I Was Six in 1966 and Thought The World Cup Was Just for Fun

1966 is the first football World Cup tournament I have any memory of, so this is the first in a series of brief diary entries that could have been made on my journey from that point onwards.

I remember the 30th July 1966 as being a very hot afternoon in our little village of Glinton in Cambridgeshire where we watched the Final. It must have been because my father and grandfather were sitting very close to our black and white television set in their shirt sleeves and I was allowed an ice cream from Betty’s Post Office opposite our house.

Our TV was built by a man called ‘Murphy’ and had a lid that opened upwards from the top of the set, revealing the on/off and volume buttons below. We needn’t have worried about the volume as most of the street seemed determined to share Kenneth Wolstenhome’s views as if they were our own. It was the only time I remember being able to cross the road – presumably at half-time – without having to listen first for cars approaching. The only other time this happened was when they brought the North Sea Gas pipes in a couple of years later from Bacton on the Norfolk coast and had to close the road for a while

We rarely had tea in the ‘big room’ – which wasn’t that big but wasn’t the kitchen – unless it was a Sunday. I was convinced it must have been because I had also been made to wear my ‘best clothes’ which consisted of white shirt and black shorts, both perfectly starched and correct like an Alf Ramsey team talk.

It was most definitely a Saturday afternoon and the first of many that would eventually be dominated by football. The only German player I remember from that day was the defender Karl-Heinz Schnellinger – I presume because our forwards seemed to be attacking him and his defensive teammates throughout the match.

Geoff Hurst was the England hero that day and, even as his image faded, so my love of football was born and would grow, as I did, out of childhood and way beyond

The grown ups washed the teacups up and spent the evening drinking from brown bottles of beer: ‘Watneys Brown, drink it down’ repeated my father over and over again after the cheering had finally stopped and the uneaten sandwiches finally cleared away. Everyone was just too excited and hot to eat very much yet the following day I’d be told in the Methodist Sunday School that we should ‘waste not, want not.’ My father smiled when I reported this to him in his version of the dugout – his greenhouse – telling me that it wasn’t every day that England won the World Cup.

Although we hadn’t made a guy and it was too hot to sleep with blankets on that night, fireworks went off in the distance and the cars on Lincoln Road sounded their horns over and over again as I drifted off to sleep.

I don’t remember my father ever being so happy as then – before or since. For me, I was just content that everybody else was in such a good mood and thought the sunshine would last for ever.

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