In opening this account of my life I felt there was no alternative but to go straight to the tragedy of Munich, and so already I have touched on the salient points of the disaster, and the unshakeable emotional impact they had for me on all that would follow, down to this day – but perhaps what I haven’t so far conveyed is my sense of separation from the sickening events that unfolded so starkly. In so many ways I was part of the horror, but I was also, in the strangest way, detached; it was almost as if I was disembodied, a silent, traumatised participant in a terrible dream I could neither act in, nor escape from.
When I was first aware that there really was a problem, when the Elizabethan, even by its own standards seemed to have been roaring down the runway for an eternity, I was conscious of the quiet in the plane and that neither Dennis Viollet nor I had uttered a word since we had started on the take-off. As we went through a fence and collided with a house, I didn’t hear the semblance of a scream. There had been just a vast and empty silence in the plane. I suppose we were in shock; overwhelmed with disbelief, certainly. What could we do? We were strapped in our seats and everything was happening out of our control. The pilot was in charge. What I did was something that I suppose came instinctively: I bent my head down and braced myself for the impact. The last thing I remember, before coming round away from the plane, was the terrible rending noise of metal on metal.
Why had it happened? Was it an engine fault? It seemed to me that the slush had neutralised the power of the plane. Random thoughts and questions came in and out of my head. The pilot had been so determined to get us into the air, and in the end he couldn’t do it. Why was it so important to go off into that blizzard? Because Matt Busby had to fulfil a deadline set by the Football League?
The Old Man, we know, suffered the most terrible regrets, blaming himself for what happened, and only came back to the game, wounded, almost broken, after the fierce persuasion of his wife and all those who were closest to him. We all knew that Manchester United had become his life, and who among that group of cheery, indestructible young men who had a few hours earlier boarded the plane in Belgrade, would have questioned his instinct to take us all on the great adventure. Certainly not me as I took off my overcoat and laid it across him as he groaned in pain on the wet tarmac.
Though I had not seen the condition of my dearest friends on the team, Duncan, Eddie and David Pegg, I knew by now that there had been terrible losses. In the snow I saw one team-mate who was obviously dead, and someone told me that Roger Byrne had gone. He was said to have joked, thinly, when the plane had made its third take-off attempt. ‘It’s now or never,’ he had muttered, but if he had one of his terrible premonitions it had apparently not shown on his face.
There was smoke and grit in the cold air and a blare of sirens, and sitting beside me, having been pulled out of the seat in which, like me, he had been thrown away from the plane, Dennis Viollet was drifting in and out of consciousness. My team-mates Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes, however, stayed conscious from start to finish, and maybe this is why, when you look at the picture of them after they played their first match after the tragedy, their eyes are far away and they are so distant from their new team-mates in a victory that had been drenched with the deepest feelings it was a possible for a football side and their fans to share.
Later, Harry Gregg said that I had been unconscious for about ten minutes, which explained why I was unaware of how I had got away from the burning wreckage, and the parts Harry and Bill had played in those first minutes following the crash. I was still dazed when Harry helped me into the minibus which rushed us through the Munich streets to the hospital. The rest of the night was pain and anger and disbelief, and that emotional eruption of mine when I thought the hospital orderly was treating so lightly the fact that our entire world had come tumbling down in a few catastrophic seconds. The injection that put me to sleep merely took me that much closer to the moment of terrible realisation that the horror would never go away.
When I awoke, the German boy reading from the newspaper, listing the dead, brought back the pounding questions that I would never be able to answer properly, the ones that asked, ‘How could I survive that? How could anyone survive? Why did I survive?’
I had a sudden desire to get in touch with home, let everybody know that I was still alive, even though that fact had been reported in every morning newspaper. I sent a message through the British embassy, saying that not only was I alive, I was without serious injuries.
Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes came to my bedside before leaving for Manchester, and when they went away I shrank from thinking about what they faced: the funerals, the mourning, the feeling that a great city had stopped dead, and then the need to train and prepare for their next game whenever it came. I wasn’t ready for any of that, and this
