began as the best year of my life. Towards the end of that football season I was picked for the first team. Twelfth of March 1939, just a month or so before my nineteenth birthday, I trotted out in my Chelsea shirt for the very first time. I was on cloud nine, seventh heaven. We were playing Preston North End away, and we lost, badly. No one was looking at me, that was for sure. I was awful, leaden-legged and useless. Ossie, who came to all my matches, took me on one side afterwards and said I had to forget the shirt, forget who I was playing for, where I was playing, all that, and just play my game.
When we played Sunderland the next week at home, it was like I was in the playground again at school, or out in the park with Joe. I ran rings round them, laid on a couple of goals and scored one myself. That was the first time I heard the crowd at the Shed End chanting my name – “Billy, Billy the Kid! Billy, Billy the Kid!”
It sends warm tingles down my spine even now just to think of it. Before the season ended three weeks later I had scored seven more goals and all the papers were saying I’d be playing for England within the year. One paper called me ‘Billy the Wonder Kid’. Another said I was ‘as good as Stanley Matthews, maybe better’. It would have gone to my head a lot worse than it did, if it hadn’t been for Ossie.
“Don’t read all that stuff, Billy,” he told me. “Don’t even look at it. Not good for you. Let your mum cut it out and stick it in a scrapbook. You can read it later when you’re older – can’t hurt you then.”
Mum did put it all in a scrapbook – she was always taking it out and looking at it and showing it – but it disappeared, like everything else.
That summer Mum married again, married Ossie – and I never even saw it coming. Joe and me were both ‘best men’, and Emmy was the bridesmaid. So the man who’d whacked me at school, who had taught me most of my football, who had been like a father to me since Dad died and a real friend to the family too, became my second father. It couldn’t have been better. It was a great day for all of us, confetti everywhere and a huge wedding cake made like a football pitch in Chelsea-blue icing. And then they went off to Broadstairs for a week’s honeymoon.
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