Getting hold of a ball was one of twin priorities – that and satisfying the hunger that so often growled in your stomach. Football knowledge was, for me, the one commodity that overflowed, and I never wanted for advice. On the rare occasions when he was slow to offer, I bombarded Tanner with questions. After he died, my uncles faced the same fate when they came home for what they might have hoped was a few weeks’ break from the game.
My uncles were the constant, walking, running evidence that, if I followed Tanner’s advice, I too could escape the pits and the shipyards. I was proud of my father, his toughness and tremendous work ethic and his lack of self-pity, but he did convey to me, without ever saying it, the benefits of the world my Uncle George first showed me when he took me to Chesterfield to stay while he and his team-mates prepared for a new season.
At the pithead in Ashington I saw the relief of the miners when one day’s ordeal was over. At Chesterfield I saw a different kind of life and if, even at my age, I could see there were tensions in the fight for first-team places – and often heard language that would have drained the blood from the face of my old headmaster – there was also a lot of laughter along with the thud of the ball and the cries for a pass or for someone to make a tackle. My annual visits to Chesterfield were a sort of pre-university course in the game which so besotted me. They also provided the signposts to that other life where football was not the weekend escape but, and this always seemed such an unbelievable gift, the centre of your existence.
The life that I would be leaving behind, no one needed to tell me, was rich and warm in so many ways. But no matter how many years passed I would never forget the trials imposed on those who had no way of replacing their existence with something easier, something in which the simple business of putting food on the table – when you had, as in my family’s case, one miner’s wage and four sons to keep – was not a daily challenge to both nerve and ingenuity.
On Beatrice Street, where we had a house with four bedrooms – grand by mining standards as my parents graduated through smaller, company rented properties with the births of Jack, me, Gordon and Tommy – there was a form of workers’ co-operative. Pigs were reared communally and vegetables were grown on the allotments. When a pig was killed it was a kind of fête. I still remember keenly my disappointment when it was first explained to me that the killing of a pig did not mean an instant feast of bacon and ham and pork. The animal had to be cut in pieces and salted and hung for weeks before a careful distribution among the families.
Life could be as hard as nails. I thought this was particularly so whenever our cat had kittens. I was told it would be too expensive to keep them. Usually Tanner would kill them. Once, he showed me how to do it. It involved two buckets, one filled with water, and then the other would go in on top, but I could barely look and there was no question that I would ever do it.
One of the abiding memories is of the hunger, but then I thought it was natural to have that feeling. There were games we played against private schools, when a warm drink and food were provided afterwards, but this represented extraordinary luxury, a rare treat that you accepted as no more than that, and certainly not as a pattern for gracious living. It was much more natural to dream of our lazy whippet rousing itself to catch a rabbit and the ensuing paradise created by the cooking smells back home in the family kitchen.
Poaching was illegal but everyone ignored the law. Often it was a choice between doing that and having nothing to eat. My Uncle Buck was one of the Milburns who didn’t become a professional footballer, but he did achieve a kind of stardom. He was a top poacher, so legendary that some locals said that he used dynamite. I had this wonderful image of a river exploding with beautiful salmon. Possibly the claim was just a piece of neighbourhood folklore, but it could have been true because, apart from being known as a dynamite man, Buck also had a reputation for being, in local idiom, a ‘cramper’, which was another way of saying he was capable of more or less anything that came into his mind.
Whenever I think of Uncle Buck it strengthens my sense that rarely did a boy have such a cast of
