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