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