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he’s out shooting and fishing.’

      Jack developed his favourite haunts, such as a local swamp called the Sandy Desert. In winter this was a vast, festering bog. But in summer, when it had dried out, it became a large, dusty hollow, riven with cracks. Used as a rubbish dump, it always attracted a large number of rats and Jack would spend hours shooting at them with his catapult. When he was older and had acquired the right equipment, Jack would regularly spend his nights fishing off the coast at Newbiggin, a seaside village just three miles from Ashington. Jackie Lothian remembers an incident which illustrates both Jack’s bravery and his devotion to fishing. ‘When we were about 13, Jack would often cycle over to my home at Newbiggin, have a game of cards and some supper, and then go out fishing. One night Jack cast his line, and somehow the hook went right into his thumb. Another lad and I tried to get it out but couldn’t, because the sky was pitch black. Then Jack breezily said, “I’ll have to go off to hospital, so look after my things.” Off he cycled over to Ashington hospital, with the hook still in his thumb. He got it out, had the wound stitched up, and then, that very night, he cycled back and carried on fishing with us.’ Jackie Lothian says that they could be far more reckless as children than would be tolerated today. ‘I cannot believe the things we used to get up to. As a dare, for instance, we would get on the swings at Hirst Park, and push as hard as we could until we could complete a full circle, right over the top through 360 degrees. We also used to try and catch minnows in Bothal Woods, where there was a big waterfall. I suppose, looking back, it was very dangerous but we just never used to think about it.’

      In such a climate, it was inevitable that accidents did happen. Once Jack and his friends were playing a chasing game at the top of an old disused windmill, when one of the boys fell out of a window on the third floor and broke his arm. Another boy broke his leg in a race through a field with Jack, when he tripped over a wire fence and was thrown through the air before landing heavily on his back. Far more serious, though, was the horrific night when Jack returned home covered in blood. Jack explained to his mother that he and his friends had been playing in a railway cutting, placing coins on the line. Tragically one of them had been hit by a train and killed. The rest of the gang had dragged the body to the nearest roadway, where they had just left it. Nothing more happened and the event gradually faded from Jack’s memory. Today, such an incident would almost certainly involve the police and social services.

      Jack Charlton has always been known as a rebel, an individualist, no great respecter of either authority or convention. And so it was in his childhood. At the age of just two, he caused some embarrassment to his family by wandering out of the house, dressed only in his nappy, to join a passing funeral procession. The sight of Jack, without any trousers, toddling proudly behind the Salvation Army band, has become part of Ashington legend. ‘I was forever getting into scrapes,’ Jack admits. Once a baker drove from Ashington to Gosforth and, when he arrived, he was surprised to find young Jack stowed away in the back of his van. On another occasion, he stole a cauliflower from a neighbour’s back garden. Then he had the cheek to walk round to the front and try and sell it back to him. ‘As a schoolboy, like most of us, he was a bit of a rascal, stealing from orchards, pinching vegetables. He was a real Jack the lad,’ says Bobby Whitehead.

      ‘From the time he could walk, Jack was full of devilment. I would often say to myself, “God give me strength.” He was a livewire,’ wrote Cissie in her autobiography. The spirit of rebellion applied in the classroom as well as the countryside. Jackie Lothian recalls: ‘He was certainly not frightened of anyone at school. The teachers were on top of you all the time and there was no answering back – except from Jack, of course. He was a likeable lad, but he would put you in your place if he didn’t like what you said. He could have been more successful at school if he had put his mind to it, and I remember he was interested in history, especially the local history of the area. But he did not really care about bookwork; he wanted to be away in the fields all the time.’ One of Jack’s school reports stated: ‘Jack would do better at school if he kept his mind on his work instead of looking out the window all the time.’

      Jack was in trouble for much more than daydreaming one day, after he shot another pupil, Bernadette Reed. With typical impetuosity, Jack had taken it into his mind to bring his father’s rifle – used for game shooting – into school. Having fired the gun towards a nearby church, he then watched as the bullet hit a fence and ricocheted into the face of the unfortunate young Bernadette, who suffered a grazed eye. Jack was given a severe reprimand by his headmaster and was then frogmarched by Cissie to apologize to Bernadette’s father. Yet there was a surprising response at the Reed household.

      ‘This is the lad who shot your daughter,’ said Cissie when she and Jack turned up on the Reeds’ doorstep.

      ‘So you’re interested in guns, son?’

      ‘Well, er, yes,’ said Jack.

      ‘So am I. Come inside and I’ll show you what I’ve got.’

      Predictably, the man who became a tough defender with Leeds was also a good boxer in his youth, winning both official bouts in the school gym and unofficial ones in the schoolyard. In a Daily Telegraph interview in 1994, he recalled: ‘I was the best fighter in the street for my age and there was a lad from the next street who was the best fighter in his. We called him “Skinny” Harmer. When I went to school at five, he was in the same class as me and I thought a fight was imminent. But we never, ever fought. We avoided each other in case we got beat.’ In another echo of the adult Jack Charlton, who made a fortune in his shrewd handling of money, particularly during his spell as Ireland manager, the young Jack had a host of money-making schemes. These included: a paper round organized like a military operation; deliveries for a nearby grocery store; and the collection – from local collieries – of unused timber, which he then chopped up and sold for firewood.

      But perhaps the most interesting parallel with today is that, as young brothers, Bobby and Jack did not get on with each other. Some of their contemporaries claim that this was because of the age difference between them. Bobby Charlton was born on 10 October 1937, two-and-a-half years after Jack’s arrival. ‘When you’re young, the gap in years tends to count much more,’ says Walter Lavery, ‘so Bobby and Jack did not really mix much. They had different pursuits and different friends.’ Bobby also takes this view. ‘Though it appears now we are the same age, he’s actually a good deal older than me, so we just did not spend a lot of time together when we were growing up,’ he said in 1968.

      The reality, however, was down more to a clash of temperaments. Jack was the adventurer, ever eager to plough his own furrow, while Bobby was far keener to stay at home reading or playing football. Jack knew that his younger brother never shared his interest in the countryside, so he hated to bring Bobby along on his wanderings – and he only did so at the instruction of his mother. What particularly annoyed him was when the infant Bobby messed himself or demanded to be taken home when he grew bored or tired. As Cissie wrote, ‘Jack wanted to be off on his own, not nurse-maiding someone who was regarded as the family’s fair-haired favourite. If I still insisted and made Jack take Bobby with him, he often gave Bobby a swift clout before they got very far and that usually sent him running home in tears, while Jack went on his own sweet way himself.’

      With his usual diplomacy, Bobby has claimed that he enjoyed these trips, speaking fondly of his bike rides into the woods to go bird-nesting with Jack or the times they went to the ‘lovely coast’ of Newbiggin to pick up coal that had been washed ashore from the mines which ran under the sea. But he has also admitted: ‘Like most elder brothers, Jack regarded me as a pest when we were kids, especially when I’d plead to go with him to pick potatoes or on fishing trips. “He’s not coming,” Jack would say defiantly. “You take him,” my mother would reply. From then on it would be nothing but moans, and there are people who will suggest that he’s never stopped moaning. He never tried to conceal his darker moods and once his mind was made up, nothing would alter it.’ Jack’s memory is similar: ‘Bobby was more of a mother’s boy. He was never a bloke to get out into the country and he still isn’t. I took him fishing a couple of times but he was no good. I had to keep changing worms for him. He’d wave to me from 100 yards down the river, and I’d have to trudge all the way back and change the bait, because he just hadn’t got a clue.’ On another occasion,

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