Whatever Happened to Billy Shears?

Prelude

James Winston has never needed a newspaper report to bring him up to date on the potholes of Blackburn. He has been in and out of most of them, with bruises for proof. Friends and family badger him to swap pedals for petrol but they’ll never understand. He enjoys cycling from one client’s house to the next, tool case strapped firmly behind the saddle. It’s a hard push up the hills these days but it keeps him fit. What’s more, he has become a bit of a local institution. People wave at him from street corners and the tops of buses. He moved here in 1996, some twenty years ago, and carried on doing what he loves most: tuning pianos.

As a child he watched and listened with fascination as two men in succession, both blind, went to work on his family’s out-of-tune Bechstein. With a child’s logic he presumed all blind people were born to be tuners and that he would have to lose his sight to become one himself. In fact, only three fellow students at the London College of Furniture were sight impaired. Tuning, he tells friends, is like having an argument with a child that won’t behave. It isn’t necessarily about listening to the pitch of the note itself but to the beats, the interference or distortion when two strings of different intervals are struck together. For James Winston, one hour spent fixing a piano stops the mind from wandering where it will but shouldn’t go, towards the darker side of the soul.

On nights like this, however, when sudden heavy showers make roads greasy and treacherous, he wonders how long he can keep going. He is returning home much later than normal, after receiving an urgent request from a client in the village of Brockhall. She needed her 1929 Broadwood baby grand tuned to concert pitch in time for a soirée tomorrow. A former opera singer, she is inclined to hum with vibrato as he tunes. While the habit is disconcerting she does at least have a fine piano to work on. These new digital affairs offer an inferior sound and, worst of all, never go out of tune.

James’s friends have been of little help, suggesting he retrain as a repairer of these ghastly instruments (so called). He scoffs at the idea. He is just one year from pensionable age and in any case, if he had wanted to be an electrician he would have become an electrician. Plenty of people are handy at mending a fuse or two. No, the skill is in the ear: the ability to hear that underwater, wiggly wavering sound. And that wavering is what you learn to count.

He pushes gamely up another steep hill. He is not far from home. A Tautliner lorry throws up spray that soaks him to the skin. He swears with passion but recovers his composure in time to remember two potholes ahead. He looks behind and pulls out wider to avoid them. A cream-and-green sports car, a classic by the looks of it, rushes past, the turbulence almost brushing him into the gutter. It is surely travelling too fast to respond to any change in the lights at the crossroads ahead. He glances through the rear window of the car. He cannot make out much in the gloom but the passengers are gesticulating to the driver. One of them leans forward. The traffic lights change to amber, then red. The car slews to the left but keeps on going, straight through the lights. A truck is approaching the junction on the green light. Horn blaring, it cannot avoid the car. Tyres squeal, followed by the sickening thud of colliding metal. Windscreen glass bursts and shatters over the road. The sports car flips on to its side, screeching as it slides across the road.

Trembling with shock, James phones 999 on his mobile, then abandons his bike to join a small crowd gathered round the vehicles. A woman, probably in her forties, is helped out of the car, blood pouring from her head. She explains that there are two more people in the car, before collapsing on the side of the road. One of the men is trapped in the back of the vehicle. The other is visible, head turned at a sickening angle to his neck. He is not moving.

‘Bloody hell, what a mess,’ says a man in the crowd.

‘Is there anything we can do?’ says a woman.

The man shakes his head. ‘They’ll have to be cut out with the proper gear.’

‘The one at the front,’ says the woman, ‘I’ve seen his face before, in the papers. He’s some bigwig, I think.’

Sirens wailing, the police arrive, swiftly followed by an ambulance and a team of firefighters. They close off the road and a rescue team pull the two men clear. A policeman asks for names and addresses, reminding everyone who saw the accident they have a legal obligation to give an account. James tells him of the argument in the car. The policeman takes his name and address and says he will be contacted in the event of an inquest.

Still shaking, James gets on his bike and slowly heads for home. Seeing those men laid out on the road has reminded him of his own mortality. He pushes his bike up the garden path, removes the clips from his ankles, parks the bike in the garage and enters the house by the back door.

‘You’ve been a while, love.’ Mrs Winston is busy knitting a sweater.

‘Nasty accident at the crossroads,’ he says.

‘I thought I heard sirens.’ Mrs Winston doesn’t look up. ‘You know I don’t like you being out so late on your bike. You’re not as young as you used to be.’

Before she says it, James has mouthed his wife’s last sentence but, still trembling, wonders if he should take more notice of her. They’ve been renting a cottage every summer on the Isle of Wight for years and the owners have put it up for sale. All the grandchildren look forward to holidays there and he’s saved just about enough to be able to retire.

Maybe there is a reason why he witnessed the accident. Maybe it’s a warning. Maybe he is getting nearer to his own end than he thinks. Maybe it really is time to hang up the tuning fork for good.

Chapter 1

Six months earlier

Forgive me, Father, for I have wind . . . now if I wait a few moments . . . wow . . . look at that. It works . . . I talk to the screen and the words appear just seconds after I’ve said them . . . although . . . hang on. I said sinned . . . I have sinned . . . Slow down, Billy . . . you need to articulate . . . clearly. That’s better. Bound to be a few teething problems using voice . . . recognition . . . software . . . for the first time. The Read Me notes say the application takes a while getting to know your accent. It’s picking up my Surrey infection reasonably well. Inflection, that is . . . I say Surrey because I can’t and never will accept this London Borough of Croydon bollocks. Good, no profanity filter. Croydon is a city in all but name but we’re too close to the smoke . . . so close that in the old days we were the horses’ first watering hole on the way to a small town on the south coast. Now then, according to the instructions . . . let me see . . . I have to say two words to create another paragraph.

Clever. I said the words new paragraph.

Ha! It’s done it again. I’ll get the hang soon enough. What a brilliant Christmas present. The truth is I’ve been far too long getting round to this dictation lark. The family complain about the hollow thud, thud, thud that resounds from my study late at night. They say there’s no need to attack a computer keyboard like I do but they don’t understand. I learned to type years ago on a manual typewriter, one of those big black Imperial sit-up-and-beg affairs. Just looked one up on Google Images . . . truly monstrous. You had to slap those keys hard, tell ’em who’s boss. Old habits and all that. For a nostalgia trip, I downloaded an app for the iPad that recreates the sounds of a typewriter. There’s a delicious ding at the end of each line. If I was a few years younger I’d say it was awesome.

I never learned to type properly, mind, the way women were taught in the 1960s. If you were a young girl, with one of those foot-high beehives, your destination was the typing pool. I can see those women now, sitting in rows, all Mary Whitehouse specs and black headphones, cigarettes dangling from the corner of their mouths, gazing into the distance, correct fingers instinctively hitting the right keys. You’d never catch a lad typing at a desk back then. I was too embarrassed to tell my friends I even owned that old Imperial. It was like a bloke pushing a pram round the park, totally infra dig. Now we’re all at it.

Seems to me the human male has been demolished and reconstructed, not just through social and political pressure. Women consume contraceptives containing sky-high amounts of synthetic female sex hormones. When they relieve themselves, all that oestrogen gets recycled into the water supply for men to imbibe. Fertilizers and insecticides are full of the stuff, too. We’re not just discovering our feminine side, soon we’ll be women. Our sperm counts are down as well. Come to think of it, that would have been a positive advantage all those years ago . . . which reminds me.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned . . . you are reading my first-ever confession at sixty-three years of age. You might well argue that an iMac with a 3.06 Intel Core i3 processor is a piss-poor substitute for a saintly man behind a glass visor. It suits me, though.

With all this in mind I ought to lock the study door . . . just a minute . . . there . . . I have to talk quietly. If the family hears me conversing with a screen they’ll regard it as the next logical step in my burgeoning relationship with this computer. Last Valentine’s Day I received an e-card signed ‘Your loving Mac xxx’. I found out who sent it soon enough. Beth, my daughter, was stifling giggles in the corner of the room. Emms . . . that’s what everyone calls my wife, Emma . . . reckons it’s only a question of time before all computers are equipped with a discreet orifice alongside the USB ports. She may be right. I have to admit I miss the old iMac, the one with an adjustable screen on a pivotal arm . . . motherboard, CD drive, printed circuits and whatever else housed inside a dome-like case that curved seductively, like the top of Emms’s backside.

This isn’t sounding very much like a confession. The date is 25 December 2015. It’s 2.45 a.m. and I can’t sleep, not because of the imminent arrival of a man in red but because of a heady cocktail of alcohol, euphoria and guilt.

A few hours ago, I turned up scuttered for Carols at Candlelight. I wasn’t the only one, of course. Nothing like getting Christmas off to a traditional start – tumbling into church, fresh from the Prince Albert, shouting, laughing, stifling giggles, singing ‘O come, let us adore him’ before running out and heaving up on top of Edmund Tinsley, born 9 October 1878 died 8 December 1937, sorely missed. Lots of people do it and, by and large, it’s pretty harmless. However, there was a subtle difference tonight. I was leading the service.

Believe me, you have to have your wits about you in that state. Slurring or rushing your way through the liturgy is a dead giveaway, so it’s vital to take your time. However . . . deliberately . . . slowing . . . things . . . down is even worse – like going fifteen miles per hour behind the wheel of a car when you’ve had too many at the pub. Exactly what the cops are looking for. However, and without wishing to sound too much like Basil Fawlty, I think I got away with it.

The truth is, I was in a buoyant mood first thing this morning and had every reason to be. The iconic events of Christmas 1914, when an unofficial truce was declared between British and German soldiers in the trenches, were commemorated with great emotion last year, particularly the carol singing and football match in no man’s land. I gave a talk on BBC national radio that was well received. Because of that I was invited to give a speech today, at a Christmas Eve lunch reception at Wembley Stadium. Some big names in the worlds of sport and politics were there, so I spent several days in preparation.

Being honest, and this is a confession after all, most people have never heard of me. In my time I’ve been a cub reporter on a local paper, a minor radio sports commentator, a part-time priest and chaplain and, latterly, a media consultant; as Beth has remarked more than once, a jerk of all trades. To use a football analogy, I’ve spent my life warming the bench. Every now and then I’ve stripped off, run up and down the touchline, before being told to sit back on the bench again. Or think of Troy McClure from the Simpsons. Forget his jutting chin and rugged good looks and you’ve got me, William Shearwater. I’ll bet there’s a compilation of McClure’s greatest moments on YouTube . . . yep, thought so . . . here you go:

‘You may remember me from such videos as Mummy, What’s Wrong With That Man’s Face?, Smoke Yourself Thin, Here Comes the Metric System and Dig Your Own Grave and Save.’

Similarly, you won’t remember me updating the score from Crawley Town’s Broadfield Stadium on BBC Radio Sussex or doing Pause for Thought at some ungodly hour on Radio 2. I’m Mr Reliable, a safe pair of hands. As a unit, Emms and I even pre-date the coming to power of Mrs Thatcher. In a world of busted vows and broken homes, we’re a safe pair of glands. But the truth is, I’m too dull to be dangerous, too polite to be provocative, too careful to be compelling.

So how did Troy McClure find himself addressing such august company at the home of English football? Well, if nothing more, the commemorations of that Christmas in no man’s land nudged a national conscience. Inflated leather and lung-bursting song on a battered, bruised turnip field in Flanders: it’s an incredible story. But I’ve gone back even further than that. For years I’ve researched the history of William McGregor and gang, founding fathers of the Football League in 1888. I’ve written articles and the odd book or two on the subject, all to a thunderous lack of applause – until now. It seems my time might have come. A high-up at the FA read one of my articles and likes how I link the two worlds of professional football and local community. Would I be interested in giving a seven-minute address on my views of the game, past and present?

So at lunchtime today I headed for the Bobby Moore Room – dubbed by Wembley its ‘grandest space’ and ‘the jewel in the crown’ – to be met by a chatty young intern with sparkling bluey-grey eyes, a series of ever-lengthening necklaces and a discreet nose stud. As we walked towards the room she asked me if I had ever been to the venue before. Many times, I told her. In fact, the first time I saw ‘Sir’ Bobby play (his lack of a knighthood is a national disgrace), was against Uruguay in the 1966 World Cup.

‘That was well before my time,’ she said. ‘In fact my parents hadn’t even been born then.’ The insensitivity of youth. I was tempted to tell her she looked a lot like Lucy Pitcher who moved into our road that same week in 1966 but she would have had no idea who Lucy was. Lucy is my memory. My indulgence. My problem.

I have to say, the Bobby Moore Room does justice to the eponym-ous legend. It is immaculate, unruffled and as spotless as the great man’s hands when, after giving them a discreet wipe on the velvet tablecloth, he received the Jules Rimet Trophy from Her Majesty. Through one window you can gaze over the deep green Wembley pitch and dream impossible dreams; through the other, look out over the grey, urban sprawl of north London and embrace dismal reality. Today, more than two hundred lords, ladies, MPs, journalists, former players and foreign emissaries tucked into a festive four-course meal in a room on two levels. The lower and mezzanine floors are connected by sweeping staircases – elegance redolent of the man himself. Which is why eyebrows moved northwards as I stood up to speak.

‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen, fellow fans, it’s an honour to be in a room that celebrates a legend of the game, but let’s be honest about Bobby Moore. He was slow, heavy-legged, not a good runner, couldn’t head a ball or make a tackle.’

I’d gone in hard. Nobby Stiles would be proud.

‘They’re not my words but those of a former teammate, Eddie Lewis and his manager at West Ham, Ron Greenwood.’ I paused and silently counted to five. ‘Bobby Moore was the best defender I ever played against and a gentleman of honour. Not my words, either, but those of arguably the best player of all time, one Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé. So . . . how could people have such conflicting views of the same player?’

I did a one-eighty-degree sweep. Four hundred attentive eyes gazed back.

‘Of course, what I haven’t told you is when the comments were made. Moore was a raw junior when Lewis and Greenwood first saw him at Upton Park; Pelé made his famous remark when Moore was captain of England, at the peak of his career. So how did a blond, curly-haired kid from Barking with limited natural ability make it to the very top of the game? The answer is simple. He listened to everybody around who knew how to play the game. For hours every day he listened and learned, listened and learned, soaking it all up like a sponge that never gets saturated. Years later, the kid who was slow, couldn’t head a ball or make a tackle came up with arguably the finest interception ever, against Jairzinho at the World Cup in 1970. The last time I looked, that tackle had been watched 197,000 times on YouTube.’

Yes, Moore was good. I was good, too. In fact, I was so good I wanted to listen to myself. And take notes.

‘All of us here today could learn a lot from Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore. Football, the sport we love, the game that engages more people round the planet than any other – male and female, rich and poor, black and white – needs to take a serious rain check. It has to do a Bobby Moore and start listening again: to the housebound pensioner who can’t afford to watch his local club live on TV because the monthly fee busts his budget; to the divorced father who, every fortnight, took his two young sons to a game but had to stop when it cost almost £200 for the privilege; to the thousands who have turned their backs on international football because of the corruption rife throughout the game; to the sound of a pin dropping here at Wembley, when England are playing a World Cup qualifier. Something’s wrong and we have to fix it. Fast.’

Now I was Alan Ball on the wing, running himself daft.

‘Bobby Moore wasn’t the quickest, or the most skilful, but he developed something few could match – an immaculate sense of timing, and not just in the tackle. Take that free kick for England’s first goal in the World Cup Final, for example. He waited just long enough before delivering a perfect ball for an unmarked Geoff Hurst to nod home.’

I paused again. We were deep in extra time. I took a long pass out of defence and hit the ball hard. Out of the ground would do.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, fellow fans, the commemorations of that football match in no man’s land in 1914 remind us that the game has the power to unite the bitterest of enemies. Can we take hold of that spirit and harness it for the common good? That is the challenge before us. If we are to recover the soul of football, we need to be honest, transparent and beyond reproach. A window of opportunity has opened which may not stay open for long. As Bobby Moore learned, timing is everything. Let’s make a goal-saving tackle on corruption and exploitation. We can recover the soul of this great game. Let’s do it, for the sake of our children and their children’s children.’

I sat down to, though I say it myself, thunderous applause. ‘Nice, one, Shears.’ It would be name-dropping to say who leaned over and made that comment from the side of his mouth. The speech seemed to cut it with the media, too. I did a bunch of interviews for radio and TV, pressed some influential flesh, got pleasantly mashed on a smooth French brandy and, on the way home in the taxi, nodded off in a warm stupor.

‘Well?’ said Emms, when I ambled through the front door. She was busy wrapping presents on the kitchen table.

‘Couldn’t have gone better,’ I said, closing the front door behind me. ‘After I’d finished speaking several people said how—’

‘That’s great. Perhaps you can help me put name tags on these presents.’ Emms is always the first to prick whatever bubble I have inflated.

With the last present tucked under the tree, I lay down on the sofa to try and sober up before Carols by Candlelight. I dozed off and now my mind was wandering: back to the late 1960s and those swirly art deco shops with black and gold interiors and subdued lighting, pumping out loud psychedelic sounds and strange-smelling incense; giggling girls trying on feather boas, wild plum-coloured hats with huge brims and floaty garments for drifting around in at home or looking groovy at the latest happening. And Lucy, cute in a red woollen mini-skirt, so short it must have taken only one ball of wool to knit.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned . . .

Chapter 2

Friday 25 December 2015

Before and since I lost Daggert (most people called my husband by his surname) to the little c, it has fallen to me to bring some measure of calm to our grandson David’s heart on Christmas Eve. Each year it threatens to burst out of his chest.

‘Read him one of those long Christmas classics,’ said Helen, last night. ‘They always sent me off to sleep.’ I think there was an ironic smile on my daughter’s face. So before bedtime I poured the usual glass of sherry for Santa. David put it by the fireplace, along with a carrot or two for the reindeer. My son-in-law Matt, the king of fads, has a nature and environment thing going on at the moment. Next to the carrots, he left three extra-large Tesco shopping bags, reusable ones, with a note saying Poop Here – ‘just in case the reindeer are caught short’. The notion that Rudolph might choose to empty his sizeable bowels chez Daggert sent young David into emotional orbit. Sleep was impossible. When he wasn’t bouncing around on the bed, I tried to sit him on my knee and read a story or two. No matter what Helen says, to my mind it’s never too early to start them on a classic. I tried Papa Panov’s Special Christmas by Tolstoy and The Burglar’s Christmas by Willa Cather. He wriggled, squirmed and changed the subject by asking me why I had a plaster on my arm.

‘I gave some of my blood to the hospital this morning,’ I explained.

He looked alarmed. ‘Did it hurt?’

I shook my head. ‘And if it saves someone’s life, it’s well worth it.’

‘Mark says that if you have a blood test and fail, you die.’

I laughed. ‘You can’t fail a blood test.’

‘Did Grandagg die because he ran out of blood?’ Grandagg was his own name for Daggert.

‘Not exactly. Grandagg ran out of good blood.’

‘I still miss him.’

‘So do I.’

‘Mark has four grandads.’

‘That’s very fortunate.’ I explained that his friend Mark has four grandads because both Mark’s grandparents have divorced and remarried. Only two were ‘real’ grandads and that quality was more important than quantity. Too much explanation: his eyes glazed over.

‘I’ve only got one now and I hardly ever see him,’ he said.

‘He lives a long way away,’ I explained. ‘It doesn’t mean he loves you any less.’

It was my turn to change the subject. ‘Pick any book from the bookcase with my name written on the inside cover.’

‘What, Nan?’

‘No, look for Sophie. I had some of these books when I was your age. I wasn’t a nan then.’

In a matter of moments, the contents of an entire shelf lay strewn across the floor.

‘Nah . . . nah . . . boring . . . nah . . . this one looks good.’ In David’s hands was Mr Pink-Whistle Interferes by Enid Blyton, priced 2s 6d. I inherited the book from my own grandmother.

‘No, no. You won’t like that one,’ I said. The cover illustration features a chubby, middle-aged man in a top hat and red tailcoat. Stubby hands outstretched and eyes open wide (too wide), he is grinning at a little blonde girl sitting up sweetly in bed. She has been playing with her toys but as Mr Pink-Whistle (seriously, Enid, what were you thinking?) approaches, the soldier, sailor and twin teddy bears are running for their lives. Pink-Whistle has form – or so it seems to twenty-first-century eyes.

‘He’s a paedo,’ said David.

‘How do you know what a—?’

‘Everyone knows what a paedo is.’

‘But you’re only . . . seven.’

‘They warn us at school.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’re listening, but—’

‘What’s this?’ A handwritten poem, wedged for several years between Mr Pink-Whistle and Roald Dahl’s Matilda (now that would be an interesting relationship) had fallen on the floor. Above the poem, ‘If Milly Comes for Christmas’, was a poor illustration of a West Highland white terrier.

‘Oh that!’ I took the page from David’s hand. ‘It’s a daft little thing I wrote myself. You won’t be interested.’

‘Read it to me. I like dogs . . .’

‘I don’t think—’

‘. . . and it’s about Christmas. Read it . . . please?’ For the first time, my young grandson got into bed.

I ought to explain: I love English, so much so that I teach it at a sixth-form college. I am not a writer, however, and definitely not a poet. Oh, I can ramble endlessly about iambic pentameters and heroic couplets, dissonance and doggerel. In fact, thinking about it now, I probably know too much. When it comes to writing, I am so overcritical that I pan whatever I’m going to write before I’ve put pen to paper. The thought of my own grandson judging something I’ve written, even a trite little poem, almost terrifies me. But by now he had snuggled right down, pulled the duvet over his head and muffled another ‘Please’.

I took a deep breath. ‘As it’s Christmas . . .’

If Milly comes for Christmas

I won’t feel so alone

We’ll sniff around the strawberry patch

Dig up that juicy bone

Other dogs, they know it’s there

I growl and make them run

This bone is for a special dog

Who’s lots and lots of fun

If Milly comes for Christmas

She’ll teach me not to bark

At scary shadows in the yard

She doesn’t mind the dark

I’ll let her doze all afternoon

Upon my snuggly bed

The floor is cold but I don’t mind

If I sleep there instead

If Milly comes for Christmas

I’ll need no brand new toys

I’ll go to bed on Christmas Eve

And never make a noise

When Santa comes a-calling

We’ll wag our tails like mad

And tell him how the kids are good

Even if they’re bad

She won’t be here for Christmas

It happens every year

I wonder what she’s doing

And why she can’t be here

Milly is my mummy

We’ve never met, you see

But somewhere, far across the world

I hope she thinks of me

For a few moments there was no movement or noise from beneath the duvet. Then, still muffled: ‘Is that it?’

‘Yes. I told you it wasn’t very good.’

‘Does Milly ever come?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You wrote it. You should know.’

‘I don’t. That’s the point of the poem.’

Another short silence.

‘I want Milly to come this Christmas,’ said David.

‘Not this year, but maybe next.’

‘Why did you write it?’

‘Oh, well . . . you know how much I like terriers, especially Westies.’ I tucked the poem into my pocket. David was still beneath the duvet. Maybe he had exhausted himself, I thought, anticipating the arrival of Santa and those reindeer in need of a comfort break. Either that or the poem had been so dull it had drained the adrenaline from his bloodstream. I took the opportunity to settle him down for the night. ‘Well, it’s gone eleven o’clock . . .’

‘That poem,’ blurted David. He was still beneath the duvet. ‘It’s about you and your real mummy, isn’t it?’ Out of the mouth of babes . . . for a few moments I was entirely thrown.

‘What . . . what makes you say that?’ My attempt to appear casual was defeated by the waver in my voice.

‘Mummy told