Bobby Moore: By the Person Who Knew Him Best - Tina Moore

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‘You’re not a patch on your mum yet.’

      She definitely wasn’t the average mother. For a start, she was a great cook - almost unique among post-war British housewives. But much more than that, she was one of those people you were drawn to in a crowded room. She had a zest for life and a strong sense of comedy and you wanted to bask in her warmth.

      She was also incredibly wise and a tremendous listener. That’s probably how, later on, she came to be a friend and a bit of a mother confessor to the West Ham lads. They’d go and talk to her for ages in the sports shop that in due course she ran for Bobby opposite the West Ham ground. Sometimes Bobby would invite her to join some of the players and go to the pub after training or a reserves game. They enjoyed her company and considered her to be one of them - she was an honorary lad. Quite a compliment, I felt. I was so proud of her.

      I’ve always had the feeling that the moment she saw Bobby, she knew he would be right for me and decided she’d do everything she could to get us together. Life hadn’t been all that easy for her. She’d always had to work for her living, because she and my father split up when I was two. After she died, one of her friends said to me, ‘She was a film star. An absolute film star. She was absolutely stunning. And she had the most disastrous taste in men.’

      Her friend got it exactly right. The three most important men in her life let her down badly in one way or another. I think that’s why she was so keen to bring Bobby and me together. She was determined I wasn’t going to make the mistakes she had made. It was my mother who saw how sweet and loving Bobby was to me and how much in love he was. I think she saw all the good qualities he had that perhaps I didn’t discern at first. She could see that he was well-mannered, decent and courteous, as well as good-looking. She loved him and he loved her. When he and I started going out together, I sometimes teased her by saying that I thought she loved Bobby more than I did. I think he was a little bit in love with her, too.

      I grew up in Ilford, a small, busy Essex town on the edge of East London. Ilford wasn’t that far from Bobby’s home town of Barking, but it was definitely regarded as a cut above socially, being quite middle-class and Tory. In those days its long High Street was looked on as a notable shopping Mecca and halfway along it was the boy-meets-girl factory, dance hall and theatre of Saturday night dreams, the Palais-de-Danse, where Bobby and I first set eyes on each other.

      My first home was a semi in Christchurch Road. The house had two floors and my mother and I lived in the downstairs part. There was no need to separate the house into flats because it was all in the family - upstairs lived Aunt Molly, Uncle Jim and their three children, Jimmy, Marlene and Jenny. Jenny was three years younger than me and more like a little sister than a cousin. My mother’s family were evacuated to Cornwall during the war but as my father had gone riding off into the sunset and my mother needed to be the breadwinner, Molly was summoned back from the West Country to be my childminder. It was a very female-dominated environment. After my father left, it was a long time before my mother had another serious relationship. She was the driving force in my life and I grew up without much experience of men’s ways.

      Our part of the house had a large living room at the front, with a smaller room behind it which served as my bedroom. If you went down a step and turned right, you’d find yourself in the scullery. You turned left for the cellar or went through to another large room with French doors that opened onto the garden. That was my mother’s room. Once I started school I was a latchkey kid. If I couldn’t reach it through the front door I’d have to climb in through the coalhole.

      We had our own loo (outside), but the bathroom upstairs belonged to Aunt Molly and Uncle Jim. My mother and I went upstairs for a bath once a week and on the other days we made do with sitting in a tin bath for a good wash down - a chore because of all the heating up of kettles that had to take place. When it wasn’t in use, the tin bath hung from a nail against the outside wall. Occasionally we couldn’t face all the bother of getting it down and setting it up and took ourselves off instead to Ilford Baths. I can still remember those shouts of, ‘More hot for Number Six!’

      I don’t want to leave the impression that I had a deprived childhood. It never felt like that at all. I was surrounded with love, tolerance and affection, so who cared if the place didn’t boast ‘all mod cons’? I remember my years in Christchurch Road as full of laughs and a lot of fun. I had good manners and politeness drummed into me gently but firmly, as well as the lesson that luxuries were there to be appreciated, not expected as a matter of course. I was a well brought up girl!

      It wasn’t as if it was anything out of the ordinary in those early post-war years. My friend Pat Booth, the author, photographer and former model whom I admire very much and who grew up a few streets away from Bobby, lived above a pie and mash shop. They had an outside loo, too, and a guard dog so scary that she would grab two pies whenever she went out there. One was to throw at the dog to distract it when she was leaving, and the other to throw at it so she could get back through the door unscathed on the return journey.

      My mother was incredibly protective of me. One day, while I was taking a short cut through Valentine’s Park on the way to school, a man flashed at me. I reported the incident to the park keeper, who promptly summoned the police. They asked me to tell them what happened, saying, ‘Describe the man, not the implement.’ When my mother arrived to collect me, she was as furious with me as if I’d committed an offence myself. ‘It’s boarding school for you,’ she said. Of course, I got round her. I could twist her round my little finger. I realize now that she was frightened. I was 11 or 12 at the time and just starting to bloom. It must have been so difficult for her, having to keep me safe without my father around to share the responsibility.

      Although money was tight, we were always very well dressed. This was thanks to a shop in Ilford High Road called Helene, which specialized in designer names. The great thing about Helene was that you could buy everything on something called ‘the weekly’, a kind of pay-as-you-wear scheme, and my mother never looked anything but smart and beautifully turned out.

      I think some women felt jealous of her, in fact. For example, there was Mrs Marshall, who lived down our road with her two children, Vinnie and Bea. I used to go and play with them. Mrs Marshall was the kind of woman who would put butter on her own bread and give the children margarine, and she was teeth-grindingly envious of my mother’s glamour. My mother had a hairpiece that was for special occasions - in that era it was called a switch. She would regularly wash it and peg it on the line to dry. One day when I was round at Vinnie’s, he announced, ‘My mum saw your mum’s hair hanging on the line.’

      ‘You liar,’ I said, ‘it was a yellow duster’, and gave him a specially hard slap. I used to hit him quite a lot anyway, but that day he really got it. No way would he be spreading any more rumours about my mother, that was for sure.

      When we became the only house in Christchurch Road with television, we were the talk of the street and the star attraction. The screen was eight inches wide and had a magnifying glass strapped to it. The Marshalls and all the other children in the road used to stand on the window sill to look at it and when the show was ready to begin, Jenny and I would part the lace curtains.

      In fact, it was a wonder that we didn’t charge them. That was what we did with the kids who came to watch the shows Jenny and I put on in the back garden. I was the ringmaster and Jenny the very bossed-about entertainer. When she became fed up of jumping through hoops, the family dog would be dressed up and brought in as her understudy. Meanwhile, Jenny would be made to hang by her knees from the laburnum tree - the highlight of the show. I was in charge of magic tricks.

      Jenny and I used to ride on the horse-drawn milkman’s float, too. We sat up top with the milkman, so it was a great treat to be selected to help. When the rag-and-bone man was on his rounds, we would ask all the neighbours to give us their old clothes because that would qualify us for a goldfish each. The two of us also used to sneak out and have midnight feasts with the other children in the street. You just couldn’t do that sort of thing now. It was a fantastic childhood, despite the lack of money.

      Jenny’s mother, Aunt Molly, was known to me as Auntie Mum. I can’t have been the easiest child to look after. Probably because my mother felt so guilty about going out to work and leaving

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