Bobby Moore: By the Person Who Knew Him Best

CHAPTER TWO

Wilde Women

If my mother and I hadn’t been riding in a taxi along Ilford High Street that day in 1958, perhaps my life would have turned out very differently. Perhaps Bobby would have given up hanging around the local shops in the hope of catching sight of me. Perhaps he would have met another nice girl at the Ilford Palais and someone else entirely would have ended up with Judith Hurst clutching her arm at Wembley on 30 July 1966. Perhaps . . . But I’d better begin at the beginning.

My mother’s name was Elizabeth Wilde, although everyone knew her as Betty. She was that rare combination - a woman who was beautiful and funny. We’d walk down the road together and men would whistle at her, not me. Even when she was in her late forties, they admired her. After Bobby and I were married, Bill Larkin, a wealthy West Ham fan, would regularly inform me that while I was a good-looking woman, ‘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 me, she wouldn’t allow Auntie Mum to discipline me and I used to do naughty things like throw the other children’s toys downstairs. I was just like the girl in the nursery rhyme: ‘When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.’

In my defence, all I can say is that I missed my mother. Auntie Mum was sweet, soft, kind and easy-going and I adored her, but all the same I was acutely aware that my three cousins had their mother around all day to look after them and I didn’t have mine. The highlight of my day was waiting for her to come home.

I was so possessive about her that I didn’t like her boyfriend Joe at all. He was quite rich and must have had a few contacts in the black market - not only was he a reliable source of silk stockings but we were treated to a constant supply of eggs, butter and sugar, all luxuries at the time. Something else we never went short of was smoked salmon. I even had it in the sandwiches I took to school. In the end I got so bored with smoked salmon sandwiches that I’d go round swapping them for ones made with jam.

In many ways she had a sad time, my mother. I think Joe was really the love of her life, but although he claimed to be separated from his wife, he never committed. She was a real beauty and a lively, bright, talented woman, but she got a lot less than she deserved. She was a blonde and looked like Virginia Mayo, a Hollywood star of the Forties and Fifties. She wore her hair drawn back into a French pleat, which showed off her classic features, and she always had an air of elegance. My grandmother, Nanny Wilde, used to say she was the flower of the flock - and it was a pretty big flock. My mother was one of seven children, five of whom were girls. She wasn’t short of brains and when she was 11 she won a scholarship to high school, but she wasn’t allowed to take it up. My grandmother said it wouldn’t be fair on her sisters.

It was Uncle Jim, my mother’s brother, who was Nanny Wilde’s favourite. He and my Aunt Glad held the European professional title for ballroom dancing. That was quite something. Jim owned a dance hall, the Princes, in Barking; coincidentally, it wasn’t far from Waverley Gardens, where Bobby grew up. Nanny Wilde ran the cafe at the back.

In those days, the Forties and early Fifties, ballroom dancing was huge. No one had TV then, of course, so everyone made their own entertainment by going out to dances and music halls. There was no such thing as a couch potato then. When my mother was in her teens, she was a very good dancer. People reckoned she had the ability to be even better than Jim and she was selected to appear in a talent show. She would have earned 2s. 6d. a week - not a sum to be sneered at sixty years ago - but Nanny Wilde put a stop to that, too.

Why? I can only speculate. My grandmother was an old-fashioned matriarch, a bit of a tyrant. She was a very powerful woman who ruled with an iron fist, and she was tough. She probably had to be, with seven children. She was such a strong personality that she seemed almost to obliterate my grandfather. Pop Wilde had a bowler hat and a walking stick and that’s just about all I remember of him.

The Wilde household lived ‘round the corner’, to use East London parlance. In actual fact they were a bit further away than that, in a large detached house in Cranbrook Road, Gants Hill. It had a monkey puzzle tree in the front garden and a marvellous lilac tree in the back. But everyone you knew used to live ‘round the corner’ if they didn’t live ‘over the road’.

There wasn’t only Nanny, Pop and the kids. Archie, the lodger, was part of the equation as well. It was rumoured that the two youngest of the Wildes - my mother and her sister, Eileen - were Archie’s, not Pop’s. It’s certainly true that Eileen didn’t look anything like Pop and if the rumours are to be believed, that might explain why Nanny was tough on my mother - she might have reminded her of her indiscretion.

I’ve got to say that Nanny Wilde was never tough on me - it was only my mother with whom she had the difficult relationship. I’d go round there frequently and listen as she played the piano and sang. She was very family-orientated and I adored her. It was being so family-orientated that got Nanny Wilde into trouble one night at the dance hall, a night so dreadful that for years we could hardly bear to speak of it.

The biggest dance event of the year, the Star Championships, was held up in London and Uncle Jim and Aunt Glad were favourites to win it. The whole family dressed up to the nines to go and watch. My mother even went to the furriers and borrowed two coats on approval for her and Nanny Wilde. It was all heady and exciting stuff and by the time Jim and Glad finished doing their routine, Nanny Wilde had had a few drinks. She swept up to one of the woman judges, pointed to her earrings and told her that she would look better in a different pair.

Unfortunately, the judge had a sense of humour failure, construed the earrings remark as attempted bribery and marched off to report Nanny Wilde to the powers that be. Shortly afterwards, it was announced over the tannoy that Glad and Jim had been disqualified. Oh, the shame of it. And the fur coats had to go back the next day. It was a nightmare!

I think what really drove a wedge between my mother and Nanny Wilde was that she, Betty, was a modern girl - ahead of her time, a bit wilful, perhaps. By the time she was 17 she was virtually living away from home, staying with the family of Gladys Mogford, her best friend. The Mogfords loved her, almost as if she was their own. And I think that in the end she decided to get married, even though she was very young, rather than go home. She just got out.

I know she loved my father, but getting married was really an escape route from her unhappiness. The only trouble was, what she escaped into turned out to be no better than what she’d left behind. My father left her for another blonde when I was very little. After that there was Joe, with his half-truths and broken promises. When I was 12, she got married again, to a ship’s chef called Eddie, but that didn’t work out either.

She’d had so many disappointments and frustrated ambitions that she projected her dreams onto me. She definitely believed I was destined for greater things. I was groomed and always beautifully turned out. Because she didn’t want me to be a gorblimey Cockney, I was sent to elocution lessons. I’ve no idea why my mother thought it was a good idea, but for some reason I was also packed off to fencing lessons.

At one point I joined a dancing school, where they were about to stage a show including ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’. I was hastily given a part in it, although as I was a newcomer, the role was minuscule. Not that you would have known. Every mother was given her child’s costume to tart up and mine had at least ten times more ribbons and bows than the star’s did. In fact, compared to me, Shirley Temple herself would have found her outfit wanting.

It all went to my head. At the end of the performance, when we all lined up to take a bow, someone with a bouquet stepped onto the stage. I might have been stuck right at the end of the line, but I knew what I was worth! I skipped forward and said, ‘Thank you.’ They had to wrest the bouquet off me. I was in floods of tears. So that was the end of my theatrical career.

Much to my mother’s surprise, I passed the 11-plus and was offered a place at Ilford County High School, which had the reputation of being both strict and highly academic. My mother was actually so worried when she received the letter containing the Ilford High offer that she asked the Head of my primary school if she should turn it down. She really had doubts about my coping. I was bright enough, just not terribly keen on schoolwork.

The Head assured her I’d be fine there and, as it turned out, I was. I didn’t like school very much, though, particularly grammar school. It was an alien world of Latin, French and German, indoor sandals, dresses that couldn’t be more than an inch off the floor when you knelt down, and heel grips. Heel grips were as much part of the Fifties as paper nylon petticoats and headscarves worn over hair rollers on Friday nights, and your mum made you stick them in your outdoor shoes which had been bought for you to grow into.