bits as I digested the food and push the drawer back in when I went to the plate for a little more.
The Second World War stories didn’t really do it for me. I could take or leave Matt Braddock VC or Captain Hurricane and his pint-sized batman Maggot Malone. Captain Hurricane had a ‘ragin’ fury’ every week and would use guns, grenades and his filthy temper to wipe out ‘krauts’ and ‘slant-eyed goons’ – not terms you tend to hear in today’s more enlightened, politically correct world. I much preferred Morgan the Mighty or Alf Tupper, the ‘Tough of the Track’, who always ate fish and chips before and after winning a race.
The Hornet always seemed to me to have the best stories and illustrations. Every week it had a serialised non-pictorial story over three or four pages in which Paul Terhune tried to solve some mystery or other, each instalment invariably ending on a cliff-hanger. As soon as a story finished, after about ten weeks, I would immediately go back and read the thirty or forty pages in one go. My favourite was a rather unlikely tale called ‘Invisible Bullets from Nowhere’ in which Terhune tried to work out why random citizens were being shot but nobody could find the shooter or the bullets. It transpired that a disgruntled employee at the local observatory high above the town had fitted the giant telescope with ice bullets and was taking pot shots at pedestrians he held a grudge against. Well, it made sense at the time.
Just reading the comics was never enough for me. They used to have competitions that I was soon compulsively entering. Quite often, I won. The first time I saw my name in print, I absolutely loved it. My mum used to read the Irish Catholic, and they had a competition asking readers to fill in the missing words in a limerick. I knew the answer because I had heard it before – in fact I can still remember it:
There was an old man quite weird,Who shrieked, ’Tis just as I feared!Four owls and a wrenTwo larks and a henHave just built their nest in my beard.
I sent my answer in to the Irish Catholic and won £3, which was a small fortune to me. I wrote them a letter saying it had been fantastic to win, and they printed that too. The biggest buzz was just reading my name in the magazine: D FANNING, DUBLIN.
Fired by this triumph, I was soon entering all the competitions in my weekly comics. The Valiant asked readers to send in a cartoon, so I got hold of a copy of a religious magazine that we used to have in school called the Word. It had a cartoon of two guys on a pulley hanging off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, too far away to clean the windows, and I traced it and posted it to the Valiant. Let’s face it, it was plagiarism, pure and simple, but the £1 postal order came in very handy.
I had no conscience about how I won the competitions. Once, I copied a joke from the Beezer and sent it to the Topper. I won. The question was ‘What is the definition of a phone kiosk?’ and I said ‘A chatterbox’. They also asked for a definition of an alarm clock and I said ‘Something that scares the living daylights out of you’, which I thought was absolutely hilarious.
I entered and won so many competitions that the people at the DC Thomson offices in Scotland must have been saying, ‘Jesus, not another one from that Irish guy!’ The prize was normally a postal order, but on one occasion the Beezer sent me a walkie-talkie. It was two small hollow pieces of red plastic joined together by a foot of hollow black cord that looked like a piece of liquorice, and it was rubbish. But it was still as much of a thrill as ever to come home from school for dinner and find a parcel waiting for me next to my place at the table.
Like any normal, average young Dublin lad, I lived for music and football. There is much more to come in this book about music, believe me, but for a while in those early years football meant almost as much to me. The first games I ever went to were at Glenamlure Park in Milltown, the home of Shamrock Rovers. Dermot took me there every now and then. The ground was always packed. That was in the days when Mick Leech was the George Best of the Rovers team, and other star Irish players included Alfie Hale at Waterford and Freddie Strahan at Shelbourne. Glenmalure Park is now a housing estate, and many Shamrock fans have never forgiven the board for selling up.
I also saw a few international matches at Dalymount Park. It always struck me how much more physical the game was than it looked on television, how much more sweaty and grunty. You could easily be hit by flying spit. I remember seeing the great Noel Cantwell, who was always known as a true gentleman of football. As I gazed at him in awe, he glanced at the referee, then elbowed the guy next to him in the back of the head.
Yet most of my football watching was via television. I followed the English league closely, and in 1966, during one of our family holidays to Bettystown, I watched the legendary match when England beat West Germany 4–2 in the World Cup Final.
It was so exciting; so incredibly dramatic. We all watched it on a little black-and-white TV. At half-time I walked down to the beach, stared across the sea and told myself, ‘I can see England, where the game is going on!’ Then it was back in the house for the rest of the match. When Webber equalised for Germany and made it 2–2 in the last minute of normal time I thought, ‘Uh-oh, this is going to go wrong!’ Then Geoff Hurst scored that famous goal off the crossbar, which, let’s be honest here, was never a goal. Unlike many Irish people, I had nothing against England winning the World Cup, but they certainly had all the luck.
Forty-four years later, in South Africa in the summer of 2010, again against Germany, Frank Lampard’s goal would have made it 2–2 and kept England in the World Cup, but for the ref who decided that a perfectly good goal wasn’t a goal. England never recovered.
At about 12, I decided that I was a Manchester United fan and followed the Red Devils avidly for the next two years. The Irish newspapers didn’t have the in-depth coverage I wanted, so I subscribed to the Manchester Evening News & Chronicle – but only on the days after United had played. It would arrive in the post a few days after it had been published and I would cut the United articles out and glue them into my scrapbook.
I watched United – who at the time boasted the holy triumvirate of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law – beat Benfica 4–1 in the European Cup final in 1968. It was so emotional. It was ten years after the Munich air disaster, and Benfica were enormous in those days; they had just beaten Everton 5–0 and 2–0. Charlton scored two goals, Best got that famous one where he cheekily rounded the keeper, and Brian Kidd got the other, on his nineteenth birthday. I’ll never forget it: right after Kidd scored, I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and my dad shouted out, ‘Jesus, he’s done it again! Exactly the same as the other one!’ I ran back in, looked at the screen, and realised that my dad hadn’t yet got his head around the concept of the instant action replay.
I once actually saw George Best play in the flesh. Manchester United were drawn against Waterford in an early qualifying game for the European Cup and they held the game in Daly-mount Park. United won 3–0, a Law hat-trick, and Best came on at half-time. One little kid got past security and ran up to him while the game was going on, and Best stopped and signed an autograph. He was just so cool.
Oddly enough, after two years I gave up supporting Man United and just followed football in general. The World Cup in Mexico in 1970 was hugely exciting. In those days the organisers didn’t kowtow to European evening viewing times so the games were on live at two or three in the morning. It was school holidays, warm evenings and football in the middle of the night … the muffled, atmospheric commentaries added to the sense of exoticism and novelty that marked that great summer.
One big family ritual was watching The Big Match on Sunday afternoons, hosted by Brian Moore. I will never forget how the programme used to start: Moore commentating and saying, ‘Charlie George, who can hit ’em!’ and George, with his long hair flying, hitting that amazing goal for Arsenal in the 1971 FA Cup final and then lying flat on his back.
Queens
