Switzerland was the icing on my football cake, or maybe the cream on my apple strudel. It was the greatest adventure of the year. We rarely ventured beyond the Cantons after playing the tournament in Zurich, but on one occasion we went into the American zone of Germany to play FC Augsburg. We were much better, winning 8–1, but there was this tough little kid who seemed ready to play us on his own. He never dropped his head, he kept battling away, and he had the look of a serious performer. Many years later, there was no reason to doubt the strength of that feeling when Helmut Haller scored Germany’s first goal against England in the World Cup final. Long after that youth game in Germany, I said to Helmut, ‘Do you remember when we played against each other the first time?’ He replied with a question of his own, ‘Do you think I am likely to forget?’
The Swiss summer was a time when I was open to so many new experiences, and one of them was going to a Catholic Mass with Arthur Powell, who was one of Jimmy’s assistants working with the youth team. He was standing outside the hotel one day, and when I asked him what he was doing he said he was waiting for someone before going to church. Though I wasn’t a Catholic I asked him if I could go along. He said, ‘Bobby, of course you can, anyone can come.’
So I went with Arthur and knelt down and said my prayers, something for which I hadn’t had a lot of practice. Mostly they were selfish prayers. I prayed hardest that we would win the tournament – that would please Jimmy Murphy, and maybe he would give me a little peace – but there was also a prayer of thanks, for so many memories that I knew would never die.
6
THE FULFILMENT OF A DREAM
SATURDAY, 6 OCTOBER 1956: it was five days before my nineteenth birthday, and six months into my National Service, and I had a date with my dreams. It was my first game in the First Division, the first time I ran out in the shirt of Manchester United, a day when it seemed that Beswick Prize Band, standing in their lumpy overcoats, were playing only for me.
I had no concern that for almost everyone else on the field and in the 41,439 crowd it was not one of the early peaks of the season; they were attending a routine football match with only one likely result – but I had arrived at the centre of my universe. For so long the prospect had come to seem like a mirage; so bright, so tangible one day that I thought I could reach out and touch it, and the next it had disappeared. Now the water and the trees were real.
Once I had run into a classroom with a miner’s helmet for a ball. Now the ball, along with everything else, was perfect. Looking back I suppose my graduation was inevitable, but it did not seem so at the time. It didn’t matter how much praise I received, how often I was told just to be a little patient, I needed to play that first game. It would calm me down, confirm my status as a first teamer in waiting. The trouble was, there was so much talent stockpiled at Old Trafford. Then, just as I was beginning to feel a touch of despair, the summons came.
Though four United players, Ray Wood, Roger Byrne, Duncan Edwards and Tommy Taylor were away with England, our unbeaten record and top position in the league did not appear to be threatened at the time my name was first written on the team sheet. Charlton Athletic had well-known South African-bred players like John Hewie, who played for Scotland because of his ancestry, and centre forward, Stuart Leary, who was also a fine cricketer for Kent, but they were having a terrible time, so bad that their veteran manager Jimmy Seed had just been replaced by the England trainer, Jimmy Trotter. They were dead last and apparently doomed.
But what did that matter to me? The band sounded no less glorious and the picture I saw when I emerged from the tunnel and into the light was as thrilling as I could ever have imagined on all the days I had fretted about when, if ever, I would get the call.
Compared to today’s Old Trafford, the pitch that welcomed me was in the middle of a football shanty town. The Stretford and City ends were uncovered and the stand across from the main one would have looked to the modern eye flimsy and ramshackle. An advertising hoarding perched on the roof announced the sponsors: Woods Contractors. Yet as far as I was concerned it might all have been lit up by the most beautiful neon. ‘Bobby, lad,’ I said to myself, ‘there are no two ways around it. You are now in paradise.’ I believed that I would have the scene fixed in my mind for ever – and so it has proved.
It is not surprising. My whole life had pointed me to this place – and this time – and before the kick off it was inevitable that I had a jumble of thoughts in my head. It really felt as if my life flashed before my eyes. I
