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Bobby Moore: By the Person Who Knew Him Best. Tina Moore
Читать онлайн.Название Bobby Moore: By the Person Who Knew Him Best
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007378661
Автор произведения Tina Moore
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
One of our haunts was Sheekey’s fish restaurant in the West End, which I introduced him to. It was my mother’s favourite and I’d often gone there with her; we’d eat steamed Dover sole with lobster sauce and gaze at the Beverly Sisters, who were regulars there. Joy, Teddy and Babs were then at the peak of their fame as the British answer to America’s Andrews Sisters. Joy, a tall, lovely, slightly toothy blonde, went on to marry Billy Wright, England football captain of the Fifties. They were the Posh ‘n’ Becks of their day!
For Bobby and me, going to the Spaghetti House in Soho was a big deal, too. Neither of us had ever tried spaghetti before. It was fun trying to master the art of twirling the fork, although of course Mister Get-it-right-or-forget-it watched and observed how it was done before attempting a mouthful. We had a bottle of chianti in a straw basket and thought how sophisticated we were.
That night, on the way back through the West End, we found a shop selling little glass animals. It was still open and Bobby went inside and bought one for me. ‘I love you,’ he said. For the first time.
In a romantic daze, we missed the last bus from the station. I thought he’d be irritated, having to walk me home then get himself back to Waverley Gardens.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said at the front door of Christchurch Road. ‘I’ll turn it into a training jog.’
‘What, to burn off the spaghetti?’
‘Yeah. Anyhow, I’m so happy I don’t care about missing the bus. Goodnight, Princess.’
Silly, but sweet and true.
Our romance progressed more smoothly than Bobby’s football career at first. As a result of the disastrous game at Nottingham in September 1958 he was dropped by West Ham’s manager of the time, Ted Fenton, and didn’t become a first team regular until the 1960-61 season after the first-choice defender, John Smith, was sold to Spurs.
Boosted by Bobby’s new-found career stability, we got engaged on Christmas Day, 1960. Bobby was 19 and I was 17. Naturally, the proposal was planned and carried out in style. He’d even asked my mother’s permission beforehand. That meant she knew what was in that big parcel, with my name on it and tied up with a huge bow, that I had been prodding expectantly ever since it had appeared a few days earlier under the Christmas tree in Christchurch Road.
We were due to go that night to a party at Nanny Wilde’s, as we always did at Christmas, but I had a terrible cold and wasn’t really looking forward to it for once.
‘My nose is red,’ I complained to Bobby, ‘and besides, I haven’t got anything to wear.’
Bobby grinned, then picked up the parcel and placed it in my arms. When I opened it, I found a brown and black check mohair skirt and a mohair jumper.
‘I want you to wear those,’ Bobby said, ‘when you put on what’s inside that.’ He pointed to another box, a very small one, nestled in the folds of the outfit. I opened up the small box and inside was a ring with one lovely, perfect diamond.
Half-joking, Bobby went down on one knee. ‘Tina, I’d like us to get married.’
My cold miraculously cured, Bobby and I went off to Nanny Wilde’s in Cranbrook Road, me flashing my engagement ring and wearing the mohair outfit despite the fact that it made me look ever so slightly like the Michelin Man.
When we got there, it was to find Nanny Wilde none too pleased because my cousin Danny, Aunt Glad’s son and a trainee plumber, had brought round a crowd of his mates from East Ham, uninvited. One of the mates was his best friend David, who had dreams of making it as a celebrity photographer. I vaguely remembered David asking me, two years previously, if I’d let him take some photos of me in Epping Forest. My mother, deeply suspicious of his quite innocent motives, had said, ‘Over my dead body.’ If she hadn’t guarded my virtue so closely, I would now be able to boast of owning a set of portraits of me as a 15-year-old by David Bailey.
By the time we got engaged, Bobby was experiencing his first full season in the first team. For this he was paid £8 a week, which these days wouldn’t buy a cheap Alice band for David Beckham. At the time, players were still paid according to the Football League’s notorious maximum wage limit of £20 a week during the season and £17 a week in the summer lay-off. That didn’t change until 1961, when Jimmy Hill, then a Fulham player and chairman of the Professional Footballers Association, forced through its abolition after threatening a players’ strike.
To give an example of how comparatively low footballers’ wages were, Bobby’s £8 a week was £3 less than I was earning at the Pru, so you could say that I was the breadwinner. Most of our money went into saving like mad for our first home, but life was still a lot of fun. We’d go round in a crowd with the other young West Ham players, like Alan Sealey and Tony Scott, and their girlfriends - Janice, who went out with Alan, was that year’s Miss Dagenham and very glamorous. After games we’d go to a private club, Harlene, in Forest Gate, where we girls drank Bristol Cream sherry because we thought it was genteel. Then we’d move on to Room At The Top. Another local hotspot was the Dick Turpin, the place to be on Thursday nights. There we’d bump into other young players like Terry Venables and Brian Dear. We used to keep the bar open, but the owners loved us because we were such good customers.
By then, Bobby had bought his first car, a red Ford Zephyr. It was such a momentous occasion that I can still remember its registration number: 2394 PU. A friend of my mother’s sold it to him and he paid for it in cash. The transaction took place in Lyons Tea Shop in Ilford, where we had our usual fruit bun with two pats of butter, a bowl of tomato soup and a cup of tea. Bobby arrived with the money in a paper bag. Naturally he had sorted the bills out into denominations first, from pound notes to fifties. They were all in piles facing the right way up and secured with elastic bands. I think he fell short in one way, though - they weren’t arranged in numbered sequence.
Bobby loved that Ford Zephyr. It shone, it was immaculate. It was the beginning of his love affair with cars, especially red ones. He was determined to get a Jaguar as soon as he could afford one.
As Bobby became a bit more established in the West Ham team, older players besides Malcolm Allison began to accept him. Chief among them were Johnny Bond and Noel Cantwell. Johnny was known as ‘Muffin’ after a puppet who featured on a children’s TV programme, Muffin the Mule. Johnny was alleged to have a kick like the said creature. Noel was nicknamed ‘Sausage’, which was short for sausage roll and thus meant to rhyme with Noel. Oh, but he was gorgeous. I loved Noel.
Bobby was ravenous for football knowledge and worldly wisdom, so he loved it when the older men included him. He almost sat at their feet. In the first flush of his romance with me, he looked up to them. They represented what he wanted to be.
Malcolm Allison lived a social whirl and during this time he was friendly with a fishmonger’s daughter. Bobby and I were invited round to the fishmonger’s house one New Year’s Eve and after sampling it for the first time in his life, Bobby devoured an entire side of smoked salmon on his own.
It was, after all, the start of the Sixties, when the more luxurious kinds of food were just becoming available after the dreary diet and relative deprivation of the postwar period. We were getting a taste of melon, avocado, French cheese and Italian wine at last. Even broccoli was an exotic luxury to Bobby, as it was to most people in that era. Up to the time I met him, his mum never dished up any vegetables other than the standard staples of those days: peas, cabbage and potatoes.