It wasn’t one of those small rites of passage that came so regularly out on the football field when, stride by stride, I grasped that what I wanted most was within my power whenever I had the ball at my feet, knowing instinctively it was not so hard to run it by an opponent or hit it low into the wind that seemed always to be blowing. Yet in an unforgettable way it did show me, beyond any doubt, that this indeed was where my future lay.
It was the time James Hamilton, a man of big physical stature and even greater authority, burst into the classroom at North Hirst Primary School, a red-brick building in my home town of Ashington, and shouted, ‘Charlton, Bobby Charlton, come with me.’
I followed the headmaster with all the usual apprehension he provoked when, while patrolling his empire, his gaze settled disapprovingly on a boy or a girl who he decided was falling below the standards of behaviour he set for all his pupils.
He was an amiable man most of the time; he seemed to care about our lives and it was my good fortune that he loved football and realised fully the part it played in so much of the imagination of the North East. However, he inflicted the strictest discipline when someone misbehaved. He especially despised bad language and it was rare that the coarse phrase of a pupil escaped his censure. Only a few days earlier he had imposed what I considered the ultimate punishment on my friend Philip Hazell, who had been heard swearing in the schoolyard. Philip had been dropped from the football team and, as I hurried to keep up as we went down the corridor, I wondered whether I had also done something wrong and was about to share the same fate. This would have been quite ironic in that I had been trying over several days to rouse the courage to appeal against my friend’s sentence.
Mr Hamilton stopped at a display of mining implements, picks and shovels and a helmet. I had often wondered about the purpose of this rather grim little tableau. Was it meant to encourage in all those who passed by a desire for book learning and the means to avoid the journey underground that had been forced upon almost all those of my relatives who had failed to make professional football careers? Or was it simply a statement of the inevitable, with options so limited for those who tried to look past the pits and the shipyards?
Mr Hamilton ordered me to pick up the helmet. ‘You can put it under your arm as though it is a ball,’ he said. Then he unwrapped and handed me the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was a bright-red football shirt topped with lace. ‘No, it’s not red,’ he corrected me. ‘It’s crimson and it’s the finest football shirt that’s ever been made. It’s our new strip.’
Mr Hamilton told me to put on the shirt. ‘I want you to run back into the classroom with the helmet under your arm.’
‘Run into the classroom?’
‘Aye, Bobby lad, run into the classroom. You’re the team captain. Go on. This is a great day.’
I had to agree with him as I felt in my hand the fine material of the shirt, and in my pleasure I had no embarrassment at all. Mr Hamilton went ahead of me to the classroom. Then, as he swung open the door and I trotted in, he sang out the signature tune of Sports Report. Everyone cheered, even the girls.
When the applause died down, Mr Hamilton announced that one of the teachers, Miss Houston, was already at work converting into shorts the satin black-out curtains which had been made redundant by the end of the war. It was so thrilling to be told we were being given our first custom-made team uniforms. The crimson shirts would replace a ragbag assembly of white ones which everyone had had to find themselves, whatever the state of repair. Our only requirement now was to get hold of red-and-white socks, which we did in various sizes and conditions and designs. In the mood of celebration there was even a pardon for Philip Hazell.
Looking back, I see that either side of that happiest of schooldays there was no special occasion when I realised that I would not have to go down the mines, as Jack did briefly – before he tried out for the police and then signed for Leeds United. There is a picture of him taken afterwards, coming to the surface. He is wearing a helmet and the expression on his face shows how bemusing and dispiriting he had found the experience. For me, the idea that my life would be football was just an assumption that built irrevocably over the months and years, and it was maybe most publicly and explicitly encouraged in that moment when I was told to tuck the mining helmet under my arm. I saw it as the clearest sign of the future – one that would always be reinforced by the fact that I felt so much pleasure and confidence whenever I touched the ball.
Everyone told me I could play well, and I was not so modest that I didn’t realise it quickly enough for myself. The game, after all, was so deep in the blood of my mother’s family and if I ever forgot that, my grandfather, Tanner, my mother’s father, was for a while there to remind me.
Tanner was the head of the Milburn football clan. Four of his sons played professionally, George for Chesterfield, Jack for Leeds, Jimmy for Bradford and Stan for Chesterfield and Leicester, and – shining above all else in family pride – his nephew and my second cousin Jackie was moving towards the height of his career as the greatest legend in the history of Newcastle United.
Long after Tanner
