Eventually, I was able to see them both. I went up with my heart pounding. Later, I was told that Duncan’s fight, which lasted nearly a fortnight, was the result of freakish strength and willpower. The German doctors did all they could and then just had to shake their heads in disbelief that anyone could fight so hard against such odds.
He was in obvious pain when I visited him, but his spirit was still as strong as ever. When he saw me he threw back his head and said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you. Where the bloody hell have you been?’ I whispered my encouragement, feeling my eyes smart while wondering all over again how it could be that this young giant of the game was so stricken while I could prepare to walk down the stairs before packing for home. Big Dunc was more than the admired team-mate and older friend who had looked after me so well when we were in National Service together in Shropshire, who went scouring the camp for a better mattress when he saw that the one I had been issued with had bits falling out. He was the embodiment of everything I admired in a footballer. He had skill and courage and tremendous power. He could do anything, play anywhere, and the world awaited the full scale of his glory.
Once, when I was training with United in Fallowfield, at the same time as England gathered for some work en route to a game with Scotland at Hampden Park, I saw Edwards lapping the field in the company of two of the great internationals, Tom Finney and Billy Wright. The three of them chatted amiably as they jogged and I couldn’t help wondering what other teenaged footballer would look so relaxed, so confident, in the company of such stars.
Duncan Edwards wore his own greatness lightly, but he knew it was a suit that fitted him perfectly. Maybe that was one reason why he fought so hard in that hospital in Munich. I could only pray for his survival after Jimmy Murphy took me by train to the Hook of Holland for the ferry to Harwich, where I was met by my mother Cissie and my brother Jack for the drive home to the North East. I didn’t say much on the journey back to where everything had started, and where I had to persuade myself, in the company of my own people, that football could once again occupy the core of my being.
Of course I would know it soon enough. What would take a little longer to understand was that nothing would be quite so simple ever again. Some, including Jack, insist that Munich changed me. If it did, I like to think that eventually it was for the better, at the very least in that it told me that even when riding a miracle you still have to remember how easily you can fall. If you are very lucky, you survive, and while you’re doing it you fulfil every dream, every ambition, you ever had. This is what lies at the heart of my story, but to tell it properly, first I had to go back to Munich. Without doing that, I know I couldn’t begin to define my life.
1
A CAST OF REMARKABLE RELATIVES
BECAUSE I WAS so quickly adopted by Manchester, a place I fell in love with as soon as I got over the first shock of its grimy, soot-covered buildings and whose virtues I have found myself championing in all corners of the world, sometimes I feel the need to dispel a misconception. It is that, somewhere along the way, I forgot who I once was and from where I came. I did not.
The truth is that nothing that has happened to me, good or bad, has come near to preventing me from going back quite effortlessly beyond Munich and the day I first arrived at Old Trafford, a fifteen-year-old dressed, self-consciously, in a beautiful sea-green mac that reached down to my ankles. ‘You’ll grow into it,’ my mother reassured me as she saw me off at the railway station.
Even now, I often return to the deepest of my roots, the ones that I suspect still claim you when all the glory-seeking is done and every game has been played. In my mind’s eye I run again in the big sand dunes scoured by the wind and dotted with the concrete pill-boxes left over from the war. Then I sit on the rocks and watch the sun disappear into the night. On other occasions I walk down the promenade where, on a good day, we scrape up the money for ice cream. Or I trail into the fields in the tracks of my big brother Jack when, usually under duress, he agrees to take me in pursuit of rabbits or birds’ eggs or to sit by a fishing stream or a pond.
I also go to the pithead again with my father Robert. He buys me milk in a little gill bottle and a meat pie and leaves me in the colliery canteen before going off to collect the wages for which he has worked so hard, even when he is groggy from some bang on the head. While I wait for him I look out and I see the black-faced miners coming out of the cage, singing and joking in their happiness that the shift is over and they have returned safely, for at least another day, to the natural light and the fresh air.
Perhaps, though, it should surprise no one who knows anything about my life, and least of all me, that invariably I stop and linger
