My mother was strong in a different way from Norma, but there was no question about her love for Jack and me or ours for her. Of course she had to be strong. You had to be resilient to come through a war and bring up four lads in the North East on such low wages, when every day was a battle to put some decent food on the table. I have never forgotten that. But however close you are to someone, and who could be closer than a mother and a son, it is still difficult if one has a certain nature and the other’s is not really compatible.
There is no doubt that in many ways I was more like my father; he sometimes complained that he was fed up with football, the need to talk about it all the time, and there was quite a bit of that in me when my mother told me that time to sign an autograph for some stranger and I was just a kid of thirteen or fourteen and was embarrassed by the whole business. My mother didn’t recognise that; for her, life was a matter of going and getting what you could and not being too shy in celebrating your success, because if you didn’t, who would?
What was most difficult for me was my mother’s pride in my football ability. She would talk openly about it in front of people I didn’t know well, and that would make me cringe. It made me want to run for the shadows. My mother couldn’t understand those feelings. At times like that I think I rather bewildered her. She was a Milburn and it was the most natural thing to be good at football. I suspect, deep down, it was something of a regret for her that she wasn’t born to play the game herself. Certainly her career would not have suffered from any lack of confidence. She had enough for herself – and her sons.
As soon as I met Norma, I knew straight away that she was what I wanted, what I needed, and it wasn’t just that she was beautiful. I felt good around her; it felt so natural to be in her company. I was a little slow to make that feeling clear to her, though, and we stopped seeing each other for a while. She fell out with me because she felt I had taken her for granted; perhaps she thought that as a young star of Manchester United I had an idea I could just snap my fingers and the pretty girls would come running. In fact, it wasn’t quite like that at all, and after our relationship was back on and set up properly, most of my friends and team-mates said that she had had a scarcely believable effect on me. I paid more attention to my appearance, my smart club blazer came to the fore, my shoes were cleaned more regularly – but before that, she had been required to give me a rather serious dressing down because of my sometimes negligent approach to our relationship. That was why we’d split up.
Then, one day, I was having lunch with a couple of pals in a little place called Snack Time, just across the road from the Queen’s Hotel, when she walked by. The effect on me was instant and overwhelming. Wordlessly, I left my lunch – it was probably my usual pie and chips – and my friends, and said to myself, ‘You’ve made a pig’s ear of this once, don’t do it twice.’ As I followed her down the street, moving smartly now, I kept repeating, ‘You know this is it, it has to be it.’
It was indeed – but in all the pleasure and the joy of being together again, there was the sticking point of my mother’s resistance.
She didn’t like Norma and, I have to say, in the course of the relationship, that feeling was reciprocated. At first, when I suggested I take her up to the North East, to introduce her to old friends and family, and of course to show her off, Norma was willing enough, but increasingly she became reluctant. She got on well with so many people in my world, especially my dad, but there was no meeting point, no common ground with my mother. It was very painful and I couldn’t get it out of my head that my mother was being very unfair both to Norma and me. This, after all, was the woman I loved and wanted to be with.
It made me think about the past and my relationship with my mother, and maybe it brought back some old and half-buried resentments. I honour my mother’s commitment to my career and my potential and to the influence of her father, the great Tanner, but in the drive to fulfil my own dream, and perhaps my mother’s, maybe something was lost along the way.
She never forced me into anything I didn’t want to do, but I suppose that at certain times I felt she was pushing me a little too hard, when sometimes I didn’t want to be pushed.
I have already touched on one of the great myths of my life in football – that my mother taught me how to play, how to kick a ball. It made a nice newspaper story, and sometimes it was even accompanied by pictures, but in fact I had made my own decisions about my future, even at the earliest age. I was totally focused, secure in the belief that I would make it in the game. My mother’s great gift to me was that she always supported me – right up, that is, to the matter in which I couldn’t be pushed: the choice of my wife. Unless you are a very odd sort of person you do not go
