The pangs of hunger were never accompanied by the impoverishment of not being surrounded by people who cared, passionately, about your wellbeing and, if Jack and I have had our differences, some of them expressed, much to my regret, in public, I am pleased that we have found ways of working them out. It would be tragic, otherwise, because rarely have brothers had such privileges to share, most notably when we played alongside each other on the day that England won the World Cup. As boys we had good times together and also, like most siblings, those when we used to fight. Sometimes we would agree to carry each other when we walked long in the fields; I would support him for a hundred yards, then he would take me for twenty or so before throwing me off. It was, I supposed, the right of the elder brother.
His greatest pleasure was fishing and sometimes you could see his face cloud when he was told to take charge of his kid brother for a few hours. Occasionally there was a flashpoint. Once I watched him play for his team at the Ashington Colliery Welfare football ground. He played well in defence before giving away a daft goal. Later, when he came into the house, I said, ‘That was a bloody stupid thing to do.’ He hit me hard enough for me to remember that, with Jack, criticism, constructive or otherwise, had to be carefully timed. I knew from that moment that when he was fuming with frustration was not a good time to offer candid opinions.
In our different ways – and some of them are undoubtedly extremely different – both of us have reason to be proud and grateful for our inheritance. From our mother we received the benefit of a brilliant football gene pool – and her passionate insistence that neither of us neglected any talent we had been given. From our father I like to think we learned to be steadfast in what we did, and proud of it.
Many years after I left the North East I discovered fresh evidence that the Milburn football blood had indeed been generously distributed. It was when I was staying for a night with my youngest brother Tommy, who had never been involved seriously in football. He worked in mine safety and lived in a flat above the place where they kept the fire engines. He told me that he and his colleagues were obliged to keep fit for the job and the most agreeable way of doing this, they had decided, was to play two games of football every week. This gave them the required three hours of physical exercise.
Tommy said they were having a match the following day and it would be great if I could play for his team. I could see how much he wanted me to, but I had to point out that I couldn’t because it would go against my contract with Manchester United. I told him, ‘Tommy, they’d go mad if I got injured in such a game. I would love to play but I just can’t. But I’d like to come to watch.’
Tommy was fantastic. I would never have known what a fine natural player he was if I hadn’t stayed with him that night. Everything he did was easy: passing, controlling the play, reading defence and attack. He had great balance and natural strength and he struck the ball so comfortably. After the game I said to him, ‘Tommy, you have lovely skills, why didn’t you ever try to play?’ He said, ‘Well, Bobby, you know, trying to follow you and Jack, it would have been a bit much.’
The truth is that if Jack and I were our mother’s boys in our ambition, Tommy was his father’s. He was more interested in whippets and greyhounds than football and fame. His vocation was to scramble the fire engines and go to fight fires in any of the collieries in his region. I think of him – and my father – whenever I see a news flash of a mining disaster anywhere in the world. I am grateful that when he had a heart attack recently – while playing snooker in Rotherham, where he is now based – one of the top specialists in the country was waiting to operate a few miles down the road in Sheffield. Like the former Liverpool football manager Gerard Houllier, Tommy suffered a burst aorta – and was saved by the speed with which he was taken to one of the few men capable of performing the emergency surgery.
Tommy’s current interest is compiling a family tree. He has shown me charts of the ‘clans’, but has also confessed that sooner rather than later he might have to seek professional advice. This is despite some discouragement, such as ‘Tommy, why bother to trace a bunch of sheep stealers.’ Well, I tell him, we are more than that. We have had lives of our own and some us could play a bit of football.
My father’s gift to his sons was energy and courage and a sense of responsibility to all around him that shaped every day of his life before he died in his early seventies. It seemed to well out of his native soil. He was never drawn to football, and was often embarrassed by the attention that came to him because of the success shared by Jack and me, but if you caught him off guard you might just see his chest swell with pride. Sometimes he would say to me, ‘Why didn’t you tackle more, why didn’t you give that bugger a kick?’ but I knew he wasn’t speaking from real knowledge. He had heard people talking. He was saying
