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FAMILY MATTERS
FIVE YEARS IS a long way down the road of a football club – and a man’s life. Everything can change in that time and for both Manchester United and me it did.
United signed Denis Law from Torino and I married Norma Ball. Both United and I were huge beneficiaries. Law invigorated United with his astonishing competitive personality and wonderful talent. Norma bowled me over in a way that no girl had ever done before and would never do again for the rest of my days. She made my life, gave it a dimension and a depth that was beyond my grasp right up to the day I met her.
This conviction was confirmed in the deepest way by our marriage at St Gabriel’s Church in Middleton, North Manchester and then by the arrivals of our daughters Suzanne and Andrea.
Because I am who I am, because there is something in me which has always made me uncomfortable with the celebrity side of football, I was a little disconcerted when some United fans showed up at the wedding in their red scarves, noisily offering their best wishes by wielding their rattles, but I was sure they meant well. I also suspected that nothing less than a full-scale earthquake could have detached me from the view that this was the happiest, most significant day of my life.
Certainly in the ensuing forty-seven years there would never be a single moment when I had cause to doubt that youthful verdict.
In all that time I have had just one regret, one that I have never publicly addressed before. I have always hated the fact that the woman who brought so much to my life, who became the most important person in it, was put at the centre of a dispute I had with my family, and most controversially by my brother Jack.
Jack told the world – and confirmed it in his autobiography – that he believed it was Norma who drove a wedge between my mother Cissie and me; he said that my wife had airs and graces, indeed that she was ‘hoity-toity’, and it was because of her that I became estranged from the person who had given me so much from the moment I was born. For the record, I reject that now in public as I have always done in private.
Somehow, Norma was portrayed as the person who, rather than enriching my life and supporting me in every possible way in everything I tried to achieve, stood between me and my ability to keep close links with all that I held dear as a boy growing up in the North East. My mother is dead and I would never breathe a word that would dishonour her, or take away the love a son has for his mother, but I have to say that it is a travesty of the truth. Of course it is a great sadness that, as my married life progressed, as Suzanne and Andrea grew up, the links with Ashington became frayed and strained, but I have talked with people across a broad spectrum of life, and I am always amazed by the fact that so many have had similar experiences.
The truth is that when Norma first accompanied me to the North East, I know she went with every intention of getting on with my mother and all the family. In the latter ambition, in most cases, she succeeded easily, receiving a warm reception from so many of my relatives. However, things were never comfortable with my mother, and I can only speculate how many sons have had the same problem when they have gone home and introduced their girlfriends and future wives.
Why there should be friction was never a mystery to either Norma or me. My mother, perhaps because of her background, was always a strong character; always felt that she had to set the agenda for her family. Norma has rarely spoken of the decline of her relationship with my mother, and certainly not publicly, but I think I can speak for her in one very basic way. When my mother suggested something, and on occasions that is perhaps a mild way of putting it, Norma did not necessarily readily submit; she had her own way of doing things, her own perspective on the world, and I suppose that was one of the reasons why I had been so drawn to her.
Yet Norma’s independence was never wrapped in any conscious effort to be defiant. She was more than ready to meet my mother at least halfway in order to facilitate compromise. Unfortunately, my mother wasn’t always open to such overtures, from Norma or from others. This needs to be said in defence of my wife because of the impression that has been created publicly that she was the only member of my family to ever be at odds with my mother.
I had no fears about Norma’s approach to the business of meeting and getting to know my family when we first travelled back to my roots. However, it quickly became apparent that my mother, such a strong woman who had become famous for her passionate interest in my football career and that of my brother Jack, would never freely embrace the girl with whom I intended to spend the rest of my life.
When I look back now, it seems unbelievable to me that it can happen that a son does not get on with his mother. Friends have told me, ‘Oh, Bobby, it happens in so many families.’ Perhaps so, but it does not make it any less painful, and this is especially so when you read about your own problems in the newspapers. The press interest made a major difference in the trials of the Charlton family; our situation inevitably became more high profile when Jack and I began to play for the England team, and our mother, for the reason that she was indeed a great character, seemed at times to become as famous as her sons.
When I trace back the difficulties that came to the surface down the years, and received publicity which I have always found very distressing, I see that perhaps part of the pattern was shaped by the fact that I mostly had to do things on my own. It’s true my father often used to take me to the mine when he collected his wages, but quite a bit of my boyhood was spent away from home and maybe it helped to make me a little independent from my mother. I never doubted that she wanted the best for me, but sometimes her way of doing things, her style, was so different from mine. I had a tendency to hold back, almost to seek the shadows. That was not my mother’s way. Once, when I was a kid, someone asked me for my autograph and I shrank back, but my mother insisted I sign. I suppose I’ll never forget the embarrassment that overcame me at that moment.
I’m not suggesting that this was the reason why my mother and Norma did not get on, or why, for such a long time, I became much less close to my family, but maybe it was a contribution to the breakdown in understanding – maybe it was the grit in the corner of your eye that can make you weep.
I have always been hesitant to deal with this subject because I don’t think anyone of feeling wants to discuss such problems in public, but now, as I’m trying to give some account of my life, I do not see how I can avoid it. Jack had his say when he wrote his book and I have to be honest: I was deeply offended by the picture he painted of my wife. He suggested that she had never tried to get on with my mother, and that it was because of her that the division in the family became so deep. I therefore feel obliged to defend my wife in a way that neither she nor I believed was necessary when the controversy first arose; we had our own lives and felt no obligation to fuel a fire which we believed would, in the way of all family disputes, either settle or not in the course of time.
The fact is that there has been some repairing down the years, and today, with my mother and father gone, Jack and I have rebuilt our relationship in a way that works for both of us. Maybe we are quite different characters, but a brother is a brother. We have the same blood and have made similar journeys in life. I’m proud of what he has achieved, both as a player and a manager, and I know that he has always been generous about my ability and my dedication as a player. We shared something when England won the World Cup that few families could ever dream of, but then if brothers are brothers, families are families; blood, no doubt, is thicker than water, but sometimes it does not flow so easily.
Now, in this my own story, the priority for me is that, with regard to Norma, the record is put straight, because of her character and the love that she has always given to my daughters and me. She has been a wonderful partner and mother, and I cannot shake the view that for some time she was badly treated by some members of my family.
If I reach for a word to describe her it is invariably the same one as all those years ago. The word is ‘sensational’. She has travelled w
ith me all around the world – and always I have been proud to have her at my side. If she comes with me to a match or some public occasion and we get separated, whenever I look for her I find her surrounded by people, this still young person – young to me – and I get a flush of never-changing pride that so many people agree with me, that she is so bright and lovely and so interesting.
There has never been an edge to Norma. She has also been very strong at times when I have had to make difficult decisions. She has always been at the forefront of such conversations; never dominating any discussions, but always making her points, always presenting a full picture of our needs as a family. She can be very tough. She doesn’t mess around if she disagrees with me – or anyone else. She says what she thinks, but not in any abrasive way, and certainly she puts me in my place if she suspects, almost invariably correctly, that I’m getting a bit carried away with myself. One of the criticisms of Norma that Jack aired publicly, and I found most hurtful, was that she put herself up above other people. It has never been so in my experience – and certainly not when she found herself caught up in the company of characters like Jimmy Murphy and Bill Shankly.
When Jimmy was keen on having one of his sessions, Norma would be invited with me to join him for a few drinks, and she would listen attentively to all his theories about football. Once I remember her saying, ‘Now, Mr Murphy, what do you think of the 4–3–3 formation?’ and of course the old football man was charmed. That, too, made me proud; for Jimmy, football was the centre of the world, and no question could have been more guaranteed to take any awkwardness out of the situation of a young woman being drawn into the alien world of football talk fuelled by beer and whisky or, if you were unlucky, Mateus Rosé.
Once, when we were newly married, my mother-in-law Nora, who lived with us after Norma’s father Tommy died soon after the wedding, reported early one morning that a strange man was lurking in the garden. Did we have a stalker? We were living in the Cheshire village of Lymm, where a lot of football teams, including the Brazilians of the 1966 World Cup, stayed at a nearby hotel when they were playing in Manchester. On this occasion it was Liverpool, and the man in the garden was Bill Shankly. He had been told I lived in the village and, as always, he was restless on the day of a big game. He had come to seek me out for some football talk, so I said to Norma, ‘I’m sorry, love, but I think you’ll have to put the kettle on.’
Norma was such a perfect hostess, talking about football with Shankly in a way that I found a little stunning, that I became a mere extra in the scene and soon enough I made my excuses and prepared to leave for the game. They were deep in conversation when I left. When I returned Norma explained that the Liverpool team bus had eventually pulled up outside our house, summoning the manager with a toot of the horn.
I do not wish to make any unfair and, still less, any unflattering comparisons between my wife and my mother, but plainly they were different people, different characters, and my hurt was that right from the start it was clear they would not get on. Any son will tell you how important it is for his wife and his mother to have an easy relationship; anything less than that, and there is an immediate problem, a pain and a stress in his life that in almost every case is unwanted and, in its way, shocking.
My mother was strong in a different way from Norma, but there was no question about her love for Jack and me or ours for her. Of course she had to be strong. You had to be resilient to come through a war and bring up four lads in the North East on such low wages, when every day was a battle to put some decent food on the table. I have never forgotten that. But however close you are to someone, and who could be closer than a mother and a son, it is still difficult if one has a certain nature and the other’s is not really compatible.
There is no doubt that in many ways I was more like my father; he sometimes complained that he was fed up with football, the need to talk about it all the time, and there was quite a bit of that in me when my mother told me that time to sign an autograph for some stranger and I was just a kid of thirteen or fourteen and was embarrassed by the whole business. My mother didn’t recognise that; for her, life was a matter of going and getting what you could and not being too shy in celebrating your success, because if you didn’t, who would?
What was most difficult for me was my mother’s pride in my football ability. She would talk openly about it in front of people I didn’t know well, and that would make me cringe. It made me want to run for the shadows. My mother couldn’t understand those feelings. At times like that I think I rather bewildered her. She was a Milburn and it was the most natural thing to be good at football. I suspect, deep down, it was something of a regret for her that she wasn’t born to play the game herself. Certainly her career would not have suffered from any lack of confidence. She had enough for herself – and her sons.
As soon as I met Norma, I knew straight away that she was what I wanted, what I needed, and it wasn’t just that she was beautiful. I felt good around her; it felt so natural to be in her company. I was a little slow to make that feeling clear to her, though, and we stopped seeing each other for a while. She fell out with me because she felt I had taken her for granted; perhaps she thought that as a young star of Manchester United I had an idea I could just snap my fingers and the pretty girls would come running. In fact, it wasn’t quite like that at all, and after our relationship was back on and set up properly, most of my friends and team-mates said that she had had a scarcely believable effect on me. I paid more attention to my appearance, my smart club blazer came to the fore, my shoes were cleaned more regularly – but before that, she had been required to give me a rather serious dressing down because of my sometimes negligent approach to our relationship. That was why we’d split up.
Then, one day, I was having lunch with a couple of pals in a little place called Snack Time, just across the road from the Queen’s Hotel, when she walked by. The effect on me was instant and overwhelming. Wordlessly, I left my lunch – it was probably my usual pie and chips – and my friends, and said to myself, ‘You’ve made a pig’s ear of this once, don’t do it twice.’ As I followed her down the street, moving smartly now, I kept repeating, ‘You know this is it, it has to be it.’
It was indeed – but in all the pleasure and the joy of being together again, there was the sticking point of my mother’s resistance.
She didn’t like Norma and, I have to say, in the course of the relationship, that feeling was reciprocated. At first, when I suggested I take her up to the North East, to introduce her to old friends and family, and of course to show her off, Norma was willing enough, but increasingly she became reluctant. She got on well with so many people in my world, especially my dad, but there was no meeting point, no common ground with my mother. It was very painful and I couldn’t get it out of my head that my mother was being very unfair both to Norma and me. This, after all, was the woman I loved and wanted to be with.
It made me think about the past and my relationship with my mother, and maybe it brought back some old and half-buried resentments. I honour my mother’s commitment to my career and my potential and to the influence of her father, the great Tanner, but in the drive to fulfil my own dream, and perhaps my mother’s, maybe something was lost along the way.
She never forced me into anything I didn’t want to do, but I suppose that at certain times I felt she was pushing me a little too hard, when sometimes I didn’t want to be pushed.
I have already touched on one of the great myths of my life in football – that my mother taught me how to play, how to kick a ball. It made a nice newspaper story, and sometimes it was even accompanied by pictures, but in fact I had made my own decisions about my future, even at the earliest age. I was totally focused, secure in the belief that I would make it in the game. My mother’s great gift to me was that she always supported me – right up, that is, to the matter in which I couldn’t be pushed: the choice of my wife. Unless you are a very odd sort of person you do not go to ask your mother if you may marry
someone.
It started badly, and I’m afraid the frost never thawed. I hoped that the years would soften things, and that when the girls came along it would help the mother and the grandmother to draw a little closer, but it never happened. The relationship refused to get better. At first, when I returned to the North East, on some football business perhaps, I would make a point of going to Ashington, and I would reclaim my old room for a day or two. But it was difficult and as time went on I saw very little of my mother. My life was going on, my kids were growing up, and Norma and I had to make our own way. If it was hurtful in a way that I have rarely expressed, it wasn’t so difficult in the sense that I believed I had to make a choice: it was never a case of split loyalties. I had made a contract with my wife, I had my own family, and I could hardly tell the most influential women in my life that they had to do something that was clearly beyond them. I couldn’t make them like each other.
You might ask if Norma tried hard enough, but I would not accept the validity of the question. Norma is a strong-willed woman – it has made her such a strength to me over the years – but in one respect she is probably no different from most people: she wants to be liked, she doesn’t want to feel that in someone’s eyes everything she does or says is bound to be wrong. There was a clash of personalities, right from the start, and I realised early on that, even if Norma could make friends easily in my old world, even if many members of my family could embrace her, there was no doubt that she was involved in a losing battle with my mother.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 16