It started badly, and I’m afraid the frost never thawed. I hoped that the years would soften things, and that when the girls came along it would help the mother and the grandmother to draw a little closer, but it never happened. The relationship refused to get better. At first, when I returned to the North East, on some football business perhaps, I would make a point of going to Ashington, and I would reclaim my old room for a day or two. But it was difficult and as time went on I saw very little of my mother. My life was going on, my kids were growing up, and Norma and I had to make our own way. If it was hurtful in a way that I have rarely expressed, it wasn’t so difficult in the sense that I believed I had to make a choice: it was never a case of split loyalties. I had made a contract with my wife, I had my own family, and I could hardly tell the most influential women in my life that they had to do something that was clearly beyond them. I couldn’t make them like each other.
You might ask if Norma tried hard enough, but I would not accept the validity of the question. Norma is a strong-willed woman – it has made her such a strength to me over the years – but in one respect she is probably no different from most people: she wants to be liked, she doesn’t want to feel that in someone’s eyes everything she does or says is bound to be wrong. There was a clash of personalities, right from the start, and I realised early on that, even if Norma could make friends easily in my old world, even if many members of my family could embrace her, there was no doubt that she was involved in a losing battle with my mother.
The added difficulty was that Jack not only took my mother’s side, which was of course his right in the privacy of family life, but he also went public with criticism of my wife. I found this quite unacceptable, and I told him so. I said that often life was a lot more complicated than he made out, and the fact that our mother and Norma did not get on was something that was not uncommon in families. It was a sadness, no doubt, but it was not a matter for handing out easy blame.
There were times, certainly, when Norma could not go along with my mother; it was her right, and however sad I felt about the way things had gone, I always stood by my wife. She was the woman I loved, the mother of my children, and if I had been so lucky in so many things, it was my misfortune that this wonderful woman could not be accepted by my mother. Of course I loved my mother, and of course I respected her, but over the question of Norma I could not say anything other than that she had been unfair. There are occasions in life when it is necessary to be clear in your mind about such a matter.
At the end, when we went to my mother’s funeral with great sadness over the futility of any effort to heal the wounds, I accepted that what had been said and done had to be over. Now, when we meet at England reunions, Norma and Jack’s wife Pat speak and talk about our families, and it is the same with Jack and me. When he is in the Manchester area, he pops into our house and sometimes it is easy, sometimes less so. We are brothers and we have shared so much, and I’m grateful that we are still able to be together, and that it is natural for us to see each other. There were moments, especially after Norma was criticised in public, when I might have exploded, and if that had happened I think everything would have been over for ever. However, life goes on and if I have learned anything it is that it is necessary to accept the need for a little bit of give and take.
Jack has a good heart, I know, and there is no question that along the way he too has been hurt, but my point to him – as it was when I was critical of him publicly when, while we were still players, he announced on television that he had a little black book which listed the names of opponents he intended to get even with on the field – was that occasionally he can be too impetuous, too eager to speak, and to lash out, before thinking through a problem.
I’m pleased to be able to report that Jack is now more receptive to Norma, seems to accept a little more that she has no feelings of regret about her relationship with my mother because she went into it hoping for the best and doing all that she thought she could without losing any pride in herself.
For myself there will always be the sadness that after the great day Jack and I shared at Wembley after winning the World Cup in 1966, when we embraced and agreed that no two football brothers from the North East could have shared such a moment of fulfilment, when maybe our bloodline could not have been more perfectly expressed in the colours of our country, the joy of our experience was somehow clouded by what followed. But then this was only to a certain extent, because, after all, we were our mother’s sons, and there is no question that, whatever came after, she had that supreme moment of pride we shared with her.
Would we have got there without her? Maybe, maybe not, but of course on one huge detail there could be no question. She gave us life and she brought us
