I could hear sirens blaring and then Dennis said, ‘What’s the matter, Bobby, what’s gone on?’ Instantly I regretted my reply, which was, ‘Dennis, it’s dreadful.’ He was not in a good condition and at that point I should have protected him from the worst of the truth, but as the horror was overwhelming me, I suppose I was removed from rational thought. I saw the bodies in the snow, though one small and passing mercy was that I didn’t recognise among the dead either of my closest friends, Eddie Colman, who with his family had befriended me so warmly in my early days at Old Trafford, and David Pegg from Yorkshire, who shared my roots in the mining community. In addition to my seven, ultimately eight, fallen team-mates, the carnage that confronted my still blinking and dazed eyes had robbed another fourteen, and in time fifteen, souls of their lives – a combination of team officials, journalists, flight personnel and a travelling supporter, who, like us all, had been expected home that evening.
Eventually, I was helped into a mini-truck, one that seemed to have been diverted from its normal task of shifting coal. Gregg and Foulkes came with me as we raced through the blizzard into the city hospital. There, the walking wounded were taken to a waiting room.
Mostly, I stared at the wall. I had one small bruise on my head and I was suffering from concussion. Reality came drifting in and out, but at one of its sharpest points I noticed an orderly smiling, as if to say, it seemed to me, that all this was a routine matter and that the world would still be turning when the dawn came. But of course it wouldn’t, not for the football team that was supposed to conquer the world. I was filled with rage and it was directed at this hospital worker who seemed to understand none of that. I screamed at him. What I said exactly is, like much of that night and the days that followed, lost to me now, but I remember vividly the pain that came to me so hard at that moment. Soon after, a doctor stuck something into the back of my neck.
My next memory is of waking the following morning in a hospital ward. In a nearby bed was a young German, who was looking at a newspaper that was spread before him. I could see from the photographs that he was reading about the crash. He spoke little English, but when he looked up and saw me he managed to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ At that moment I had to know who had gone and who had survived.
The German lad read out the names and then, after a short pause, said, ‘Dead.’ It was a terrible roll call, and I make no excuse for repeating once again … Roger Byrne, David Pegg, Eddie Colman, Tommy Taylor, Billy Whelan, Mark Jones and Geoff Bent. How could it possibly be? It was as though my life was being taken away, piece by piece. I had invited David Pegg to my home for a North Eastern New Year, had spent so many hours in Eddie’s house in Salford, where the talk was mostly of football and soldiering; I had shared digs with Billy Whelan, and most Saturdays I would have a few beers at the Bridge Inn in Sale with Tommy Taylor, who would wait for me if I had been away with the reserves.
It was impossible to grasp that these days were gone, that I would never see Eddie swaggering into the ground again, humming some Sinatra tune, walking on the balls of his feet – or have Mark Jones, the kindest of pros, touching my sleeve after a game and giving me some encouraging word. A game never seemed to pass without that tough Yorkshireman taking the chance to say something like, ‘Well done, son,’ or ‘That was a lovely touch.’
There was some relief when I was moved into a ward with a few of the other survivors: the Welsh winger Kenny Morgans, goalkeeper Ray Wood, Dennis Viollet who was looking better than when I last saw him lying in the snow, Albert Scanlon the talented, unpredictable film fan from Salford, who was known to spend most Fridays using his free pass at one of the city-centre cinemas before emerging groggily into the street after gorging on Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. I wanted to shout, ‘At least we’re OK,’ but then I thought of Duncan Edwards, who was fighting for his life, and the badly injured Johnny Berry and Jackie Blanchflower, who would never play again, and that took away any such urge.
Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes passed through the ward on their way to what they saw as their duty to the dead, back at Old Trafford. I shivered when I thought how it must be in Manchester. We had been screened from much of the news, but then, as the days passed, you heard of the funerals and something deep inside you was grateful that you weren’t there, because it would have been so hard to say goodbye with so many eyes on you. All the time the question came pounding in: why me, why did I survive?
When you heard how Manchester was stricken, how many people were turning up at Old Trafford, aimless in their grief but just wanting to be as close as they could to the team who had so lifted their lives, who they had seen growing up before their eyes, you felt there had to be a match as soon as possible. This was something to try to latch on to, as you might to a piece of flotsam in a wild sea. A match would help everybody, players, fans, the
