Italia ’90 and all that? Maybe it’s time to lock the door and throw away the key. We’ve been banging on about it long enough.
Those images have become a memory loop so deeply embedded in the mind, it’s like the reel of film that first captured them has been implanted in our brains via a silicon chip. We are triggered to respond with a fond smile every time they flicker on the retina. For the last 30 years those scenes have gone round and round and round the national play yard, like a carousel at a funfair that was never switched off.
But someone needs to pull the plug. It is a sign of desperate times in the present when we keep recalling all our yesterdays. It’s a cheap anaesthetic in the face of contemporary woes. It keeps saying we’ll never have a future like our glorious past.
And, more relevant still, it continually leads to deluded expectations in the here and now because there was a time when once we were kings. In terms of international football we are paupers now. But because we were once a big noise on the world stage we think we’re entitled to be a big noise still. While we wallow in that warm, comforting jacuzzi on memory lane, the work doesn’t get done and the years are wasted.
So, it was with our defences up that we sat down last weekend to watch the documentary, made by the veteran television football reporter Gabriel Clarke, among others. The advance publicity had given us some idea of what to expect. It would be a chronicle of Big Jack’s life and times but it would also take us on a voyage round the dementia that had afflicted the great man in his final years, before lymphoma claimed him last summer at the age of 85.
It duly delivered on its promise and we were left with a film that started out nostalgic but ended up becoming elegiac. It is an elegy to Jack that becomes, in its way, an elegy for all our beginnings and all our ends.
When it goes back in time we see a man at the peak of his powers, a leader and a doer, a man of fame and achievement, a master of his dominion. When it returns to the present, to his home in Northumberland, we see a man who is gently told by his wife that he can take off his hat and coat, now that he’s back in from the cold. He takes off his hat and coat without a word.
In the old footage of Charlton as a player with Leeds United and England, he is ramrod straight in his posture, as if proudly showing off his tallness, his physical command, his pride as a man of iron in a world of hard men. Now in old age he seems docile as a lamb. Still ramrod straight, mind you, not stooped and shrunken by the weight of years.
But the fog has swamped his mind. He takes off his cap and coat and stares at a framed picture on the wall of Alf Ramsey and the boys of ’66. Bobby Moore is sitting on their shoulders holding aloft the Jules Rimet; Jack and his younger brother Bobby — “our kid” — are there too. It doesn’t seem to register at all.
“Jack was a strange breath of fresh air,” says Roddy Doyle in the film. “He was an Englishman that we loved — somehow.”
This has become part of the official history of the golden era. It needs a bit of revisionism. It seems to ignore the social history. Jack’s Englishness did not matter one whit to a great majority of Irish people, many of whom, then as now, were steeped in connections to England through kith and kin, through the BBC, through pop music and comedians and TV soaps and English football clubs and newspapers. Morecambe and Wise were loved in Ireland, The Beatles and Cliff Richard too; and not just one Ronnie but The Two Ronnies as well.
The tidal waves of emigration meant that thousands of Englishmen were loved by and married to Irish women, long before Jack supposedly became the first bloke from old Blighty whom we had permission to adore.
Charlton’s nationality was more or less a thing of nothing to the mass of Irish people who followed the national football team. If anything, his reputation as a World Cup winner meant he automatically brought a level of prestige and stature to the Ireland team before a ball was even kicked on his watch.
His nationality became politicised by official Ireland through its chattering classes, whenever commentators or politicians wanted to make a point about Anglo-Irish relations or Northern Ireland or the like. It always seemed a tad condescending, this presumption that the plain people needed to be chivvied along into accepting an Englishman because it would signal a new maturity in relations between the two countries, or some such platitude.
Irish people and English people had been getting along fine together, in the workplace, in the taverns and music halls and football grounds and British military services, for the previous few hundred years. They may have been surprised to hear that they hadn’t been getting along well, if they passed any remarks on this kind of talk, which of course they didn’t.
Relations generally between people are not conditional on superficial matters such as nationality but on the fundamental human criteria of warmth and decency and humour and likeability. Jack was enormously likeable, at least from a distance. Players who fell out of favour with him would tell you he wasn’t a pleasant person to deal with in these situations. He could be ignorant and dismissive of players’ feelings. But that was business, he held the power and he wasn’t afraid to use it.
Otherwise, his natural star quality, his charisma and indomitable authenticity made him tremendously popular with the nation as a whole, not just the sporting public. The film reminds us just how good he was with people. He was marvellous with people. They followed in his wake like he was a latter day Pied Piper. He had Ireland eating out of the palm of his hand through Germany in ’88, Italy in ’90 and America in ’94.
He liked us and we liked him. We quickly forgot that he was an Englishman, maybe because he was in fact a north of England man, from a coal-mining town and coal-mining people, which meant he had more in common with the ordinary Paddy than with a chap from the Shires who voted Tory and took The Daily Telegraph of a morning. It meant, too, that we had more in common with him than, say, the gentlemen who ran the IRFU back in the day. The class divide is a much deeper fissure in human relations than matters of nationality.
“One of the reasons that dementia is such a terrible disorder is that memory defines who we are,” says Dr Michael Grey, a neuroscientist, in the film. The memories of those halcyon days under Big Jack define that time and place in Irish life for a lot of people. But the man who birthed them could not himself recall them in his last years.
During filming he sits in front of a laptop and watches in silence those delirious scenes from 30 years ago. Pat, his wife, watches him as he watches the footage. She is standing by his side; she puts her hand on his shoulder.
When it’s over he turns to her and says: “I couldn’t remember a lot of the memories.” “Yeah,” she replies tenderly. “But could you remember that night?” It’s the night his team are beaten by Italy in Rome in the World Cup quarter-final. Players and staff are having a party al fresco on the terrace of a restaurant. Jack stands up and sings a verse and chorus of ‘Blaydon Races’, the famous old Geordie folk song that he must have grown up with. “Can you remember getting up and singing?” He shakes his head in defeat. “No,” she replies. “Never mind.”
Sometimes, says Pat Charlton, glimpses of the old Jack will come flashing through the blanket of fog. In a beautiful touch, the film-makers set a record player down in front of him at the table. They put a vinyl record on it and drop the needle.
It’s a band, sounds like a Geordie band, doing a version of ‘Blaydon Races’. Again, he sits there blankly. But as they swing into the chorus a shaft of sunlight evidently cuts through the darkness; a connection to some distant memory is sparked. Suddenly he spreads his arms out wide and clenches his fists and starts singing the words.
A fragment of his past is momentarily retrieved. A part of our past will always belong to him. Goodbye to Jack. Goodbye to all that.
