Tina Moore - Bobby Moore - By the Person Who Knew Him Best

When I got home, still starry-eyed, my mother was waiting for me. I’d forgotten that Thursday was her half-day. The lamb stew was thrown straight into the dustbin. As far as she was concerned, it was the most heinous thing I’d done since getting myself flashed at in Valentine’s Park. It was boarding school for me again, for all of twenty-four hours.

The Ilford Palais episode wasn’t my only covert expedition. I used to sneak up to the Two I’s with my girlfriends to see Tommy Steele, but things would hardly have started before we had to steal away at 10 pm like Cinderella. Another place we went to was Heaven and Hell, which was in a basement accessed only by some very narrow stairs. If a fire had broken out, it would have been virtually impossible to escape. But you never think of that kind of thing when you’re 15. You’re immortal.

My first boyfriend was Harry and I went out with him for six months. He was 17 and had lovely amber-coloured eyes with long eyelashes. Harry was a Mod and wore a bum-freezer jacket; he took me to haunts like the Skiffle Parlour in Ilford Lane on the back of his scooter. But that Easter I was offered a school trip to Perpignan, and my mother said, ‘I think it would be a good idea if you went on that.’ She had no time for Harry, amber eyes or not.

No sooner had she removed me from the clutches of Harry than I fell for Gilbert, the Perpignan Adonis. He played rugby for France schoolboys and was my first real crush. Cupid’s dart must have been more of a pinprick, though, because Gilbert was soon abandoned in favour of my next conquest, an actor. He can’t have been a very successful one because I’ve forgotten his name. But he had some great lines. ‘When you grow up,’ he murmured, ‘you’re going to be quite something. You must always drink champagne with a peach at the bottom of the glass.’

My suitors also included the one who arrived to pick me up in a Jag. The Jag was nearly as old as he was. When he knocked on the door, my mother opened it and said, ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’ve come to see Tina.’

My mother said, ‘Do you know how old she is? Fifteen.’

‘Well, I like them young.’ Off he went, never to be sighted again.

And then came Bobby.

‘Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own.’

It’s true. It really happened that way. The band at the Ilford Palais was playing ‘Blue Moon’ and suddenly this blond boy was in front of me, asking for a dance. Bobby always had an incredible knack of staging things to perfection.

To him, I suppose, I was a pretty girl in a lovely dress. Pat Booth, who went to the Palais at around the same time as me, said she’d catch sight of me in a boat-necked long-sleeved number and feel deeply envious - which was funny, because I used to lust after her clothes, a ‘mod’ dress, bell-skirted, with cap sleeves. I discovered later that she also went out at one point with Harry the Mod; it must have been those amber eyes. After that she went out with one Billy Walker, who was a bouncer at the Palais, though not for much longer. He was just passing through on his way to becoming the golden boy of British heavyweight boxing

Bobby would go to the Palais with some of his fellow apprentices from the West Ham ground staff. Much later I found out that he’d been watching me for weeks, stationed on the balcony but too shy to approach me. What did Bobby see in me? I spoke nicely, I’d led a sheltered life and my mother had groomed me to the best of her ability. All those elocution lessons, dancing lessons and my grammar school education had combined to turn me into what, in the late Fifties, was called ‘a nice type of girl’. I’m not sure that the fencing lessons ever came in useful, but my sense of humour did. I could make him laugh and this intense, rather inhibited football prodigy needed that.

Once you’re in a relationship, you get to know and trust the other person and then your real self starts to unfold. Bobby unfolded a lot. Even now, I have a very strong image of him as a teenager, just sitting watching me, laughing because I amused him. I was the extrovert of the partnership and that’s what he enjoyed about me. I brought him out of his shell. I could always twist things to see the funny side and although Bobby projected a public image of self-control and aloofness, he actually had a very dry wit. It was so subtle that unless you were completely attuned to him, you missed it.

When we met, I was coming up to my sixteenth birthday. He seemed a bit square at first. Because I’d grown up in such a female-dominated environment, I knew nothing about football. I wasn’t at all impressed that Bobby was a player, let alone that he had just signed professional forms with West Ham and was an England Youth international. I didn’t even realize he was a footballer at first, not a proper one who was planning to make a career out of the game.

His great heroes were Johnny Haynes, captain of England, and the Manchester United icon, Duncan Edwards, with whom he was besotted. I hadn’t a clue who he was talking about - didn’t even realize that Duncan Edwards, one of the Busby Babes, had died along with seven of his team-mates earlier that year in the Munich air crash. Duncan had been a left-half and was already established in the England side, despite his tender age. Bobby was shattered when he heard the news.

He was much more taken with me than I was with him in the early stages. After that first dance I agreed to meet him at the Palais the following Saturday - then I stood him up. He waited all evening for me.

I’d told him I liked going to the record store, so he took to lurking around there in the hope that I’d walk in, but the most he would get from me was a little nod of acknowledgement. Even so, something about him must have made an impression because I told my mother about him. That was when Fate took a hand. One day, my mother and I were sitting in the back of a taxi as it crawled along Ilford High Street in the traffic when I happened to glance out of the window. There he was, sitting in a coffee bar. ‘That’s him!’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s the boy who asked me out.’

My mother leaned across me to get a better view. ‘Mm, he looks nice,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you invite him home for tea?’

Our first date took place the evening after his second game for the West Ham first team. Bobby had made his first team debut at Upton Park when West Ham, newly promoted to the top flight, had beaten Manchester United 3-2. Bobby, only brought into the side because senior players were unfit, had been brilliant. He dominated the following day’s back page headlines.

It was actually a bitter-sweet moment for Bobby when he got his first team chance, because his rival for the Number Six shirt was Malcolm Allison, who had been Bobby’s mentor and idol since Bobby joined the club as a schoolboy. For most of 1958, they had both been fighting to get out of the reserves, Bobby because he was knocking on the door to his future, Malcolm because he was trying to prove he could still play after a spell in a sanatorium recovering from TB.

Malcolm was thirteen and a half years older than Bobby. Very tall, big-shouldered and handsome, he was a man, whereas Bobby was a boy. He had a slightly sardonic air and sometimes he could be cutting. It would be a while before he developed his twin reputations as fedora-wearing, cigar-smoking playboy and brilliant, flamboyant, big-spending coach, but even then he had panache. More than that, he could tell greatness in the raw. As one of thirteen colts on the ground staff at Upton Park, Bobby had been widely regarded as ordinary, but Malcolm saw something in him that others at the club didn’t and set about coaching him. For that alone, Bobby adored him.