Wonderful World

May 1968

On the telly… Mary Hopkin was making a name for herself on Opportunity Knocks.

In the charts… Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World hit number one.

Football…Manchester City won the League. West Bromwich Albion won the cup.

At home… I waited anxiously by the wireless for news of Manchester United’s game in Madrid, having endured forty five minutes of suspense before the broadcast began.

The news wasn’t good. Real had wiped out United’s 1-0 lead from the first leg and now led 3-2 on aggregate. It sounded grim. The celebratory home crowd got in on the act too, taunting their opponents with a half-time rendition of La La La, the Spanish song that had recently pipped Cliff Richard to top spot in the Eurovision Song Contest; the rotten Spanish gits.

When the second half commentary began, my heart was in my mouth every time Amancio touched the ball. He was their danger man and he’d scored once already. It all came right in the end though, United hit back to level the scores on the night and go through 4-3 on aggregate.  

At school… a Golden Wonder promotion to help our athletes in the Mexico Olympics encouraged kids all over the land to do their patriotic duty and stuff themselves with crisps. Toni Walters took charge of the operation in our classroom, collecting great wads of empty crisp packets and returning them to Golden Wonder. How the athletes benefited I don’t know, but it was fun to get involved and believe we were doing our bit.

By the pool…

Being a proficient non-swimmer, I was never in a hurry to leave the changing room. By the time I joined the other nervous ninnies standing near the shallow end, the accomplished and the confident were already splashing about and engaging in high jinks. With no desire to get in the pool until Mister Charlesworth arrived, I left them to it. Nobody was going to bite my ankles again.

‘Lynch, throw me a float!’

Happy to oblige, I did as requested, but even as the float flopped on the water, an angry voice boomed out.

‘Lynch! Get back in the changing room!’

It was Mister Charlesworth.

Back in the changing room I got dressed and spent the rest of the period stewing. Fate had got me out of the lesson but at what cost, I wondered. Throwing things into the pool was forbidden, everyone knew that, but I’d responded to a specific request and that was different. I thought so, anyway. How Mister Charlesworth had seen it was another matter. More worrying was what he was going to do about it.

Mister Charlesworth didn’t stand on ceremony when the class returned at the end of the lesson. In less time than it takes to say mitigating circumstances, he was in and out of his private room and brandishing the infamous stoolball bat.

‘Bend over, Lynch.’

Clenching everything I could clench, I braced myself for the full force of a bat wielded by a fourteen stone lunatic in a black track suit.

THWACK!

 

‘Argh!’

Launched into an involuntary long jump, I took off with a yelp and did the dance of the crumpled buttocks all around the pegs and back, suffering agonies all the way. Oh the pain. How that wretched bat didn’t inflict severe compression injuries I’ll never know. I thought I’d been deformed.

In the playground…

Thursday May 30^th 8:20am.

In the corner of the playground by the entrance to the field, boys were taking turns to kick a tennis ball against the wire fence. Most mornings they’d say ‘Lorimer!’ or ‘Greaves!’ as they lashed the ball into an imaginary goal. But not today. Today they were Kidd or Best, or Charlton or…

‘Aston!’

I felt so proud. Manchester United had won the European Cup by beating Benfica at Wembley the night before and the whole game had been live on telly.