His role as an overseer of my life, a protector, was established very early. Though Ashington was hit by only one wartime bomb landing on the ice-rink, which was miraculous when you considered how much industry lay between us and the fifteen miles to Newcastle, we always went to Tanner’s home down the street when the air-raid warning sounded. It was a bigger, more substantial house and for me my grandfather’s presence was reassuring. When the all-clear came we would grope through the dark back to our house and when we did this I always felt that maybe we were leaving a little safety behind.
I was entranced by Tanner’s competitive world, which often involved ferocious betting, and was fascinated by the intensity with which he trained Stan. In the summer I would go with them to miners’ galas, when Stan gave away at least eight or nine yards in the handicap sprint. Sometimes in training he would give me a fifty-yard start and let me win. The whole ritual was thrilling as they laid out the string to mark the sprinting lanes. Then Tanner would bring Stan to a fine boiling point, and there would be the explosion of the start.
Along the way there was so much to see in the sideshows, people trying to break free of ropes that had been tied in ‘unbreakable’ knots and fighting to get out of sacks. As a young man my father had always been drawn to such occasions and it was claimed, though not by him, that he won the money for my mother’s engagement ring in a boxing booth at a fair. Certainly I knew he was a strong man and I could easily imagine him faring well in bare-knuckle days. His nickname was Boxer. He was a miner, of course, and that for me has always announced a man’s toughness. I went down a pit once, in Salford, long after I had established myself as a player. I descended eight tiers and I hated every minute of it. I was spitting up black stuff for about a week afterwards. Naturally the experience made me think of my father. I was down there for an hour. He went down every day of his working life; once, I remember, he took just one night off after he had been hit by a buggy which left one side of his face twice the size of the other.
Tanner would watch me from the other side of the railings as I played football in the schoolyard and afterwards he would analyse my play; sometimes I would see him conferring intently with Mr Hamilton or the football master, Norman McGuinness. Before he fell ill and became bedridden I always felt his eyes on me when I played. It gave me, I’m sure, an edge of commitment as I tried to maintain the standards he laid down. Famously, my mother is credited with driving on Jack and particularly me in our football careers, and it is true that she was passionate in her desire that we made the best of any talent we had, but some of the stories about her training and coaching me are exaggerated. It was Tanner, weathered by the wind and the rain in which he spent so much time, who painted for me most vividly the possibilities that awaited if I worked hard enough.
He never tired of repeating his most basic message. If you had enough talent, which he repeatedly assured me I did, anything was possible. All I had to do was work at something which I most wanted to do. ‘If you are good enough, lad,’ he would say, ‘there is nothing you can’t do – not if you look after yourself, not if you give it everything you have.’ Tanner sowed the seeds of my ambition so diligently it would always be one of my regrets that, as I began to find success beyond the boundaries of our neighbourhood, I was never able to take him to a great football occasion, perform well and then say, ‘Thank you for all that you taught me; today I played for you.’
I was devastated when he died. I missed him most sharply on Saturday evenings, the time when I used to go to his bedroom with the Newcastle Evening Chronicle sports pink edition and read him the scores and the reports, starting with Newcastle United and the performance of ‘Wor Jackie’. Tanner’s sight was failing, but his vision of the game seemed to be as acute as ever. He wanted to know all the details of the important matches. Inevitably some of his last words to me, which I will never forget, were about never letting yourself down just because you weren’t prepared to take the extra stride, make that last vital effort to be at least as good as the gifts you had received.
He need not have worried about that as he slipped away. Sometimes on a Sunday I played non-stop for as long as six or seven hours at the nearby Hirst Park. Jack and I would go there hoping for a game and invariably we found one. Lads would come and play for several hours, then go back home for their dinner. Sometimes they would drift back and play again, often, in the case of the older lads, the worse for their time in a pub.
I never tired of
