Howe of Derby County in his first international, ‘and incidentally the first man to play for England wearing contact lenses over his eyes’. By contrast he was sniffy about the Italian defenders, who sometimes ‘indulged in acrobatic antics while clearing the ball’. England’s forwards left the Italians dumbfounded with their simplicity of approach, namely the way they cracked the ball into the net with first-time volleys and after quick one-pass movements. But most of the honours won from England’s near incredible 4–0 victory went to Swift. It was acknowledged as his finest game in the finest England performance ever. Hitherto there was no question that Britain had the finest keepers in the world. In Turin Swift proved to be the finest yet seen.

The England selectors may even have agreed at the time. But it didn’t take them long to think again. The following season, little more than six months later, Swift was dropped. He competed for his place with Ted Ditchbum for a couple of games but, soon after, seemed to have been overcome by the affront to his pride. He stood down not only from the England line-up, but from football altogether.

The decision to drop him could have been put down to the passing years but it was not so much Swift’s age, more his style that was cracking on. The selectors were an aged crew themselves, a panel of half a dozen or so club directors or other luminaries from the football establishment. There was a picture of one of them, Arthur Drewry, in my encyclopaedia. He had the brushed-back grey hair, nervous smile and starched collar look of a Neville Chamberlain. He and his colleagues sat in learned committees, their anxiously awaited, often haphazard and mysterious decisions worthy of a puff of smoke when finally revealed. But they did what they believed was for the good of the game and chose those whom they felt were the right type.

Before the war, Swift had never been considered ready for the England team, yet he was the national character for the moment. He had acknowledged that the pressures of life were enough to get anyone down but embodied the spirit of ‘get up and get on with it’. He, as much as any popular figure, symbolised the people ‘smiling through’. Swift waved and laughed to each member of the crowd. To those going off to Africa, Sicily, Normandy, or wherever, this said, ‘It’ll be all right, son’. They didn’t know it would, but it was the best they had. With luck, and the right distance between them and the explosion when it came, they might even survive to get their medals from the king.

For my father and the other soldiers in Florence, Swift was to arrive almost at the very moment of victory. In person, not just in spirit, he was going to be on hand to begin the celebrations with them. Swift’s team won 11–0, so no one would have seen him do much goalkeeping. But you could bet when the ball was up the other end, he’d have been turning to chat with the squaddies behind his goal. My dad said it took him several years to get over the disappointment of missing that game.

Still, Frank’s elevation to the England team meant he was on hand for the party back home. As the returning soldiers ejected Churchill from Downing Street, so they went to be entertained by Swift between the posts. As a keeper able to put on a show, there was no one more perfect for the occasion. Long after Swift retired, my father and anyone who spoke about him continued to do so in terms which raised him to the status of a giant and friendly god, who made you hardly able to believe your luck that he was on your side.

By the time I heard about Swift, revision of the record had been going on for a while. My encyclopaedia made what sounded like noises of approval, yet didn’t throw its compliments around. Swift was ‘massive’ and had ‘exceptional height and reach’, features which represented no great achievement on his part. Harry Hibbs, after all, had not enjoyed such natural advantages. Swift was also ‘likeable’. There had been nothing to say whether Hibbs, Hardy and Scott had been likeable – or even whether to be likeable was a good thing. They were no doubt the soul of decency as people but their virtue as keepers was in their hardly being noticed. With Frank there was little chance of that and here lay the problem. ‘Swift might have been the greatest goalkeeper of all time,’ intoned the encyclopaedia, ‘but for a tendency to showmanship.’

He had been great for the fleeting post-war moment of celebration but deemed inappropriate for the dour times which set in. People were expected to get back to where they’d been. Women from the Naafi or the Land Army – like my mum’s sister, Olive, who’d driven a tractor, worked with the Italian prisoners in Sandy, and even had an Italian boyfriend – were wanted back in the home. Men were required in the jobs that would reconstruct the nation. Men and women were wanted back in stable relationships; Brief Encounter urged them to forget their Little flings. Everyone had to knuckle down to austerity. With a large part of the harvest being sent to Germany, there was bread rationing, something that hadn’t happened throughout the war.

Abroad it was all going haywire. India demanded and gained independence. This was serious, although in the popular mind explained by the usual muddle-mindedness of foreigners – the half-naked fakirs in loin-cloths’ that Churchill referred to. Really threatening was that the Russians had the Bomb. When Moscow Dynamo had come to tour Britain a few months after the war it was amid great public excitement. They met Rangen in Glasgow, with demand to see them so high that tickets priced at three and sixpence were touted for as much as £1 outside the ground; 90,000 people crowded into Ibrox for the 2–2 draw. But the Russians’ tour had transmitted early signals of suspicion. They said there weren’t enough flags, flowers and music to greet them. In London they wouldn’t sleep in the guards’ barracks they were given saying the beds were too hard. (How soft had the feather mattresses been during the siege of Leningrad?) They decamped to the Soviet embassy. Churchill spoke of the Iron Curtain descending from the Baltic to ‘Trieste on the Adriatic’. Churchill made his speech in the USA, among friends; his mother was American. But the USA wasn’t on our side over the empire, not least when Palestine broke up and Israel emerged. They wanted us out, for the ‘freedom’ of others, and to slip in themselves. We were being pushed back again. These weren’t Swiftian times to be bouncing around gleefully off your line.

When Swift was dropped from the England team, his response was, in character, more dramatic than it strictly needed to be. A little more than a year after his greatest international game, he retired. Manchester City could not believe he was giving up and kept him registered for another five years to ensure he didn’t play for another team. But he sought more security than was possible in football. A giant of a keeper, he went off to be a sales rep, for Smallman’s the Manchester confectioners.

He, at least, had relished his international career. His old rival, Sam Bartram, did not win the honour. The general view was that he was kept out of the England team by Swift’s brilliance. Then, when Frank was being lined up for replacement, it was easy to pass over Sam as too old. But short of his one appearance for England Possibles, he had not been in with much of a chance. Near deified by the fortnightly 60,000 or so who turned up to enjoy his performances at the Valley, Bartram never overcame the objections of those who watched in judgement. He was condemned by them as too sensational and for playing to the gallery. His bravery in the way he threw himself at forwards’ feet – normally a commendable feature of a keeper’s game – earned him the criticism of being a ‘danger to football’.

I heard my dad talking with his brother Reg about Bartram by the coal fire in the waiting room on Sandy station. My uncle was seeing us off after one of our monthly weekend visits – dismal night, the late Sunday train, with a probable change at Hitchin or Three Counties. Bartram was good for times like this. My uncle recalled a game against Birmingham City near the end of his career when he had left his goal to take a penalty. He ran non-stop from his own area to hit the ball, which struck the crossbar with such force that he had to chase hilariously back again after it. Sam was a great laugh like that, the shame being the selectors couldn’t see the joke.

In Swift and Bartram the selectors may have noticed something like the unruly ghost of ‘Fatty’ Foulke looming from the grave. Swift they had gone along with as an exception to the desirable rule. To have sanctioned a second showman would have risked established tradition. Protective of the nation’s sterner values, Bartram was where they drew the line. He had to get by with the unofficial title of ‘England’s greatest uncapped keeper’. He played till 1956, by when he was forty-two. At the Valley they named a set of gates after him. Seeking a living, like Swift, out of the English love of humbug and sherbet lemons, he ran a sweet shop and tried football management, without huge success.

I got his autograph on the platform forecourt of St Pancras station on a Saturday morning when he was manager of Luton Town. Had Luton been a big, as opposed to Fourth Division, club, this wouldn’t have been possible. The station would have been alive with big kids who pursued the signatures of the stars and gave any younger kids present a hard time. Bartram was tall, with a big face, wrinkled forehead and wave of sandy hair. He signed my book in front of the cafeteria, as his team grabbed cheese rolls and cups of tea before taking a train somewhere north for their afternoon game. I was aware that here was the man who had been Frank Swift’s chief rival, England’s greatest uncapped keeper. Not so long ago, that had made him one of the finest in the world, and I was surprised more people in the St Pancras steam and grime didn’t give some sign that they recognised him. He was the type who’d have happily called and waved back.

Chapter 3
In Swift’s Succession

The Swift succession played to an unprecedented audience. More than 41 million fans attended the stadiums of the nation in the 1948/9 season. Most of them were prepared to stand on exposed and crumbling terraces for the sake of an afternoon’s entertainment and they established a record that would never be beaten. With so many potentially critical eyes on them, the England selectors replaced Frank Swift by stages. In discreet British fashion, they dropped a hint here and there to prepare the crowd.

Putting Ted Ditchbum of Tottenham Hotspur between the England posts represented a return to reality. He was in Swift’s commanding physical mould at just under 6 feet 2 inches, but his style was different. Ditchburn, fearless and agile, generally did not embellish things. He was solid, consistent and, as such, more within the tradition.

A year and a bit younger than my father, he was of the generation that came to maturity in the war and had to become serious while still very young. There was no time for any of the old inter-war mood of trying to put the bad times behind you – they were on you before you knew it. Ditchburn came from Gillingham near the naval dockyards of the Medway and had volunteered for the Royal Air Force at the start of the war when he was eighteen. Younger keepers gave a new edge to the question of fitness. It was not something you had for the sake of your game or personal pride, but a matter of national necessity. Physical Training became such a high priority that it crossed the frontiers of fanaticism as PT boys were rolled off the wartime production line. Ted Ditchbum was the first of them to occupy the England goal.

Off the field at Spurs he was the players’ representative, at a time when there was talk of a strike for wages higher than the going rate of about £10. The club board threatened to put amateurs in the team. But Ditchbum was not one for ill-discipline or unchannelled aggression. He had a talent for boxing. It went with being a PT boy. If you were expert on ropes and wall bars, likely as not you could handle yourself with your fists. When done properly, it was a fine individualist art – its rules had been laid down by the gentry – which stood you in good stead against the instincts of the mob. It had for my dad when cornered by a bunch of yobs by the Roman arena in Verona. They were yelling the usual stuff about ‘British troops go home’ and edging in. So he put up an orthodox guard, left paw well forward ready to jab the first to make a move, and shouted back in Italian that they should keep coming. Good-in-a-crowd types, they backed off. Ted Ditchbum could have been a boxer, like his father had been, but he chose football and played his first game for Spurs in 1941.

Ditchbum’s military record contained an important element of sacrifice. On the verge of regular international selection, he’d been sent to India in 1944 when the call came for a dozen PTIs – physical training instructors, or so it was thought. He arrived to find the need was for Parachute Training Instructors. Once there he had to stay for two years, thus giving up the opportunity of individual honour and playing for his country for the relatively mundane duties which went with serving it. He returned to find someone else had his place in the team, but didn’t sulk and went out and played well week after week for his club. Ditchbum was made of the right material.

Fog in north Islington meant his international debut against Switzerland at Highbury had to be postponed for a day. A 6–0 victory was duly recorded the following afternoon. My dad’s youngest brother, Bim, who was eighteen and came down from Sandy by train for all the internationals, said all the action was around the Swiss keeper’s goalmouth. While the fans were fired by the moment, Ted Ditchburn had nothing to do.

It was logical to give him another run out in the side, a proper opportunity to show his international worth. For the time being, however, the selectors didn’t feel they had another one available. The function of matches like that against the Swiss was to help plug the gaps between the truly important international games. These were the home championship contests, between ourselves, the British, playing our game. Scotland were the chief opponents, but Wales and Ireland could never be taken for granted. Their players, with few exceptions, played in the English league, the ‘finest in the world’. Foreign international teams were brought over for the delectation of the masses, the fun part of a bread and circuses exercise. With the basics of daily sustenance now in such short supply, their role was all the more significant. Like Christians in the Colosseum, they provided a chance for the lions, without excessive exertion, to keep themselves in trim. No team from abroad had managed so much as a draw against England on home soil.

In the last ten games between England and Scotland either side of the war, each had won four, with two drawn. Swift was chosen, the selectors still not ready to forsake his experience and make his execution too blatant. That was largely taken care of in the match itself by the Scots keeper, Jimmy Cowan, of Greenock Morton. Few people in England had heard of him but, at Wembley and with a performance that was the highlight of his career, Scotland won 3–1. Swift, by comparison, looked jaded. He was at fault with one of the goals and injured a rib when one of the Scots forwards had the temerity to shoulder-charge him. The selectors felt more justified in replacing him.

On the 1949 post-season tour of Scandinavia, they chose Ditchburn for the reasonably stiff task of facing Sweden in Stockholm. Sweden were remembered as gold medallists at the London Olympics the year before. Nevertheless, most of them were still mainly amateurs. From undiscovered centres of footballing excellence like Norr- and Jönköping, Swedish players likely passed the their days as steambath masseurs and cross-country ski instructors. In four previous internationals they had not got within two goals of England.

Captain Billy Wright made the first mistake when, having won the toss, he elected to play into the setting sun. It dipped slowly below the Swedes’ crossbar for much of the first half and into Ditchbum’s eyes at the other end. On the high ball particularly he did not ooze confidence. Worse, as England lost 3–1, he was held to have abused that placed in him by the selectors. He had been invited into their high-risk strategy of toying with the public mood as they displaced Swift. Now they’d been embarrassed. Swift was brought back against Norway, for an easy final international of his career. Ditchbum the selectors sniffly dropped from the reckoning.

They knew they’d find support among the fans. Ditchbum’s popularity on his home ground at White Hart Lane was unconditional but Swift’s enormous national following would have had its fair number of sceptics whoever was replacing him. My dad’s first reaction to mention of the Spurs’ keeper’s name was to scoff. If pressed, he would concede that Ditchbum was a ‘good keeper’, but given my understanding that British keepers were habitually brilliant, it followed that all of them were at least ‘good’. To say so was hardly a compliment.

Spurs were top of the Second Division and the most exciting London team of the season. As well as Ditchbum, they had full-back Alf Ramsey and inside-forward Eddie Baily, both pushing for places in the national side. Ron Burgess was captain of Spurs and Wales and the year before had played left-half for Britain in their 6–1 win against the Rest of Europe. They pulled crowds of more than 50,000 to White Hart Lane fifteen times during the season. The attendance for the visit of Queens Park Rangers was 69,718. Your arms were pinned to your side, my dad said. Lift them to applaud or wave around and you wouldn’t have got them down again.

The game in October was another one-sided contest in which Ditchbum had very little to do. On one occasion when he did – out of character and bored out of his mind – he jumped a little extravagantly at a shot which needed only a simple catch, and spilled the ball. Under no pressure, he retrieved it hobbling in his 6-yard area. He even put on a bit of a smile to the packed terraces. This worked well enough for the Tottenham faithful but my dad was near apoplectic. In his view, the Spurs’ keeper was not only an unworthy pretender to Swift’s national selection, but also a poor imitator of his style. ‘He should have stuck to goalkeeping, not clowning around,’ he said. ‘He could never do it like Frank could.’

Spurs won but their constant attacks managed only a single goal – a lucky bounce off Baily’s shin. QPR’s keeper, Reg Allen, otherwise stopped everything: ‘The finest display of goalkeeping seen by any man,’ said my dad, adding that it finally got him over missing Swift in Florence three years earlier. Allen, a former commando, had spent four years in a harsh German prison camp, which later caused him bouts of heavy depression. He left the field at the end of the ninety minutes, to an enormous ovation from the crowd, with head bowed and an embarrassed, barely detectable smile. Manchester United bought him soon after for £10,000. the first five-figure fee paid for a keeper (inexplicably, centre-forwards were going for three times the price).

One of Allen’s best moments in the match caused the crowd to surge forward for a better view. A steel barrier buckled and spectators fell in front of my father in a heap. If any more had gone down there’d have been injuries and quite possibly a disaster. But thanks to a bit of luck, and several years of army PT, he stayed on his feet. When he got back home, I’d been crying most of the afternoon and my mum had been left holding a three-month-old baby for the sake of a game of football. It was a natural enough moment to leave off watching it for a while.

After England’s defeat in Sweden the selectors went for Bert Williams of Wolverhampton Wanderers. He had played in one wartime international while still on the books of Walsall, a Midlands club of limited ability and such uncertain geography that in the 1930s it bounced between the Third Divisions South and North. Walsall’s greatest moment had distracted focus from Hitler’s ascent to power. In the winter of early 1933, and within the shadow of the laundry chimney at the side of their ground, they’d taken Arsenal to the cleaners, 2–0, in the Cup. The two seasons before the war, as Williams was finding his feet in the team, Walsall had been on more familiar form and at risk of dropping out of the football league altogether.

Walsall’s manager in the late 1940s was none other than Harry Hibbs. If old Harry saw something in Williams, the selectors reckoned they might, too. In his wartime international against France in 1945, he’d made a mistake in the first couple of minutes and the French had scored. But he had retained his nerve, recovered from the setback and played well in the rest of the game. Stan Cullis, returning from his role as a wartime entertainer of the troops to become manager of Wolves, bought him for £3,500 and Williams was elevated to football’s top flight, the English First Division.

Blond-haired and of the same age and frame, Williams looked like my father in his army photo wearing uniform and shorts in Algiers in 1943. At the age of fifteen Williams had been only 5 feet 2 inches tall and built himself up with exercises, which included dangling by his arms from door frames. He grew 8 inches in two years. He was another PT boy, a former instructor at the same RAF camp as Ted Ditchbum. A high-class sprinter, he could speed off his goalline for crosses, or to get down at the feet of onrushing forwards. His saves were often dramatic; he covered huge distances with his dives. These midair gyrotechnics were certain to raise the spirits of a crowd, and have a similar effect on the eyebrows of the selectors. But if he wasn’t their automatic choice, he had an undeniable quality. There was no doubting his seriousness.

Williams was shy and quietly spoken. In no picture I saw of him was he smiling, but since he looked like my dad I imagined he did. From Staffordshire, he lived several miles from the Wolves ground, a distance he would walk each training and match day on his toes and the balls of his feet. His reckoned that to rest back on your heels left you ill-prepared for sudden attack. He had a tortured look and masochistic edge. His training programme comprised a tireless stream of handstands and somersaults into mud. He’d round things off with a full-length dive on concrete.

Williams was the ideal compromise for the England goalkeeper’s job. He had enough of what, from their varying perspectives, the selectors and fans wanted. The sharp shift from Swift to Ditchbum – triumph to reality – had been too much. Williams borrowed from both styles and was perfect for the transitional times. He mixed drama with dour necessity. He was the first keeper I heard my dad describe as ‘spectacular but safe’.

The turn of phrase aptly described the country’s view of itself. It was obvious to anyone with a brain that by standing alone from the fall of France to Pearl Harbor we’d saved the world but, as obviously, that Britain was no longer the dominant player. As the Russians and Americans carved up the world between them, it wasn’t certain how we fitted in. But we could still lead by principled example and were still able to show the world ‘a thing or two’, even give the enemy ‘a bloody nose’. Alert on our feet, we could get out there, sharply off our line if necessary, to save this new world from the dangers it was creating.

Bert Williams played his first full international as the Soviet Union was being persuaded to lift its siege of Berlin. For nearly a year the US air force and the new England keeper’s own RAF had airlifted in water and other basic supplies in defiance of the Soviet blockade of the west of the old German capital. The Soviets had tried to strangle the place. In taking them on, we dared them to shoot us down. They didn’t have the nerve, and we held ours. This was what we were like. We did the spectacular when we had to, to keep the world safe.

At the same time, the Amethyst, a British boat sailing up the Yangtze river in China, was fired upon and besieged for weeks by communist troops. Why it was calmly steaming through a country in midst of revolution was unclear; it was also beside the point, as the Royal Navy made repeated attempts to rescue it. Finally, it just slipped away and, under cover of darkness, got back to safety, brilliantly, as you’d expect and to rapturous cheers at home. The enemy were ‘caught napping’, resting back on their heels. Like Bert Williams, we wouldn’t have been. We were the types prepared to dive on concrete – piece o’ cake these Chinese.

Just a few days after the flop against the Swedes, Williams was drafted into the team for the season’s last international. Three weeks earlier he had played in Wolves’ FA Cup Final success against Leicester City. A nerveless performance in the 3–1 victory over France in Paris secured his place in the England team. It also tidily completed the otherwise messy process of the Swift succession.

The new era got off to a shaky start, however, early the following season. As with Williams’s old club Walsall, the uncertainty owed something to geography. In September 1949 the Republic of Ireland came to play an international at Goodison Park, which posed the question ‘Who are they?’ England played Ireland every year but that was the north of the island. This team were more rarely taken on and went under the title ‘Eire’. Few people knew how to pronounce it: was it ‘Air’, or ‘Air-rer’? As it turned out, it rhymed with Eamon de Valera. Even few Irish people used the term, preferring simply ‘the Republic’.

Still it was convenient in a way because it emphasised to us the foreignness of the place. For reasons best known to themselves, they had gone their own way and wanted to be different. In the war, for example, they stayed neutral even though Irish regiments fought with the British army. De Valera refused to give Churchill guarantees, my mum would recall, that German U-boats wouldn’t be allowed to use Cork harbour. You never really knew where you were with them. They weren’t people who stuck to clear-cut lines; the edges were always slightly blurred.

Some of their players had played for both ‘Ireland’ and ‘Eire’. Johnny Carey, their captain, was a case in point. In the Protestant north of the island, football was played on Saturday, Sundays kept sombrely free. In the south they went about things in the chaotic-but-fun, Catholic-continental way of lumping church and football all into the Lord’s day. Some Irish footballers had played for both the island’s national teams in the same weekend.

Not that Eire’s team was cracked up to be much. Most of them played in British league teams but back at home football came a poor third in popularity after Gaelic football and hurling. Their 1949 team was a suitably makeshift outfit. It had three goalkeepers. Tommy Godwin of Shamrock Rovers was to play between the posts on this occasion, but Con Martin upfront had also won international honours in goal, and Carey had played a league match for Manchester United when the regular keeper had cried off late before the game.

The fact that they won the match, therefore, was cause enough for English disillusion. But it went further than seeking reasons and scapegoats for the 2–0 scoreline. If this Ireland was the alien ‘Eire’, then England had lost their proud record of never having succumbed at home to a foreign side. Hadn’t they?

The problem was deftly solved in a Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon way. The edges were blurred and the lines made less clear-cut. Sure, weren’t we all a bit Irish anyway? In my family there had been Great-great Granny Smith, with her one eye and caravan in Sandy around the turn of the century. But, fundamentally, it was noted that nine of the winning team played in the English or Scottish leagues, including both the goalscorers: Martin of Aston Villa and Peter Farrell of Everton. At Goodison Park Farrell was on his ‘home’ pitch. Keeper Godwin was an exception, but he soon won a transfer to Bournemouth in the Third Division South, and you could hardly get more English than that. No, whatever they were – and forget the signs in landlords’ windows saying ‘No dogs, Blacks or Irish’ – they were not foreign. After a nasty scare, England, it was decided, had kept their home record intact.

Two months later against Italy at White Hart Lane, there were no ambiguities about the opposition’s national status, but many nasty scares. In front of a 70,000 crowd – Ditchbum, ruefully, among them – it was Bert Williams’s finest game. Despite the cold, misty afternoon, the Italians tiptoed through the England defence and pounded his goal. The spectators watched in amazement, the Italian players with their heads in their hands, as Williams saw them off. One shot he diverted with his legs, while diving in the opposite direction. England managed a couple of effective breakaways near the end to win 2–0, but Williams took the credit. Italian newspapers nicknamed him ‘II Gattone’, ‘the cat’ (to be exact, ‘the big cat’, such had been his presence).

The performance placed Williams second only to Swift in the ratings of post-war English, and arguably British, goalkeepers for much of the next two decades. But in a key sense, it was almost immediately forgotten. Although Italy had made England look inept for most of the game, the final score encouraged the thought that we were ready to advance off our lines, at least with a quick dash to take on the newly emerging threats caused by upstarts, the lot of them, who needed to be put in their place.

Before the World Cup arranged for Brazil in 1950, the tournament had been staged twice in the 1930s, then war intervened. British teams had shunned it; as a notion dreamed up by a Frenchman, Jules Rimet, it was a bit of a cheek. Foreigners had created a competition which presumed to anoint the champions of ‘our game’. Sensible analysts knew who the world’s champions were. They were the annual winners of Britain’s home international championship, the toughest international competition in the world.

The World Cup illustrated just how like foreigners it was to go organising fancy events with fancy titles. They always had to show off. When you played them, before kick-off they presented things like elaborately tasselled pennants. Even when Moscow Dynamo came in 1945, they had taken the field with great bouquets of flowers for each of their opponents. The British players looked lost, the crowd laughed. What was the point? All insincere gestures and flashing smiles (well, in this case, maybe not the Russians), foreign teams tried to wheedle their way into your affections, then turned on you and got nasty once the game started. They were people who weren’t what they appeared to be. Play them on their grounds and, like as not, they’d fix not only the match ball, but also the referee.

England went to Brazil in keeping with the new spirit of international cooperation and comradeship. Having fought with, or against, each other we had to live together, rather than, as after the First World War, retiring to our respective corners, in effect to prepare for the next conflict. Something else had also begun to gnaw away at us. There was no need to announce it to everyone, but perhaps we had something to prove. The World Cup was creating an alternative pole of development which others might come to regard (wrong though they would be) as the true yardstick of greatness. We wouldn’t have been wrong to stay away, but would not have wished our actions to be misinterpreted as shirking a challenge.

When England turned up in Rio de Janeiro in June 1950 they were greeted as the ‘kings of football’. The arrival of the inventors of the game was an endorsement of the competition. The England party regarded it less seriously. Most arrived ten days before the competition’s start, allowing little time for the players to acclimatise. Their first game was to be with Chile in the coastal humidity of Rio, the next against the United States in the rarefied mountain air of Belo Horizonte. Four players, leading lights like Stanley Matthews among them, came via a post-season tour of Canada and arrived just three days before the opening match.

Conditions confirmed the party’s suspicions of what living abroad must be like. From a country blessed with the Broadstairs and Blackpool B&B, the players were scathing of their hotel on Rio’s Copacabana beachfront. Egg and bacon breakfasts were obtainable, but served in black oil, not wholesome melted lard. Players survived on bananas, risky in itself. When the first bananas, not seen since the 1930s, arrived in Britain after the war, there had been reports that a young girl of three had overdosed and died eating four of them. Alf Ramsey was the first to go down with a bad stomach, a bilious episode that was to colour Anglo-Latin American relations on and off for the next thirty or forty years. English pressmen on the trip also warned against whom, not just what, you could trust. The players were urged not to give autographs. Some Brazilians had, only to find they’d signed subversive ‘communist’ petitions.

The first game before a thin crowd of 40,000 at the Maracanã stadium (capacity 110,000) saw England players suffer from the surprisingly thick air. They gulped from a cylinder of oxygen at half-time. Surprisingly, in a foreign land, rain then fell to make conditions a little more familiar and a 2–0 win was scratched out of a patchy performance. The manager, Walter Winterbottom, and captain, Billy Wright, thought there should be changes for the second game against the USA, but the decision was in the hands of the one selector on the trip, the Neville Chamberlain look-alike Arthur Drewry. He chose to change nothing. The USA was a small footballing nation about which we knew and cared little. Thus, he waved his sheet of paper with the England line-up before an expectant world. There were to be no changes; a case of peace in our team.

Other factors were also blamed for England’s subsequent performance. The stadium at Belo Horizonte had been built for the World Cup but was a rickety structure. With a capacity of only 20,000, it summed up the players’ feelings that this was not a serious competition. The surface, recently laid, was a scrubby desert of tufts of tall grass, interspersed with bare earth. Any of the 111 pitches just created from the east London rubbish dump at Hackney Marshes-with so many posts and crossbars it had caused a national shortage of white paint – might have been better.

Neither could the USA be regarded as serious combatants. One of their better players was a Scot named McIlveney, who’d played in Wales but, after seven games for Wrexham in the Third Division North, had been given a free transfer and emigrated. Keeper Borghi’s first sporting love was baseball. The centre-forward Joe Gaetjens was from Haiti, a place few had heard of except in lurid discussions about voodoo. Several of the US team took the field in a zombified state. Imagining they would have little to celebrate after the match, they’d stayed up to party through the night before.

Surreal forces, whether brought to bear by Haitian Gaetjens or not, played no minor part. When England’s forwards prepared to shoot, the ball stood up on the long tufts of grass, to be scooped, with uncanny regularity, high over Borghi’s bar. No one was quite certain what magic fashioned the USA’s winning goal. Bert Williams appeared to have a shot from the left covered but Gaetjens somehow got to it with the faintest of headed deflections. People wondered, had he touched it at all?

The British press hit upon the analogy of the defeat at Gallipoli in the First World War to convey how England had been routed in distant parts. When a loss to Spain meant ejection from the tournament, Dunkirk was the obvious parallel. Britain’s first expeditionary force to a World Cup rapidly evacuated hostile territory, the instinct of the England team, officials and the press to get away as quickly as possible, back to the safety of home. They didn’t stay to study the form of those who remained in the competition and missed the eventual final between Brazil and Uruguay. The view was that there was nothing to be learned from places where the conditions for football were never right, nor from the teams which played there. If they weren’t out-and-out cheats (the Football Association toyed for a while with the idea of protesting that the US team had contained ineligible non-Americans), then they were as good as. An official report darkly pointed to how the Brazilians had cancelled all league matches for months before the competition. The Uruguayans had been together for no less than two years. This was typical of such people. They got together in darkened rooms to concoct their plans. If that won them games, well, it showed what a state the world was in. Doubtless in the estimation of Monsieur Rimet, Uruguay’s victory in the final was magnifique, but it wasn’t football.

What did the World Cup mean, anyway? ‘Even if we’d have won it,’ said Stanley Matthews, ‘the public would have said it was “just another cup”.’ What had happened was in a remote part of the globe. Unlikely defeats had happened before in those sorts of places, where climatic and other quirks allowed Johnny Foreigner his occasional day. Losing to the USA at football was as humiliating as Gordon going down to the ‘mad Mahdi’ and his whirling dervishes at Khartoum. That had been in the desert. The pitch at Belo Horizonte was much the same and the Americans had played like a team possessed. But it was also distantly forgettable. It wouldn’t happen at home. England turned back on itself from its failed beachhead in Brazil, bruised and ready to draw its line in the sand.

The assault began almost immediately, in the irregular shape of Marshall Tito’s ‘partizans’, with Yugoslavia’s visit in the late autumn. Yugo-, or Jugoslavia as it was often written, had beaten England 2–1 in Belgrade before the war, one of their players rugby-tackling an England forward in the penalty area to prevent an equaliser. The war had confirmed Tito and his mountain men as a belligerent bunch. The British soldiers called them the ‘Jugs’, which rhymed with ‘mugs’ and sounded funny. But the Jugs were definitely no mugs. When the British forces were based there during the stand-off over Trieste, anyone tempted to go looking for wine and women in the hills behind Gorizia was in serious danger of never coming back. Partizans came down into Trieste, marched off groups of Italians and shot them. A stealthy band paddled across from their Slovenian haven to my dad’s camp around the bay one night and removed and made off with the tyres of seventeen jeeps. Now the Yugoslavs came from the depths of Serbia and Montenegro to the dim hinterland of Hornsey Road to snatch a 2–2 result at Highbury. Thus, Islington, and a site but a mile up Upper Street, and through Highbury Fields from our street, took its place in history: it saw the first draw by a foreign team on English soil.

Just under a year later the venue and the score were the same, only this time the French were the opposition. It was more perplexing. France had regularly played against England since 1923 but usually in Paris when the English selectors felt like a jaunt across the Channel. Taken with the game against Yugoslavia, it suggested a pattern was developing. Foreign teams need no longer be fodder for the cannons of the England forward line. The two drawn games also meant England were only one slip or stroke of ill-luck away from losing their home record. Control of events was ominously slipping out of our hands.

This was clear in the war in Korea, where the Americans and Russians were dictating events. In addition to 40,000 British troops, the Labour government under Clement Attleee sent along twenty-five warships, but they were under American command. Thanks to my dad’s extra year facing the partizans, he was spared the call-up. His younger brother, Bim, was bound for Korea, till at the last moment India was persuaded to join in by sending some medics. My uncle’s ambulance division went to sweat it out in Hong Kong. The Chinese were a range of hills or so away from his base at Sek-kong and assumed to be ready, on an order from Moscow, to sweep down in their millions. Many soldiers had to be treated for depression and some committed suicide. All you could do was wait. The tension, he said, was awful.

I came downstairs and heard a report on the wireless one morning that British troops in Korea had been attacked on somewhere called the Imjin river. This sounded like my dad’s name, Jim, and a funny thing to call a river. They’d fought off the attack, which was to be expected. But what was alarming was that the assault had been carried out, the broadcaster said, by ‘communist gorillas’. My parents were at work, so I asked my grandparents what this meant and picked up the impression that communists got up to all sorts of tricks. Thereafter, gorillas kept cropping up everywhere.

In Malaya they killed someone called the British High Commissioner. In Kenya, they’d been stealing from white people’s houses in Nairobi. Here they’d formed an armed band with the frightening sounding name of ‘Mau Mau’. It was said they got together in the jungle in secret to ‘swear oaths’. This wouldn’t have done round our way. With the exception of people much further down the street, you didn’t go around swearing oaths. Why were they like this? It was said they wanted the white man out of Africa, yet it was we who did things honestly and openly, wasn’t it? The British police and army, for example, were doing their straightforward best to deal with them. The gorillas, on the other hand, in Asia, Africa or wherever, did things in an unreasonable and underhand way. Reports of their activities suggested that now everything was against us, even the animal kingdom.

Soon after the France match, Bert Williams suffered a shoulder injury which threatened to end his career. Given the gravity of the global situation, there could have been few worse times for it.

Chapter 4
End of Empire

For a small village, Great Marfold had a good team and could call on players from a much wider area. The uncle married to my dad’s oldest sister, Laura, played centre-forward. She went to watch when they’d advanced to the late stages of one of the Bedfordshire cups. It was a Saturday afternoon game, quite sunny, at the Victoria Works ground in Bedford. Their keeper, Bill Farrell, was twenty-one and due for a trial at Luton Town the following Monday.

In the style of the day, their opponents had a hard centre-forward, a curly-haired fellow called Red Venner. ‘Dirtiest man ever walked on a football field,’ said my aunt. ‘I heard him shout out during the game, “Get that big bugger!”, pointing at Bill.’ When a cross came over, Farrell took it arms outstretched, body taut. Venner came in, studs raised, and caught him hard in the chest and stomach. ‘Well, you said you’d get him,’ my aunt shouted at him, as they carried the keeper off. My uncle took over in goal.

In the dressing room they gave Farrell a cup of hot sweet tea. When they took him to hospital and he was waiting to be seen, he kept doubling over to ease the pain. The proper sister wasn’t on that evening. Something had perforated in his stomach and he died next afternoon. ‘The day his banns were called,’ said my aunt. ‘And he’d have got in the Luton team easily.’ Venner’s son was apprenticed to my uncle as a toolmaker. He said his father had hung up his boots, would never play again, and didn’t sleep for a month after the incident.

Bert Williams had been injured before. It may have had something to do with the way he played, taut and, like a compressed spring, waiting to bounce. But there were always good stand-ins available. We had the greatest goalkeepers in the world and any one of them could be drafted in to do a perfectly adequate job by our standards. By anyone else’s, it would be superb.

Bernard Streten, Luton’s veteran keeper and favourite of my Bedfordshire uncles, had deputised for Williams once in 1949. He came in, did all that was required in a match in which he had very little to do, and never played for England again. His only international cap was a reward for long-standing service to the cause, bestowed by the selectors in the spirit of ‘they also serve who stand and wait’.

The same sentiment guided them as they brought in Gil Merrick of Birmingham City now late in 1951. Williams wasn’t expected to be gone long. Though two years younger, Merrick was already thirty. He’d been overlooked as a contender in the Swift succession. At that time Birmingham had been promoted from the Second Division to the First, thanks to his conceding only twenty goals in forty matches. But next season his team’s form was so bad that two of their players started arguing on the field on a visit to Highbury, and almost came to blows. Team captain Merrick ran upfield and told them to ‘turn it in’. A selector was in the stands and concluded that a keeper had no business out there getting involved. An army man in the war, Merrick soldiered on as his team was dispatched back to the lower division. Eventually he was deemed worthy of reward and proved a decent stop-gap for Williams.

For the spring-to-autumn months up to Merrick’s selection, Clement Attlee’s Labour government had tried to lift the nation’s spirits with a celebration of its new British way. The Festival of Britain was held down by the Thames on bombed wasteground by Waterloo Bridge. There was a steam train, and big iron wheels standing there for people to look at. My parents said there would be a firework display and some kind of dome. They took me along and told me it was good. The festival made no impression on me, other than the strangeness of its slogan: ‘Tonic for the Nation’.

A tonic was something my grandparents had when they were ill. They’d get it from Dr Dadachanji’s surgery at the end of Colebrooke Row, opposite the gardens, the last house before Goswell Road. His waiting room in the front parlour was cold and dim, with a few wooden chairs, and his surgery was at the back. Dr Dadachanji was small and quiet and, to me, mysterious. He probably was to everybody. I’d gone to see him when my nose bled badly and people didn’t know what to tell me but to put my head back. The blood ran down my throat and came back later in livery globs. Dr Dadachanji sent me to the children’s hospital in Hackney Road, where they plugged my nose with cotton wool soaked in snake venom. Mysteriously, it worked.

Millions were spent on the festival and millions came. It was pronounced a great success. An uplifted people should have gone to the polls in the general election the month after the festival closed and swept Attlee back into power. He was running against Winston Churchill, who had lost in the 1945 election because he was considered yesterday’s man. Many people, however, had picked up the idea that the nation was a bit poorly. A large part of the electorate did certainly vote Labour, even though many of them were in places much too far from London to have gone to the festival. They were in the big industrial constituencies, with enormous Labour majorities, but they only counted for one seat. Many in the lesser populated areas – strangely, a lot of them nearer London, so they may have visited the festival – voted Conservative. Labour got more votes, the Conservatives more constituencies, and Churchill returned to office.

I’d never realised he’d been away. With his solemn presence in the wings – his pronouncements on the ‘noble cause’ of the Korean War, and the like – he’d been awaiting his call, available when the country took stock of the seriousness of the situation. Enough people felt it was not the time for ‘tonics’ but for harder stuff to raise the spirit. A few more finest hours, that’s what was needed. Churchill came back with memories stirred of resolute wartime leadership and the glories of unflappable defence. Gil Merrick made his international debut three weeks later.

The selectors found the man they’d been looking for. They could have invented him. Merrick was from Birmingham City, the club of Harry Hibbs himself. Where Harry had been safe rather than spectacular, and Williams had modified the goalkeeping standard to spectacular but safe, so under Merrick it took a step back into history; he was referred to as ‘never unnecessarily spectacular’.

Merrick was in the image of Birmingham itself, capital of the English Midlands, the industrial heartland. It was just up the road from Coventry. Birmingham people didn’t say much, not that we’d have understood them when they did, but were quietly engaged in the job of rebuilding. They made hammers and drills, anchors and chains, gear boxes and other bits for cars, which was all pretty dull, really, but they ‘got on with it’. Gil Merrick played with the sleeves of his jersey neatly rolled to the elbow.

He was the model of post-war man. With a dark, neatly trimmed moustache, he looked like one of my scoutmasters and anyone’s gym teacher; apart from the rolled sleeves, it was his only hint of affectation. The programme my dad brought back from Wembley when he saw him in the Belgium game the following year said; ‘One of the few goalkeepers in the football league with a moustache.’ In the 1930s my mum used to write away to film stars in Hollywood and they’d send back autographs. To a generation brought up on Clark Gable, moustaches had an element of dash and made men ‘handsome’. Unfortunately, Hitler and, with his periodic returns to the country to save us, Sir Oswald Mosley had intervened and done nothing for them as far as I was concerned. But that wasn’t Gil Merrick’s fault.

Merrick was a PT expert and fitness fanatic. You could imagine him in white singlet and long trousers, crease finely pressed, standing calmly at ease as he awaited the order to vault the wooden horse or cartwheel across the rough coconut matting (if it chafed the skin, you just took no notice). When I later saw photos of him, his face was entirely placid. As far as 1 knew, he never smiled or looked as if he was about to. His hair, dark and receding at the temples, was brilliantined back and flat. As a goalkeeper, he was unflappable. He said it himself, he was ‘born to the defensive position’.

His debut was in his home city, at Villa Park, and a comfortable 2–0 win against Northern Ireland. It was an uncomplicated game in the manner of the home international championship, where football was played in the right way. Nippy wingers jinked down their right and left touchlines and inside-forwards were artful schemers. Respectively, they were marked by the full-backs – unsung, decent men with neatly greased and parted hair – and the half-backs who matched their opponents by being muscular and wily. In the vanguard of each attack was the centre-forward, a physical, thrusting player, much of whose game was reduced to single combat with a strong and unyielding centre-half. The goalkeeper stood detached and beyond, awaiting the outcome of the set-piece battles in front of him. This was how things were and were meant to be.

My dad, instinctively a Williams man, was a rapid convert. The Belgium game ended as a comfortable 5–0 win but the Belgians had put a few good shots in on goal. The day was November damp, the ball becoming heavier with each revolution across the Wembley surface and with each yard travelled through the afternoon murk. But every Belgian effort Merrick handled with absolute ease. He caught the ball ‘like he didn’t have a care, just picked it out of the air,’ my father said. ‘That wasn’t easy with those leather balls, they’d weigh pounds on a day like that.’ Actually, in the second half a white ball was used. It looked like the new plastic continental type that didn’t absorb water. Merrick later wrote that he didn’t like them because they swung around unpredictably, though this one proved to be the only one he came across that didn’t. Maybe it was a normal leather one which somebody had slapped a bit of white paint over.

In any event, Merrick’s handling was impeccable. Someone in the newspapers called him ‘the Clutch’ and the terraces picked up on it. From Bert Williams, ‘the Cat’, with its overtones of continental panache, England goalkeeping passed into the clutch of Merrick. It spoke again of the industrial Midlands, with its car factories and things. Very solid, reliable and British.

Just as well, because his first game in London, two weeks after his debut, brought home the nature of the outside threat. My father went again. In our role as founders of football, ‘everyone wanted to beat us’, he said. The latest to try were the Austrians, who came armed with the concept of ‘tactics’. These weren’t entirely new. Austria’s pre-war ‘Wunderteam’ had employed ‘tactics’ when they beat England 2–1 in Vienna. This was in 1936 shortly before Hitler had annexed Austria. The war had come and we’d largely forgotten about ‘tactics’, trusting the world might have the sense to do the same.

The Austrians were held in such high regard they were invited to play at Wembley. By contrast, France had never been afforded this full international honour, inferior footballers and poor ally in war that they were. Austria had flourished as a playing nation till overrun by the Nazis. Though on the wrong side in the war, this could largely be attributed in people’s minds to German belligerence. Austrians had about them underdog qualities. They might even rate as plucky. They still had the unwelcome occupying force of the Russians on their soil and it was touch and go in these grave times whether they’d leave. We instinctively liked the Austrians. They showed their gratitude by turning up at the headquarters of world football with a devious plan to overthrow us.

Against all natural law, they played with an attacking centre-half: Ernst Ocwirk, ernst in German meaning ‘serious’. He performed in a manner that made the conventions of the centre-half position a joke. He took the field with a number 5 on his back, as he should, but then showed this was a deliberate attempt to deceive. Instead of holding back to await the thrusts of the England centre-forward, he advanced to occupy something more like his own team’s central attacking position. Had he any decency, he’d have worn number 9 on his back. Then, just when the English team had noted where he was, he’d be gone, and back in his own team’s defence. Up and down the field in flowing fashion he and the Austrians played. The terraces, according to Fleet Street, nicknamed him ‘Clockwork’ Ocwirk. The Austrians ran into open spaces where they weren’t expected to run. They passed the ball to each other there and held it, while thinking next what to do. They kept it from the England players for lengthy periods of the game.

England couldn’t get a handle on them. The Austrians wouldn’t attack in conventional, civilised combat form. Nor would they stand up to be attacked. Characters you’d least expect would pop up and attack you. As suddenly they’d be gone. From the dark heart of the European continent, they were like those gorillas in the Malayan and Kenyan jungle. They, too, got together to concoct plans and tactics. They also probably sat in the dressing room swearing oaths. But everyone agreed they were damned tricky. (A few years later when one of my comics started giving away small photos of foreign players, Ocwirk’s was the first I collected.) With a minimum of effort they scored two goals. England did most of the running, often fruitlessly chasing the ball. But we had more muscle. Through physical endeavour, England scrambled a draw.

The menace of tactics was obvious but it was difficult to know what to do about it. In the absence of clear thinking, it was decided to ignore it. Resolve and character would have to do. An empire had been built on them. Britain lost ‘every battle but the last’. There were no defeats, merely setbacks ‘on the road to eventual victory’. Actually, it was Karl Marx who said something like that, the fellow who had claimed that by bringing the railways to India, Britain had only laid down the iron path of Indian revolution. Off the rails though he was, he’d done his best work in Bloomsbury, in the British Museum, a few streets from where my nan had been born off Theobald’s Road. Lenin had lived in Finsbury for a while, just north past the end of Exmouth Market. He’d have walked along it, as my grandad and great-grandma served up carved roasts to the poor and workers of the area, and around the streets of Clerkenwell en route to his own eventual victory. Marx and he would have picked up some of the grit and mood in the air.

It wasn’t that foreigners like them, or any other, were not clever people. Tactics, whatever you felt about the morality of them, showed they could be. But could their keepers calmly catch a ball? Would they take a cross, with the pressure really on? They were form rather than content, capable of something thrillingly dangerous or elaborate but impossible to sustain. Foreigners couldn’t ‘hold the line’; they couldn’t see things through.

Churchill saw through the Labour Party as soon as he was back in Downing Street. Our position slipping, they’d tried to stop anything that might be construed as our retreat from greatness by quietly taking us down the nuclear path. Churchill didn’t mind, he just wished he’d been told. He soon visited the USA to push his arguments for the alliance of English-speaking peoples, our special relationship. It was the alternative to dealing with the chaotic Europeans. The USA had always liked the cut of the old boy’s jib more than that Attlee fellow, with his pink ideas. In return for aid, Churchill said they could use our military bases for the two countries’ ‘common defence’. That’d hold the line.

On the customary end-of-season tour, in May 1952, England went to Italy. In the goalmouths of Florence stadium where my father had played before him, Merrick did his bit maintaining the score at 1–1. They travelled on to meet the Austrians again, in occupied Vienna. The game was played at the Prater Stadium in the Russian zone, but British troops packed the crowd. The forward line was led by Nat Lofthouse of Bolton Wanderers, a centre-forward in the old physical mould. Ocwirk’s mechanism failed to tick for the occasion, while Lofthouse so intimidated the Austrian keeper, Walter Zeman, that he scored two of England’s goals in a 3–2 victory.

Unintimidatable, Merrick had his best England game. He made the winning goal, rising to pluck a swirling corner kick from the angle of bar and post and clearing, via Tom Finney, to Lofthouse on the chase. Zeman came at him boots first – as Merrick noted, this was ‘the wrong way of going down at a man’s feet’. We went down with head and hands, bravely, either to smother the shot or pluck the ball from the rampaging opponent’s toe. Zeman’s feet laid out Lofthouse, but not before he slipped in the winner. The troops carried him off on their shoulders at the end, Lofthouse the ‘Lion of Vienna’. Merrick, however, quietly claimed a greater prize than a mere title. England field players kept their shirts from each game, but the keeper was never able to have his jersey. He had to hand it back to an FA checker perched over the kit basket; something about them being more difficult to obtain, thought Merrick. The feel of this one was like wearing ‘a special and expensive suit for the first time’. The mood in the dressing room was so jubilant that he asked if he could keep it and the ecstatic Winterbottom was happy to comply. ‘Do you wonder,’ said Merrick, still moved by the memory years later, ‘I treasure that jersey more than anything in football?’

For reasons I could never grasp, my parents were moved to take holidays on the continent – about once every four years, with a week at a holiday camp between times, while they saved the money. This was my mum’s doing. My dad – country boy, big family – would as happily have stayed at home. Before the war she’d taken a couple of day-trips to Ostend from Margate and a boat trip down the Seine for her fourteenth birthday. At work, Waterlows had organised a football tour to a small town near Ypres and she went as a spectator. That was Easter 1939; a member of the ship’s staff counting them off at the Ostend quayside said: ‘There’s more than ever now. Everyone thinks there’ll be a war.’ Then the civilian traffic stopped and my dad went in khaki. He wrote romantic letters back with sketches of happy soldiers jumping off landing craft on to beaches. The censor would let those through. My mum felt she’d missed out on the fun and dragged him back as soon as he was home. Much of Italy was destroyed. They hitched army trucks to get from Florence to Siena, wangled special visas to get to Trieste. This was thought very strange round our street.

When I went abroad at the age of three, the Channel was very rough. It always was. My parents said they’d been on one crossing when even the crew was sick. We stayed with my father’s friends in Siena in a small street behind the cathedral. It all seemed extremely poor. Aunts, nieces and grandmas competed to scrub my face at night and parade me back in front of the applauding family. It was very embarrassing. Trains were always late. There was a huge mob on Florence station, which my dad said would all leap through the open windows when the train came in to grab a seat. So, clever move, we stood on the platform behind a priest, our seating arrangements thus assured. When the train came in, he threw his suitcase through the window like the rest of them and, habit ascending, dived dramatically after it.

If it hadn’t been for the last game on the next summer tour – this time stretching itself to the newer frontiers of South America – England would have stayed unbeaten. Uruguay, the World Cup holders, won 2–1 in Montevideo. It was a pity but much too far away to matter. Of more immediate importance was the fact that the spring and summer of 1953 proved that reward came to those who stayed the course. Stanley Matthews received his winner’s medal at Wembley, with his last chance to appear in an FA Cup Final. His runs down the Blackpool right were defined as the thrilling difference in a 4–3 victory against Bolton Wanderers. That much of the score resulted from errors which would have disqualified either goalkeeper from appearing in the South East Counties League, was a detail laid aside in celebration of a long and distinguished career. A month later, Gordon Richards, unable to win a Derby in three brilliant decades in the saddle, did so at his final attempt. ‘It felt like it all came right,’ said my dad. There was a sense of justice and harmony to the world. Master the fundamentals and eventually the glorious moments would follow.

No one did either like we did. In June, who else could have staged a coronation in all that rain? Look at Queen Salote of Tonga, the only royal guest to ride with her carriage hood down, soaking Haile Selassie in the process. God bless her, people thought, for being such a good sort and showing why the empire was necessary in the first place. My fourteen-year-old Uncle Keith and I squelched around to the special school in Colebrooke Row, near the Manchester Union of Oddfellows, for our red jelly and pink blancmange. They were served in the hall, not the playground where the kids’ party was meant to be. It didn’t detract from the day. The national spirit had been buoyed that morning by the news we had conquered Everest. At least, that was as I understood it.

There was some confusion over the men who had reached the summit. Neither was British. As a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary was almost, but not quite. Our butter came from New Zealand and had a picture of a kiwi stamped on the wrapping. New Zealanders were called ‘kiwis’. The fellow who went to the top with him clearly wasn’t British. He was Sherpa Tensing. ‘Sherpa’ was the name of the group, like a tribe, he belonged to; his name was Tensing Norgay. The BBC and everyone called him ‘Sherpa Tensing’. They could, by the same token, have referred to his partner at the summit as ‘Kiwi Edmund’.

The Sherpas were loyal and trusty, a bit like the Gurkhas who fought with the British army. My dad had a kukhri, one of the Gurkhas’ curved knives, in a leather sheath on a shelf in the sitting room. This one was blunt but a frightening-looking thing. You were glad these people were on your side. The Gurkhas were from a similar part of the world, but the Sherpas lived at the foot of Everest itself and were mountain guides. Amazingly, they were guides who hadn’t been to the top of the mountain themselves. Their god had forbidden them to do so, we learned. Only on our authority, it followed, had they been happy to ignore his ruling. It was a mark of how loyal and trusty they were. They’d just been waiting for us to come along and lead them to the conquering heights.

There lay the answer to my early confusion. Two non-British types had reached the summit but the conquest was ours. It was a British expedition. A little down the mountain was its British leader, John Hunt, who had selected the two to go to the top. He could have chosen himself but it was to others we allowed such honours. We took quiet satisfaction from knowing that without us it wouldn’t have been possible. As on Everest, we led by rock-like example, uninterested in public glory. Britain’s role was naturally that of the man at the back.

There was no one more natural in the role than Gil Merrick. He had been born to the position upon which everything depended. He was the sort of person who exemplified our response to a threatening world. He faced it as we would, quietly and calmly, and if not to win every title on offer abroad, then at least to stay unbeaten at home.

The first challenge of the autumn was to be the game staged for the FA’s ninetieth anniversary. The team sent along in October by Fifa as the ‘Rest of the World’ wasn’t exactly that. The Latin Americans found it too difficult to travel half the globe in boats and planes for this one game alone. But with a collection of mainly Austrians and Yugoslavs, plus a Swede, German, Italian and a Hungarian-born Spaniard to make up the number, it would represent a good test of our renewed confidence in our game and the forces of the universe.

An Austrian, Willy Meisl, a journalist whose brother Hugo had been the goalkeeper of the 1930s’ ‘Wunderteam’, was given the honour of writing an introductory note in the Wembley programme. True to the character of such people, he abused it. It had long been recognised in other countries, he said, that ‘there was little hope of defeating a British national team by orthodox tactics on its home ground’. The Rest of the World would employ Austria’s methods of an attacking centre-half and ‘charmingly precise, short-passing game’.

This was boastful of him, as well as mischievous to suggest that the ‘orthodox’ way was itself a form of ‘tactics’. Right-minded people knew it was the right way to play. He showed further bad grace in suggesting that although England might be getting used to such ‘tricks’ as tactics (he used quote marks to suggest he didn’t really think they were tricks), its teams were ‘so stereotyped’ that they were ‘still prone to be baffled when unusual methods are introduced’. In response, they could only play a hard physical game and get ‘stuck in’. It was ‘why the true craft of soccer has experienced a decline in the game’s homeland’ he claimed, concluding that the Rest of the World would prove superior on the day. But England’s fighting power might achieve a 2–2 or 3–3 draw.

Shoddy though his intentions were, his forecast proved almost correct. The Rest of the World were 4–3 up with one minute to play when England fortunately won a penalty. Some said the referee’s decision was dubious. But Mr B. W. Griffiths was a transparently neutral Welshman who had served in the RAF during the war. He’d been a sergeant-instructor and was now a schoolteacher, a stickler for doing it by the book. In 1950 he’d been among the first British referees to officiate at a World Cup and seen at close hand the tricks foreign defenders got up to. They needed watching. Besides, there was an order to be upheld here. England and Tottenham full-back Alf Ramsey, a man with a stomach for the occasion, strode up to take the penalty kick and drove the equaliser home from the spot.

The crowd had been in such a state of cliff-hanging excitement that they’d probably forgotten the advertisements in the programme for Wembley’s forthcoming attractions. England’s next opponents at the ground in one month’s time were to be the Olympic gold medallists, Hungary. They figured modestly on the page of events on offer. At the top was an ice hockey match between Wembley Lions and Harringay Racers in the Empire Pool (seat prices from half a crown to twelve and sixpence); next, tournaments of amateur boxing and ‘indoor lawn tennis’. The Hungary game – for 25th November, kick-off 2.15 p.m. – was then mentioned, but in far less space than the ad for the imminent start of the year’s pantomime season. Understandable, really, since as a spectacle it would surely not rate with ‘Humpty Dumpty on Ice’.

On the day itself, the programme notes did anticipate a significant contest. At the Helsinki Olympics the year before, the Hungarians had beaten Yugoslavia 1–0 in the final. They were, of course, among the communist countries making a mockery of what should have been the thoroughly amateur Olympics. Their players claimed to have jobs outside football. Hungary’s captain, Ferenc Puskas, was an army officer, the ‘galloping major’. He would be marked in one of the day’s crucial battles by England’s captain and ‘human dynamo’ Billy Wright. Centre-forward Nandor Hidegkuti and goalkeeper Gyula Grosics were ‘clerical workers’. Centre-half Jozsef Bozsik was to set a Wembley record as ‘the first Member of Parliament ever to play in an International match upon the famous pitch’. He was member for one of the Budapest constituencies, whatever that meant in a totalitarian state. No one was fooled. They were full-time footballers.

Their beautiful football in Helsinki, said the programme, had made them famous the world over. They were unbeaten in the past two seasons. One note, which had a 1066-and-all-that ring to it, went so far as to say that this was the day ‘England faces perhaps the greatest challenge yet to her island supremacy’. To meet it, Gil Merrick was cast in a classical role; he was Horatius facing the Etruscan hordes across the Tiber: ‘It may well be his duty this afternoon to show that unspectacular anticipation is the best weapon of all to hold a heavily attacked bridge.’

But this was to get things out of proportion. Others had been and gone before this lot, the cherry-shirted Hungarians, all continental short shorts and short passing game. The privilege of writing in the programme on how the match might go was not given this time to any cheeky foreigner but to the football correspondent of the London Evening Standard, Harold Palmer. In a half-century or so, he noted, fourteen foreign international sides had been seen off. Hungary had been among them, losing 6–2 at Highbury in 1936. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been a clever team, Palmer conceded with magnanimity, and they had even been superior in midfield. They’d just lacked that component of seeing things through. Having got so far, they ‘let themselves down by their weakness in front of goal’.

Theirs was a style fairly common to central Europeans. Like their neighbours, Austria, they moved away from their adversaries to find open space and retain possession: ‘they reason that while they hold the ball the opposition can do nothing.’ But they couldn’t run away for ever. Today they would also find conditions not to their liking. Heavy fog had threatened to have the game postponed and the novel concession was being made, in their honour, of using a white ball for the whole game. But they were not accustomed to playing on ‘heavy grounds like ours in mid-season’ and the hard tackling of a team of ‘superior stamina’. They were, in short, about to discover it was a man’s game. There was not so much wrong with our football, the Standard man concluded, as the ‘jaundiced Jeremiahs’ made out. This set of opponents would no doubt come with their schemes and plans. We had no need, however, to worry unduly about tactics. Honesty would triumph above deviousness: ‘The English game is all right.’

Elsewhere, the programme noted the Hungarians’ tactics would differ from the Austrians, but not greatly. Rather than an attacking centre-half they came with a retreating centre-forward, Hidegkuti, the Budapest clerical worker, filed away mischievously in the wrong shirt. It had number 9 on its back, but he ‘usually lays well behind his inside-forwards’. From here he was apt to feed them with through passes, or run through himself on to passes they supplied him. It wasn’t, therefore, that England didn’t know about this. As Palmer had recommended, they chose not to worry unduly about it. In the event, the words of Meisl came back to haunt: faced with unusual methods, England teams were ‘prone to be baffled’.

The England defence retained control of their faculties for all of fifty seconds. In as many years, no foreign team had been able to storm the citadel. A sign that things might be otherwise came with the Hungarians’ first attack. Advancing from behind his midfield line, Hidegkuti collected the ball and hit a hard shot from the penalty area’s edge into the top right corner of Merrick’s net. A ‘stunned hush from the packed Wembley terraces’ greeted it, said a Hungarian report. It took their players several seconds to dance at the sight of the ‘white English ball in the net’. Geoffrey Greene, The Times reporter, also had his eyes on it: ‘it was meant to be a dove of peace. Instead it was the angel of doom’.

Within fifteen minutes the same player had scored twice more, one of them charitably disallowed by the referee. The appearance of a retreat that the deep-lying centre-forward gave, suddenly revealed itself as attack. Not only had the match programme given warning, history had seen it all before. In the last such challenge to England’s ‘island supremacy’, the nifty Normans had pretended to run away, then turned with the home team caught unprepared. First Hastings then, 900 less a few years on, Hidegkuti worked the same trick. The victim was a Harold, now as then. Harry Johnston, the Blackpool centre-half, couldn’t fathom whether to follow Hidegkuti and be caught out of position, or leave him to cause havoc at will. Mind befuddled, he looked through the mist for help, calling out across the pitch to his captain, Billy Wright: ‘What do I do, Billy?’ Wright’s reply was succinct and honest: ‘I don’t know, Harry!’

The score was 4–1 by half-time. In the second half England dug into their reserves of resilience and scored twice. So did Hungary. A combination of their easing up – a lack of ‘superior stamina’, possibly – and a first-rate performance by Merrick, kept the score to 6–3.

At five o’clock, a little over an hour after the end of the game, my dad walked the couple of minutes to Gloucester Road tube from the Natural History Museum, where building works were going on around a new air-conditioning system to fan the dinosaur bones and drawers of dead beetles. The papers were on the streets, the placards and men at the newsstands screaming the match outcome. He had to walk up and down the pavement by Baileys Hotel with the Evening News for a while to take it all in. ‘We thought foreign teams were nothing,’ he said. ‘The big games, the ones you were frightened about, were with the Scots.’ He’d had the chance to see the match but hadn’t taken up the offer for the sake of a lost afternoon at work. He was glad he had. He didn’t want to face the journey home: ‘If I felt like this, I wondered how bad it was for those who were in the stadium?’

As for all internationals, his youngest brother, Bim, was there. In his early twenties he had no worries about missing a half-day’s pay and no regrets that he had. It was an incredible occasion, breathtaking – actually, the very opposite of that. It made you realise how long you’d been holding your breath and didn’t have to any more. You’d felt it coming for so long, that the waiting was the problem. The tension was off. The hordes had finally stormed down from the hills. ‘To those who had seen the shadows of recent years creeping closer and closer, there was perhaps no real surprise,’ said Green of The Times. England must ‘awake to a new future’.

For the Wembley crowd the true shock had been Hidegkuti’s goal in the opening minute. It was one of four in the afternoon hit with such power as to make the dusky continental ‘weak in front of goal’ ghost look more pallid than old Harry Johnston. The second following within a few minutes of Hidegkuti’s initial strike made the spectators realise this was to be no flash in the pan. By the third, they were fully disposed to savour what was served before them.

That goal came after a sharply hit diagonal pass from the wing found Puskas on the gallop a few yards out from the right edge of Merrick’s area. Severely left-footed, Puskas easily controlled the ball but, skidding to a halt, found himself with his back half turned towards the goal. He may have appeared off-balance to those near him. He rocked back on his right foot, as if he might even fall and let the ball go beyond reach in front of him. Billy Wright, driven to new heights of dynamism at having been caught out by Puskas’s move into a dangerous position, ran and threw himself at the ball in a sliding tackle. He aimed to sweep it out of play for a corner kick and on the damp turf his momentum carried him into the crouched row of photographers across the touchline. The problem was he didn’t have the ball with him.

Puskas was the ‘tubby brains’ of the Hungarian attack. In addition to his plastered-down, centre-parted hair, he was short and of square frame. In technically polite terms he had a low centre of gravity. He hadn’t been unbalanced at all, and placed the studs of his left boot on the ball to drag it back swiftly out of Wright’s path. In a continuation of the same movement, he pirouetted on his right foot, drew his leg back and hit an unstoppable shot. Merrick, knees buckling, hardly had time to lift his hand.

Billy Wright witnessed this as he detached himself from the sprawl of grey-coated cameramen and dislodged trilby hats. Stanley Matthews was off in the fog on the right-wing but four decades later could still clearly see Puskas’s goal in his mind’s eye. The Hungarian report observed how the crowd ‘applauded for a very long time’. What they’d seen had been so simple that anyone in British football would have been proud to have done it. The footwork was perfectly no-nonsense, and effective enough to dump the England captain on his backside. It was rounded off with an example of shooting to equal anything England’s own forwards could have provided. It was brilliant, might even have been very British, yet was a million miles beyond us.

Puskas’s ‘drag-back’ captured the imagination sufficiently to be given the name. In scarcely a second, it fused elements of the game – deftness and directness, skill and shooting power, the scurrilous tactical stuff of foreigners and the straightforward decency of home – thought unfusable. It was a moment of football creation and for England the moment of much wider defeat. We had to acknowledge we were beaten. What the crowd witnessed wasn’t some overseas reverse, explained by the quirky things that went on abroad and distant enough to be forgotten. It had happened here, on our turf and before our own eyes.

Allowing for a few thousand neutrals at the game, a bare minimum of Magyar émigrés and a scattering of communist diplomats, some, say, 95,000 people went back to the workplaces, pubs and working-men’s clubs of an England approaching full employment and spoke about it. According to the old marketing principle that everyone knew 250 people – or, even if the number were pared to a conservative 100 – it meant that somewhere between nearly a quarter and over half of the population of England heard of the moment from someone they knew who had been there. This was in addition to what they discovered through the papers and radio. TV had missed the moment; only the second half was broadcast, because the FA didn’t want people staying away from several afternoon replays between lower division and non-league clubs in the second round of the Cup. But all channels of communication reflected on this matter of wide national concern. Scots, Welsh and Irish joined in, in appreciation as much as glee.

Puskas’s achievement was of mythical proportions. My dad talked about it with his brother and many other people. When he told me about it, I understood it to have been performed by someone from somewhere called ‘Hungry’. This put it in the same funny-country category as ‘Turkey’ and ‘Grease’, though it turned out to be not some old gag but a stroke of magic. Puskas, I gathered, rolled the ball beneath his foot backwards and forwards several times. This had cast a kind of spell on the England defence, as if they were under the influence of an old Indian snake-charmer like Dr Dadachanji. They had swayed back and forth with it, till Puskas’s final dispatch of the ball snapped them out of their trance. I practised rolling an old tennis ball under my foot in the backyard and tried it on the other kids in the infants’ playground. Far from mesmerised, they shouted at me to get on with it. It occurred to me this might not be my skill; also, that foreigners could do very impressive things.

The Hungary defeat was not Merrick’s fault. He’d had to be necessarily spectacular to stop any number of Hungarian attacks. My encyclopaedia showed one, the England keeper springing left with rolled sleeves and black wool-gloved hand to push the ball around the post. A strand of dark brilliantined hair out of place confirmed the pressure he was under. Puskas said that if Merrick hadn’t played so well the score would have been 12.

By the time a quarter of that figure had been reached, the outcome was certain. We had been out-performed and the most implacable last line we could muster was unable to stop the foreign tide. As Puskas’s shot flashed by, Merrick’s raised hand clutched only a gloveful of November gloom. Half turning his head to watch the ball on its way into the net, his eyes were unmoved as ever, staring at the end of empire.

Chapter 5
Neck on the Block

We learned at school that the tree which best survived on the streets of London was the plane tree. For several years I assumed there was no other tree around, failing to register the chestnuts on the steep embankment of the canal and evidence from Sunday visits my mum organised to leafier places like Kensington and Hyde Park. The plane tree’s visible trick was to shed its bark regularly to shake off the effects of the London smog. But its secret lay in its name. It was the ‘good old’ plane tree, plain and straightforward as we were, a tree for the common man. It was strong and it survived.

Crossing Danbury Street on my way back home from school, about a week into 1954, it started to rain. The taps in the playground had been frozen, so I leaned my head back and for about twenty seconds drank from the sky. A few days later I was sent home from school early with a head like death. My stomach came out in sympathy. No one quite knew what it was as I was put in bed, but when my dad arrived back in the evening he recognised what was wrong from his time in Italy and Africa. He carried me to my grandad’s car and they took me to the children’s hospital in Hackney Road, which confirmed the problem as dysentery. I was kept in for three weeks and treated as if victim of a tropical disease.

My grandad generally had a ton of coal delivered just before winter started. The coalman, who wore a flat cap, trousers held up by braces and looked like he’d climbed out of the chimney, shot the 20 hundredweight sacks of the stuff down the coalhole in the pavement and into the basement area cellar. It shone in large, tar-laden chunks. After its dust was swept into the gutter, the stain in the paving stones remained for at least a day of rain. A month later the smog came down, from about the third week of November, and hung around on and off into February. You wore it as a badge of honour, a mark of living in the largest city in the world. The newspapers said that thousands of people with bronchitis and other illnesses died from it. When you put a handkerchief over your mouth, by the time you’d walked down the street and back, a wet, black mark had appeared. Many football matches would be abandoned, the ref finally giving up hope of an improvement some good way into the game. Every year there’d be one when, with the teams back in the dressing room, it would be realised a goalkeeper was missing. The trainer or a policeman would be sent out to find him, at the edge of his penalty area, peering into the smog, unaware everyone else had left the field. This happened to Ted Ditchbum, Sam Bartram and any number of them until the smog as an annual event finally disappeared.

Ours was the black ash variety, particles of the stuff floating before your eyes. The Americans came up with a new one. They carried out an H-bomb test on the Pacific island of Bikini. Japanese fishermen heard the explosion and saw the mushroom cloud rise from 80 miles away. An hour and a half later, it started to rain, or rather snow on them, a kind of white-ash smog – probably pieces of Bikini, as well as whatever else comprised such a phenomenon. Fortunately, the Americans were on our side (the Russians only had the A-bomb). My dad said the GIs he’d met abroad were as friendly as anyone you could come across. But despite the fact they spoke English, you couldn’t say they were exactly like us. Johnny Ray began a tour of Britain, smiled a lot and collapsed into tears at the end of his songs – nice, but funny people.

It was just as well that this time the USA were not among the teams in the summer’s World Cup finals. Neither England, nor Scotland (who turned up for the first time) needed the embarrassment. In an act of self-punishment that would have done Bert Williams proud, England chose to go for one of their warm-up games to meet the Hungarians, in the Nep, or People’s stadium in Budapest. A local reflecting on the occasion with British writer John Moynihan said he was amazed when England took the field: ‘We had always thought of them as gods. But they looked so old and jaded, and their kit was laughable. We felt sorry for you.’ That was before the kick-off. His sorrow had surely turned to Johnny Ray-like sobs by the final whistle. Hungary won 7–1.

In the World Cup in Switzerland, Merrick was blamed for three of the four goals Uruguay scored when eliminating England in the quarter-finals. Out of touch with home newspapers during the competition, he was surprised when a reporter asked him on his return whether he had any comment on having ‘let the country down’. He replied it was a ‘poor show’ if people had said that, that only the last Uruguay goal was his fault in a 4–2 defeat and that none of his teammates had blamed him.

Actually, Stanley Matthews – often cast as one of football’s ambassadors – commented that Merrick ‘disappointed’ us ‘when we were playing well and had a chance’. This in itself showed a new feeling towards the tournament. In Brazil four years earlier the players had given the impression they couldn’t have cared less. Suddenly they wanted to win. After the years of suspicion towards a ‘foreign’ trophy, it was at least a tentative advance from the line into territory mapped out by others.

There was obviously something to be learned from the wider world. As well as dispatching England, Uruguay scored seven against Scotland. The British teams’ performance helped start a debate about training methods. Merrick noted that before a match, teams like Hungary and Brazil did stretching exercises in the middle of the field. British teams tended to stand around stiffly, rubbing their hands from the cold and having a few desultory shots at their keeper. It was suggested that back home British clubs might put less emphasis on dogged cross-country runs and encourage the more refined, if slightly prissy, practice of training with a football. Not any old football, naturally. Officialdom remained sceptical about the new white one, rejecting it as contrary to our natural game. The absorbent leather ball was an important test of how men met the sport’s varying challenge. It was designed to be played in the rain. It was just like the sunny continentals to run up the white flag in the event of a downpour.

The selectors, anyway, had enough experimenting on their hands with a new generation of keepers. Ray Wood had come into the Manchester United team; Reg Allen had been part of United’s championship-winning side in 1952 but, as a result of his war experiences, had suffered a nervous breakdown. Wood appeared modest enough to satisfy national requirements: a degree of shyness meant, in his photographs, he tended to incline his head down and look guardedly at the camera. He also had elements of a greasy quiff, an unnecessary bit of styling when compared with the plastered-back fashion of the wartime generation. Did this place him in the ranks of surly youth? He played in two games, did his bit to register two victories, and was promptly left out of the team.

The next overseas visitors to Wembley were the new world champions, West Germany. Hungary had hammered them 8–3 in an early World Cup round in Switzerland but somehow the Germans contrived to keep going through the competition and met the Hungarians again in the final. Puskas was injured, the Germans triumphed. This showed characteristics not associated with them. They were the types who went on to an early offensive – Schlieffen Plans, Blitzkriegs and Operations Barbarossa – then collapsed when things got tough. The World Cup had showed ominous signs of an ability to claw their way back.

The selectors reverted to the tried and trusted. Wolverhampton Wanderers were the reigning league champions and Bert Williams had proved he was back to fitness. He made a reassuring return in England’s 3–1 win. One thing mentioned in the programme notes, and otherwise largely missed, was that the Germans were building for the future. Their players were part-timers, their team experimental. Uwe Seeler, for example, their centre-forward, was apprenticed to a Hamburg firm of furniture removers and now in the van for his country at only eighteen. It made him the youngest player to appear in a full Wembley international.

Chelsea won the league in 1955 and were invited to take part in the newly constituted European Cup for national champions. The London club wanted to enter, the Football Association said no. Unnecessary games on the continent would clog up the fixture list at home. And could teams going abroad for what amounted to little more than an exhibition match on, say, a Wednesday, guarantee they could have their players back fit and well for the proper stuff of life on the Saturday? We should maintain our distance.

In Downing Street, Churchill had had a stroke and decided to retire. He convalesced by bricklaying in his garden. What with the renovation of our house, there were bricks around and so, using sand instead of cement I put up a few temporary walls in our backyard. My dad said they were better than Churchill’s, which were more ‘serpentine’ than straight. Clearly the old boy could have benefited from a seven-year apprenticeship. But building walls seemed a thoroughly good thing to do.

The new prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, agreed in that there was too much of this modish European integration stuff floating around. Germany and France, enemies for most of the last hundred years, were getting together, combining their coal and steel industries. Britain should block this and anything like it. It would only lead to the kind of imbalance in Europe that in the past we’d had to go in and sort out. Eden had previously been foreign secretary and knew about these overseas places. He said himself, he understood the affairs of the continent inside out. He’d studied Persian at Oxford.

In Persia, no less, we were under attack. British people had been forced to leave our oil refinery at Abadan. Things were worse in Egypt where types like General Nasser had taken over the Suez Canal. ‘Their canal’, they said. Really? Who built it? England’s football season got under way with its first international but showed that roughneck forces were infiltrating our borders, too. England played Wales in Cardiff and lost 2–1. The by now venerable veteran Bert Williams was harshly treated by some of the young Welsh forwards out to show off their muscle. They used shoulder barges, as the law said they could. But wasn’t there a spirit of the law they were offending? In the opposite goal, Jack Kelsey of Arsenal, whose display was key to the Welsh victory, thought so. He agreed a keeper was there to be hit, within reasonable limits. The way Williams had been targeted was unnecessary. That said, he quickly added that the rule book should not be changed. Take away the right to barge keepers and they’d end up like those on the continent – allowed to flap around when they had the ball and, as Kelsey said, ‘do just as they like’.

James Dean died as Rebel Without a Cause came out in London. More worrying to people than Johnny Ray, he didn’t cry but looked sullen, like the Teddy Boys on the streets, with their long Edwardian-style jackets, sideburns down to their necks, drainpipe trousers and thick rubber-soled shoes. A week later the ‘King of the Teds’, who lived around the Walworth Road in south London, was arrested for throwing a firework at a policeman; with intent to do him grievous bodily harm, said the police. Five years, said the judge.

Eden took the boat from Southampton to the USA for talks on the Middle East, where Russia was supporting Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal. Three weeks later he reported back to Parliament that the Americans fully supported the British position. The Russian leader Mr Khrushchev was booed as his train arrived in London at Victoria station. He had come by sea from Russia to Portsmouth and during his stay a Royal Navy frogman, Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, disappeared in the harbour. The crew on Khrushchev’s boat complained they saw him surface and dive back underwater. No one else saw him again alive. There was nothing these people wouldn’t do. On the wireless I heard the Russians went in for things like ‘brainwashing’ and assumed Crabb’s body was back in Moscow, his brain extracted and being washed right now. Yet it was the Russians who protested. He was a spy, they said, and, incredibly, it was Eden who had to apologise.

Crabb had been awarded the George Medal in 1944 for searching the bottom of British ships for limpet mines. Of the wartime generation, there were pictures of him with lined face and wearing a black roll-neck jersey under his frogman’s suit. The passing of Bert Williams from the England team saw the goalkeepers’ roll-neck all but disappear. It had been creeping down towards and below the Adam’s apple for years. Keepers now appeared less wrapped up against the cold and, in a dangerous world, went bare-necked into the fray.

Manchester City reached the 1955 and 1956 Cup Finals with Bert Trautmann in goal. It had seemed a crazy decision by them to have a German keeper. Badly bombed in the war and with a large Jewish population, Manchester was not likely to feel well disposed towards him. Then, someone had to follow Frank Swift and, as England had found with Ditchburn, anything like a ‘normal’ goalkeeper would have had a tough job. No one would have been able to ‘do it like Frank could’. Manchester City’s first choice had been Alex Thurlow, who was taken ill and died of tuberculosis. Trautmann was drafted in, his one advantage that his nationality lowered the level of the crowd’s expectations. Anything good from a German was bound to be better than the fans had anticipated.

When he was a boy in Bremen in north Germany, Trautmann had joined the Hitler Youth. This was shocking to learn but, when you thought about it, not much different from my joining the 31st North London cubs over the canal bridge in Vincent Terrace. You went for the games, suffered the church parade every fourth Sunday, and tolerated the rigmarole of learning to fold the flag and not to fly it upside down. From our get-togethers, there was little or no grasp of any underlying mission.

Trautmann had been a paratrooper, my dad said, which was ‘very important’. Paratroopers were an elite force on either side, floating above the dirtiness of war. My dad’s brother Cecil was at Arnhem. Under fire and moving from house to house, he and a mate had stopped to shelter in a doorway. He heard a gurgling sound and turned to see the throat of his friend had been cut by shrapnel. I thought paratroopers were small men: my uncle was 5 feet 5 inches and, as a signwriter by trade, often found himself working at the extent of his ladder. Trautmann was tall, at 6 feet 2 inches. Short or long, you knew they were tough.

Trautmann was blown up in retreat from the Russian front, then later buried in rubble and injured in a bombing raid in France. Captured by the Americans when the Allies invaded Europe, he assumed he was going to be shot; armies on the move didn’t always want the bother of prisoners. Instead he was allowed to slip away, picked up almost immediately by the British and shipped to England in 1945. The prospect of seeing Germany again, he said, was only a dream: ‘es war ein Traum’. Yet he stayed on when the war finished. My mum had told me German prisoners had to be kept in captivity because they wanted to escape and get back and fight. Only one ever managed to get free and off the island. The Italians, in contrast, weren’t bothered. Those in Sandy were allowed to roam more or less free. They hadn’t wanted to go to war like the Germans. The fact Trautmann didn’t want to go home, I assumed, meant he must have been different.

He was blond like Bert Williams, though altogether more outgoing. In his photos he invariably smiled. My dad said he was a ‘good bloke’, like Rommel, one among the enemy who gave you hope. The Chief Rabbi of Manchester came out in support of him. As a keeper, he didn’t court acclaim and got down to the job. He was no showman, but he had an important element which was familiar. He engaged the crowd, waved and chatted to them from his goalmouth at the start of the game and even between opposition attacks. It was a direct echo of his predecessor Swift, who before the war had assured the crowd it’d be all right. Now after it, Trautmann seemed to be saying the same. He liked us and people liked him. Just before the 1956 Cup Final he became the first goalkeeper – leave aside the first foreigner, the first German – to be made footballer of the year.

When my dad got back from work on Saturday afternoons he sometimes took me to the cinema. On Cup Final day Moby Dick was on at the Carlton, beyond the Essex Road library by the tube near New North Road. By the time he was ready and we had passed by at my grandparents to say hello, the match was not far away from starting. Birmingham City and its veteran keeper Gil Merrick with his dark moustache were firm favourites. A German smiling cheerily at the future was cast as underdog. Arthur Caiger, the small man in a baggy suit who stood on the high wooden platform wheeled out on the pitch for the communal Wembley singing, was saying: ‘Now, Birmingham City fans don’t have a song of their own, so I’ve chosen one for them.’ He asked everyone to join in with ‘Keep Right on to the End of the Road’. The band in bearskins and red tunics struck up what sounded like the Funeral March. Televised Cup Finals were no substitute for something to go out for; I was happy to leave for the pictures.

Moby Dick kept just the right side of very frightening. Captain Ahab was the brooding, isolated type, fixed in his goal. He suffered a kind of death on the cross. His arms were out, strapped to the side of the whale by the harpoons and ropes. As it smashed in and out of the waves, its eye kept staring at the camera. My father liked the whirlpool the whale made at the end, which sucked everything into it, except the one person who survived to tell the story. It was clever how they achieved that effect, my dad said, with what was actually a large piece of concrete.

When we got back home Manchester City and Bert Trautmann had won 3–1, which was good. Trautmann had been injured quite badly near the end, but had played on, which was even better. There were the photos in the Evening News and in the papers my grandad brought back from Fleet Street next morning. Trautmann was being led from the field at the end, head down, hand clasped to the left side of his face. The front of his jersey was soaked from the water splashed over him by the trainer with his sponge and bucket. Another showed Trautmann diving at the feet of Birmingham inside-left, Peter Murphy. His hands were gripping the ball on the ground but his bare neck was close to Murphy’s outstretched left leg and his right, about to follow through. It must have been that one that had caught him. The clash had happened fifteen minutes from the end and Trautmann spent the rest of the game staggering around his goalmouth in agony. One newspaper was amazed how he came through ‘this alarming situation’. We heard he had been taken for X-rays; later, that he had broken his neck and nearly died.

If Trautmann was well-regarded before the match, there was no measuring his popularity after it. There could be no clearer example of a keeper who ‘took it’, which was precisely what the best British keepers were meant to do. Yet this one was a German and people loved him for it. He hardly seemed foreign at all and was really ‘one of us’. Also, it only added to his attraction that he wasn’t. He could have had a British passport if he’d asked and would have certainly played for England. For some reason obviously not connected with the quality of their keepers, Germany failed to select him. But Trautmann didn’t seek to become a British citizen. As he said, that wasn’t what he was. My dad told me this with approval and it met with national acclaim. Had he applied to become British, he’d have been seen as toadying up. His only reward in terms of international honours was that he was chosen to captain the English Football League in a couple of matches. His lasting achievement was to inspire a national change of mood. In the future we might have to get along with these people and Trautmann showed it was possible. He did more than any other person for post-war reconciliation between Britain and Germany. In passing, he also performed the almost unbelievable trick of remaining an outsider while winning the acceptance of the crowd.

The Brazilians had been in the stadium watching the Cup Final. They were in town for the first game between Brazil and England the following Wednesday. I spent a long time over reports of the match in the papers. They were the first team of top standard England had played that had a number of black players. They came from somewhere that was almost of another world, yet at the same time quite familiar. If you looked at an atlas, Brazil was on the border of British Guiana, one of the outlying pink bits of the British Empire. In a sense, the Brazilians were our next-door neighbours The way we went about things, however, didn’t bear a great deal of resemblance. You couldn’t tell exactly from the pictures in the papers that their team was in yellow shirts and light blue shorts, but their outfits were obviously much trimmer than ours. The shirts had collars. These weren’t limp and floppy but looked like they might have been ironed, as if the shirt could double for use on a summer Sunday School outing. The goalkeeper Gilmar had a collar poking out from under his top and wore an all light-grey outfit that must have been specially tailored for him. His wasn’t a jersey he gave back at the end of games, with a view to it being baggily handed down through the keeping generations. On it was the globe, dotted with stars, of the Brazilian flag. It was all a bit pretty-pretty compared with what we were used to.

The reports said the Brazilians were ‘maestros’, with a ‘special relish for flexibility’ and a ‘lovely patterned approach’. The star of their forward line, Didi, was a ‘black panther’ of a player. This didn’t mean they had what it took. They lacked the ‘depth, teamwork and creativity that shaped great sides’. They were subject to peculiar things like ‘gyrations’. This put them on a level with the whirling dervishes I’d heard my nan refer to, those who had beaten Gordon at Khartoum. Once you overcame the shock of them, and confronted them firmly – preferably on your own turf where you could make them behave – they could be quelled.

There was no doubt they were brought to Wembley for a lesson. Brazil’s ‘sudden spasms’ ran up against the ‘solid oak of England’. Like the resilient plane tree battling the London smog, so we were constructed of other stuff, too, that saw off the threat of flimsier foreigners. Our 4–2 victory was described as a triumph of old over new worlds. Then again, it couldn’t be said they were without their bit of plain, old-fashioned resistance at the back. England would have won much more comfortably but for Gilmar saving two penalties.

In our goal the selectors had felt compelled again to experiment with a younger type. Wood had recently had another game, and Ron Baynham of Luton Town was brought in for three. All were victories but neither keeper was given the job permanently. Next the selectors awarded it to Coventry’s Reg Matthews, and it was he who played against the Brazilians. He was blamed for one of Brazil’s goals, though given another chance. With it, he proceeded to play brilliantly in Berlin a fortnight later.

My family went to Italy again. I didn’t want to go and the Channel was as rough as the first time. After twenty-four hours on the international train, we stayed two days in a hotel near Milan station. We visited the Italian friend who had been a prisoner in Sandy in the war and my aunt Olive’s boyfriend. He was now married to a woman who was pale, quite square and solid-looking and came from Trieste, like he did. His family did not approve because hers was from across the border in Yugoslavia. They’d have preferred him to have married my aunt. We ate red peppers, cooked in the oven. They were like nothing on earth, smelt and tasted like they were going to be sweet but that someone might have mixed in something bitter with them, maybe gunpowder. I ate them and, in the end, thought it was worth it.

For the three- or four-hour journey to Siena, the old train from Milan was very hot, with the sun blazing in on to the wooden-slatted seats. Fortunately we didn’t have to change in the pandemonium of Florence. We stayed with the family again behind the cathedral. At the communal meals I mastered spaghetti and was allowed to drink red wine mixed with water. Italian water was unsafe – hable to give you dysentery, we were told – but was miraculously all right if you put wine with it. I was expansively praised for eating and drinking everything. We had breakfast alone – as my parents explained, Italians didn’t really eat it – but Luciano, the boy of the family who was about my age, joined us. My parents had brought tea. When Luciano finished his cup, he scooped up the leaves with his roll and ate them. My sister and I gasped, though he didn’t notice.

He took part in the marches for the Palio. Horses representing the districts of Siena raced each other round the main square, like Islington might have against Finsbury or Stoke Newington. Members of the family were bornin different areas and were rivals on the day. We had the best seats, wooden tiers put up at the base of the buildings of the square. We sat for three hours as the procession of the Siennese boroughs went around. We didn’t see or hear a British person anywhere. The race was over in a minute, many horses crashing into mattresses on the sharp corners. Jockeys who fell off were immediately suspected by their supporters of having been bribed and, if caught, were kicked and beaten up. The winning horse was from the area of the porcupine, Istrice. The jockey was feted, the horse the guest of honour at a banquet in the victorious part of town. But it didn’t matter if a particular area won the race, just as long as they’d beaten their neighbours. Victors of these tribal battles would walk around their vanquished rivals’ streets shouting and taunting. Everyone did this twice a year.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.