When I was 12 there was a brilliant article in the local paper. Because I’d been to Wembley so many times since turning eight, the only thing I ever dreamed about was actually playing there. In this feature my dad was quoted as saying, ‘It’s Wembley or bust, isn’t it son?’ Dad had taken me to internationals, FA Cup Finals and amateur cup finals between the likes of Crook Town and Bishop Auckland, so by that time I had gained a real feel for the place. There were the old songsheets and such like and I just loved going to that magical place.
Mum and dad were bringing up their only child in a sublime area for sporting activity. The local hamlet of Elstow was proud of its pristine village green and I would play cricket as well as football there. Dad was also trainer of Elstow Abbey, a men’s team in the Bedfordshire and District League. I played for them at the age of 14 against all the village sides and I would have to look after myself although some of the lads, particularly our centre-half Maurice Lane, and Charlie Bailey, would not allow the opposition to take liberties with me. They didn’t mind me being kicked, because that was all part of the game, but if there was any sign of a rough house they would look after me. If you were in the trenches you certainly wanted Maurice with you. I appeared for them in a cup final at Bedford Town’s ground. At school at Pearcey Road I had played in a cup and league-winning team, scoring 60 goals in one season, and was in the Bedford and District team when I was eight. When I moved up to Silver Jubilee School I was soon into the Beds and District Under-13 and then Under-15 teams. It was a period in my life when I walked to school and ran home!
Dad, as always, encouraged me in my football passion. He would come and park outside school in his lorry and watch me play and he was even known to have climbed up a GPO pole to get a good vantage point. These were Friday afternoon matches, after the last lesson in school, and in my playing days in the Bedford and District side we played on Saturdays and went all over the country together.
At 14 I was picked for London Schoolboys. I know the saying that Big Brother is watching, but how the hell a boy 56 miles away in Bedford is selected to play for London is beyond me. Then, in what was a wonderful year for me, I had trials for England Schoolboys. They were organised as Southern Possibles v Probables and Northern Possibles v Probables and then South v North and for the first of these I was down as a reserve. As luck would have it, somebody didn’t turn up and I got a game. I must have impressed the right people because I was called up for the next trial and then the other. As a kid you never know how these things come about, but it was announced in school assembly one day that I had been picked to trial for England. I went on to play for England schoolboys six times and the most memorable of these was in front of a 93,000 crowd at Wembley against Scotland on Saturday 30 April 1960. Among my England team-mates were Len Badger, the Sheffield United full back, Ron Harris and David Pleat, while George Graham played for the opposition. My international selection was terrific for Silver Jubilee school because I was the only Bedford boy ever to have been picked for England. A convoy of buses left the school for Wembley and later the headmaster insisted on a photograph being taken of the entire school with me wearing my England cap.
I used to wonder what it was all about when the other kids would say they were going to Blackpool for the week or Great Yarmouth for a fortnight, for we never had a holiday. Never once. Aunts, uncles and mates all had cars and forever seemed to be darting here, there and everywhere, but for me it appeared that the Bedfordshire boundary lines indicated some kind of electrified fencing to keep us in there, with the rest of the world a no-go zone. I never knew why this was the case but it has since become clear. After all the years dad worked he was allowed four weeks’ holiday, then five, then six but never used to take them. What he did instead was to build them up, because he felt that at one time he might have to pack up work, or take a long period of time off, to look after mum. He had to look after his family and do the best he could for them. When retirement came upon him it became apparent that he could have finished a year earlier because of all the time due to him that he had in the bank.
Mum, Dora, died a month after my son Mark was born and it was very sudden. It was as though she had been clinging on to life just so that she might see him. I was at Bedford Town as a player and I worked for the chairman, George Senior, in the mornings. He had a cafe down the London Road and had all these breakfast rolls to get out for a lot of local companies. I couldn’t cook, so I was just serving or cutting rolls and putting cheese and ham in them. About 7.30am dad came in with Maurice Lane. He and Maurice often popped in but this day he came in the back way. He never did that. He said he’d been up all night with mum and she was in pain and at the hospital in Kempston, where I lived at the time. Dad said mum had said that I was to get on with work, but I wanted to go to the hospital to see her. He said there was nothing to worry about, but it did concern me. After half an hour I said I wanted to go. At Bedford I used to go round in a van collecting from the sale of lottery tickets. This night I went to hospital with dad, a week before Christmas on a Friday, and mum was obviously in a lot of pain. She had her face screwed up and complained of feeling cold.
I was in the room alone with her for a while and she kept saying that I had to go to work. I felt very uncomfortable. When dad came back I asked if he’d seen the nurse to sort out her coldness and he just said: ‘No’. The bell ending visiting hour was going in no time, so I kissed her and she said: ‘Go to work.’ Dad had to pick up her mate from Hallwins. She was a Scottish lady called Jenny Denton who was getting the bus to Biggleswade from where she would catch the train to Scotland for New Year, so mum was on about dad not forgetting the passenger and me not forgetting to go to work. I went first. Dad had a car then, which I bought for him. I just wanted to go home and not go to people’s houses. My house was only five minutes away. I walked in the front door and Anne, my first wife, said the hospital had just rung to say my mum had died. My reaction was to turn round and put my fist through a pain of glass in the window.
‘You’ve got it wrong,’ I said.
My dad wasn’t on the phone. He worked for the company for 40 years and never had a phone. Can you believe that?
I was 26. I didn’t even know mum was ill. My first thought was about dad taking this lady to Biggleswade, so I jumped in the car, got there taking one route to find the bus for Scotland had gone and coming back another route without seeing my dad. I stopped at a club, run by my mum’s sister, Alice, which my dad sometimes popped into for a drink. I saw Auntie Alice and asked if she had seen my dad and she said: ‘No, why?’ I said: ‘My mum’s dead.’ She screamed. I was in a daze. ‘Our Dora’ was all she could say. I was trying to find my dad and couldn’t. I called at a couple of pubs in which he would usually be having a drink with his mates but nobody had seen him. They all knew he was going to take this woman to Biggleswade. I just went home. I was telling Anne the story when there was a knock on the door and it was my dad.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Mum’s dead.’
‘Yeah, I’ve been expecting that,’ he said.
Just like that.
We went back to the hospital. Upstairs the curtains were drawn and by this time it was 10 o’clock at night. I could hear people near mum breathing and you didn’t know she was dead. I went a bit crazy. Dad calmed me down and took me to the pub opposite the hospital. He said there was nothing I could have done. That was the way she wanted it. She knew she was bad but just tried to forget about it. She had being going to London for years for chemotherapy treatment and there was no way you could have known this unless you had been told. She was always as white as a freshly-starched tablecloth so there was no reason to suspect that anything was wrong.
I was due to play for Bedford the following day and I said to dad that I would have to pull out of it. He fixed me with a stare and said: ‘You won’t. The last thing your mother said to you was to go to