Whatever Happened to Billy Parks

Is this it? Is this the end? Is this death?

For a few seconds everything is quiet. Nothing. Not a sound. There’s just me, Billy Parks, Parksy, bloody Billy Parks of West Ham United and England, legend, lying, alone, on the ground, crumpled and small and breathing with a violence that makes my body shudder.

I can hear anxious voices in the distance. ‘See that, that old geezer’s fallen over,’ they say and the boys who’d been playing football start to run towards me.

I’m not old, I think.

And my lips move, silently.

I’m Billy Parks.

2

I was six and I’d cried when I had to leave my cousins’ house. I’d gone on the bus with my mother all the way to Dagenham. All the way, just the two of us – her in a pretty cotton dress with red flowers on it, me in my Sunday bib and tucker. It had been the best day of my life. And when it was time to go I’d felt my head go down and sticky silent tears force their way into my eyes: proper painful tears brought on by the awful, heavy, horrible dread that I was going to have to go back home. I wiped them away furiously because you get nothing for crying, Billy.

My cousins’ house had a back garden. My Uncle Eric had ruffled my hair and Aunty Peggy, gorgeous Aunty Peggy, who always smelled of the promise of something exciting that I didn’t yet understand, had smiled this lovely smile at me and my cousins, twins, Bobby and Keith and their sister Alice, as we ran around, laughing out loud, big carefree childish pointless laughs, and shouted and pretended to be Cowboys and Indians. It was the best day of my life and it had made the whispered tick-tock silence of home seem unbearable. I hadn’t wanted to leave. I wouldn’t leave. I would stay – why couldn’t I stay? Even Mother had seemed happy here in her dress with red flowers on it, sitting in the kitchen drinking only tea, smiling at me as I played.

Smiling at me.

God she was beautiful that day.

We’d left, me with my head down and my mother’s hand in between my shoulder blades. I’d sulked all the way to my home where my father, Billy Senior, never ruffled my hair.

Oh my poor, poor father. The poor, poor bastard.

That day, as I played and my mother laughed, he had sat in his usual place in our house, in the open back doorway of our kitchen, looking out at the back yard and up into the east London sky at the clouds that passed on their heavenly journey, waiting for the day when his own celestial cloud would arrive and mercifully take him away. Every day. Every single silent, wasted, disappearing, bloody day.

Sometimes I would stand in the kitchen with a little ball in my hand and look at the back of his head. Other dads played games, I knew this, I’d heard this, so I would shuffle my feet against the lino and make a noise before Mother would arrive and tell me to be quiet and go and do something else on my own.

Home was sad silence. Home was doing things on my own. Home was listening to the footsteps of my sister Carol, who was ten years older than me, clip-clopping across the stone hallway on her way out of the house to wherever it was she went to seek solace. Home was the slow monotone sobs of our mother and my own breathing as I lay on my tummy and played with little toy cars and little wooden animals that I liked to line up in a quiet row.

I had known nothing else, but then I went to my cousins’ house in Dagenham and I discovered a wonderful truth: not all homes were like mine. I was six. I was six and I’d had my hair ruffled and smelled the feminine smell of my lovely smiling aunty. And now, like an addict, I wanted more of that, that wonderful life.

I feel guilty admitting that. I mean, my poor, poor bastard dad. It wasn’t his fault. He’d not always sat mute in the back kitchen. Once upon a time he and Mother had smiled and laughed too, once upon a bloody time he had held her and told her not to worry because he was only going there to ‘mend broken tanks, not to fight’. And she kissed him and pressed her breast against his chest and he had pulled his face away from hers so that he could see her and remember her, and as he looked at her he’d promised, ‘I’ll be fine, it’ll be just like being in Mile End’, and then he’d smiled his lovely smile with his twinkling blue eyes and joked, ‘Only hotter.’

That, I discovered, was 1941 as he left for Burma.

He was taken prisoner the next year and it was another five years until she saw him again. She saw him and she held him, but he never really returned to her. The poor bastard – the poor pair of bastards.

He had tried. Or so I’m told. He had gone back to the garage on Woodgate Road and a pint down The Albion and West Ham on a Saturday afternoon. He had bounced Carol on his knee and smiled because she adored him, and he’d got on with the task of blotting out the images of Burma and the camp at Thanbyuzayat and the corrugated iron shack with the waist-high ceiling that had been his jail and the rats and snakes and scorpions and the slow death brought on by malnutrition and the exhaustion of working day after day on that bloody railway, or the faster, better, death brought on by dysentery and malaria and typhoid.

He got on with the job of blotting out the images of his dead friends and of the camp guards with their sticks and their swords and the ‘Hellship’ home when the Americans accidentally torpedoed them, and the awful, overwhelming gut-wrenching feeling of guilt when he eventually reached home in 1946 and walked down what was left of our street, Scotland Street, in Stratford.

It was the guilt that did it.

At first he could block out the images. He could deal with the pain of loss. His body recovered, he put the weight back on, he was always an athletic man – but the guilt never left him. The guilt grew like a creeping winter shadow, placing everything into cold darkness. And once the guilt had gnawed at everything, stripped him bare, the images couldn’t be blotted out any more.

Even me, little Billy, born in December 1948 and loving him from the moment I first formed a memory, even I couldn’t stop the images that came to him each day: of his mate Eddie Hastings from Romford, who had been a postman – a postman, from Romford, he shouldn’t have been in bloody Burma building railways, he shouldn’t have died in my dad’s arms, incoherent with disease and weakness and thirst; and the big Colour Sergeant, Harry Green, who was executed, and how he had shouted out for his wife and his sons just before they decapitated him; and all the others, all the bloody others, who came to him every day and did their spectral dance around his poor suffering head.

I couldn’t take away those images. Not even when I held my little ball and looked up at him with the same twinkling blue eyes that he had once had.

‘Why are you sitting by the back door, Dad?’ I asked, and I curse myself now, because I know now that my presence, my question, my little bloody ball, would have just added to his guilt.

‘Will you play with me, Dad?’

‘I’m sorry, son, I’m tired. I’m so tired. Maybe tomorrow.’

My poor scared broken dad.

I would nod, disappointed. I wanted him to hold me and I know now, I’m sure now, that he wanted to hold me, but it wouldn’t happen. Ever. He would never play with me.

And as my father sat quietly and neatly waiting for the turmoil in his head to go away, the life was sapped from my mother.

During the war, she’d worked as a clerk for the east London General Omnibus Company keeping tidy ledgers to try to stop herself from worrying. She had worried though, of course she had, every day for five years. Worrying and fantasising and yearning for his twinkling blue eyes and his sandy hair and his lean athleticism and an end to the crushing weight of loneliness.

The man she yearned for never came home.

So she stayed lonely.

And the local women gathered around, because that was what they did round our way. And they helped her when she fell with me after one of the few times Billy Senior had come to her as a man, and they helped her when he stopped going to work, and they helped her when he woke every night crying. They told her that it was alright to have a couple of snifters of Mrs Ingle’s home-made gin from time to time.

But from time to time became every day, so they stopped gathering around.

I would be sent in the morning round to Mrs Ingle’s (always go round the back, Billy) with a coin in my trouser pocket and a note. And Mrs Ingle would ask me how me ma was and how me old man was and give me a flask and send me on my way. Your mother’s tonic, don’t drop it, don’t break it, get home straight away.

I broke it once. Only once. And that was on the day that I discovered football.

I always took the same route to Mrs Ingle’s: up our road, past the corner shop and the Nissen huts, through the lane that ran between Eric Road and Vernon Street and across the waste ground that had, until the Luftwaffe had bombed it into oblivion four years before I was born, been Singleton Street and Sharples Street. Now it was just a derelict piece of ground about the size of, well, the size of a football pitch.

On the day that I discovered football I crossed it on my way to Mrs Ingle’s just like I did most days. Then I went round the back of her house, just as I was told, knocked on the door and was met by Mr Ingle in his vest and braces chewing on a mouthful of thick brown bread. He looked at me witheringly and motioned for me to stay where I was. A little while later Mrs Ingle came to the back door – funny, recently our transactions had become more businesslike. She had stopped asking me about my parents; instead I would silently hand over the money and she would silently hand over the flask, we would exchange a knowing look and off I’d go.

This particular morning was no different. I took the flask and put it into the little brown paper bag, just as I was ordered, and started to walk back home. When I reached the waste ground at Singleton Street there was a football match going on. I knew a bit about football, not much, just bits and pieces I’d picked up from my cousins. What I did know though was that if the bigger boys were playing I would have to walk around the pitch or risk a cuff around the ear from some twelve-year-old psychopath.

Wisely, I started to walk around the makeshift pitch, skipping over the puddles that formed in the blast craters to make sure that I didn’t get my shoes wet. It was the last childish thing I would do because halfway around the pitch my life changed for ever.

‘Oi you, kid.’

I turned around to see an enormous nine-year-old shouting at me. Chris Cockle, his name was, a boy with thick arms and legs and a head of dark wavy hair. He wore his grey V-neck jumper taut across his chest like chainmail. I knew Chris Cockle, everyone knew Chris Cockle. He was a fearless slayer of any beast that crossed his path.

‘What?’ I said, trying to sound somehow more confident than I actually was – a trait that has got me out of countless good hidings over the years.

‘Come on,’ said Cockle, ‘we’re a man short. Put your bag down by the goal, you can play for my team. You can play right-back. You can be Alf Ramsey.’

‘He can’t be Alf Ramsey. He’s just a kid, he’s rubbish.’ The dissenting voice was that of Charlie Scott, who was ten and had a dozen brothers and sisters who would hang around outside their house like cats. Chris Cockle wasn’t having that.

‘If he’s going to play right-back, he’s got to be Alf Ramsey.’

I had no idea whatsoever what they were going on about. I had no idea what right-back meant, never mind the name of Tottenham and England’s Alf Ramsey. I assumed that Alf Ramsey was one of the other lads on his team. All I knew was that if Chris Cockle wanted me to play, then I had no choice – Mother would have to wait for her tonic. I put the bag down by the goalposts, which were made up of a mound of rocks on one side and a stick stuffed into a hole on the other, and strutted cautiously on to the pitch, which was marked by a series of jumpers and coats.

This was serious. This was football and football is more serious than anything else.

‘Come on,’ said another gigantic boy. ‘Go and stand over there, we’re playing the lads from Manor Park. Don’t go near the ball unless I tell you, and if the ball comes to you just kick it to me. Alright? I’m Billy Wright, you’re Alf Ramsey.’

Billy Wright! This was even more confusing, surely the lad who’d introduced himself as Billy Wright was, in fact, Ginger Henderson who lived behind the corner shop and whose dad had been killed in the war. I decided against saying anything.

The game kicked off with the lads from Manor Park attempting to play a long diagonal ball out towards where I had been told to stand. Ginger Henderson (or Billy Wright) went to head it, I moved out of the way, Ginger missed the ball completely and the Manor Park left-wing was left with only the goalie, Lanky Johnson, to beat: thankfully, he put the ball wide of the pile of rocks.

Ginger picked himself up, Lanky Johnson, or Bert Williams as he had taken to calling himself, gave him a bollocking, so Ginger gave me a similar bollocking and the game continued.

This was football.

There were goals and movement and swear words and arguments and kicks and shoves and I loved it all. Lads became spitting, snarling men imbued with a sense of purpose. I started to relax. I started to watch the ball and work out, instinctively, where it would go. I started to watch the movement of my teammates; I worked out that Chris Cockle was good because he was big and fast, but little Archie Stevenson who was sat in the middle of the park, just in front of the enormous water-filled bomb crater (If the ball goes in there, we restart with a drop ball, OK?), was by far the best player, as he could spray passes out to the right and left. On the right, was a little fat boy called Stanley Matthews who was quite good, but the tall gangly boy, called Tom Finney, on the left-hand side, was rubbish because the ball would just bounce off his legs.

Impulsively, like a salmon lured upstream by invisible forces, I wandered from my given position at right-back and made the diametric move to the left-wing. It just seemed the most natural thing for me to do, as though it was where I belonged; I wanted the ball, I wanted to play football, I wanted to kick it, I wanted to be part of this, to feel the rush of scoring a goal, a prospect that caused a pounding of excitement that I had never felt before. Now, playing football, I was alive.

And then it happened. I scored my first goal.

Stanley Matthews, who I would later come to know and adore as Johnny Smith (oh poor, lost Johnny, Johnny Smith), cut in from the right and tried to swing over a cross for Chris Cockle: Chris jumped marginally early and the ball glanced off his bouncy brown hair across the face of the goal towards me. It dropped perfectly. I controlled it – alright, not particularly elegantly with my knee (my beautiful close control would come later) – and then instinctively, without considering anything, without a conscious thought in my little mind, found that my body had naturally formed itself into a position to shoot at the goal.

‘Shoot!’

I shot. With all my tiny six-year-old frame behind it, I shot and the ball headed towards the piece of rusty iron railing that was the near post of the Manor Park goal. Then, with the assistance of the uneven pitch the ball bounced over the goalkeeper’s leg (if he had dived with his hands he would have prevented my first ever goal, but such are the vagaries of sport) and inside the near post.

Goal. Goal. My first goal. My first bloody goal.

I felt my body and mind surge with the glorious fresh air of life. My face beamed triumphantly for the first time. Chris Cockle came over and ruffled my hair. ‘Well done, son,’ he said. ‘What’s your name again?’

‘Billy Parks,’ I said and Chris Cockle smiled at me: ‘Well done, Parksy,’ he said, then turned to the opposition with a bellowing, captain’s roar: ‘That’s eight all. Next goal the winner.’

Next goal the winner. Next goal was a cause of problems and strife.

As I chased everything on the pitch, and some of the lads started to feel a bit tired, our team became vulnerable to a break-away attack. The Manor Park centre-half, Lennie Hansen, kicked long, Ginger didn’t deal with it and the Manor Park striker, a talented little lad called Spider, who was later destined to drown in an accident involving an old well, nipped in and steered the ball past Lanky Johnson. The ball clipped the piece of wood knocking it over on to the paper bag that contained Mother’s tonic.

All hell broke loose. As Spider reeled off in celebration, Chris Cockle, Ginger Henderson and Charlie Scott declared that it wasn’t a goal as it had hit the post. Lennie Hansen wasn’t having this and he and a couple of the other Manor Park lads squared up to them.

As Chris and Lennie, now reinforced by most of the other players, exchanged blows, I ran over to my brown paper bag and surveyed the damage: the flask had smashed and the tonic had seeped out emitting a pungent oily smell. I put my hands up to my head. This was bad.

I walked home. I knew that the broken flask was a tragedy. I knew I had to think of a good lie, a good story, but all I could think about was my goal. How the ball had left my foot and how the other boys had shouted ‘Shoot!’ and I had smashed it into the near post, and how everyone had smiled at me, and how Chris Cockle had ruffled my hair and asked my name and christened me Parksy. This was what life was about. This was an elevation above and beyond the mere existence of my usual days. This was living.

But the flask was still smashed. The goal couldn’t mend that.

Back at home Carol was waiting for me. Her face swollen with tears and rage.

‘Where have you been, you idiot? Mum’s been waiting for you all morning. You know you’re supposed to come straight back from Mrs Ingle’s. Where have you been?’

‘I’ve been playing football,’ was all that I could muster.

She screamed at me, ‘Football? Football? Who cares about bloody football?’ She paused, then seethed through gritted teeth, ‘Just give me the bottle.’

She held her hand out and my head dropped.

‘It got broken. It was an accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen,’ I was mumbling.

Carol started screaming at me again.

My mother appeared at the bottom of the stairs: her face was lined and taut and anxious. ‘Where’s the bottle from Mrs Ingle’s, Billy?’

‘He’s broken it, Mum,’ my sister squealed. ‘He’s been playing football.’

I saw my mother’s face break into a desperate ugly rage, and she advanced on me and rained down blows on my head and back in syncopated rhythm as she scolded me.

‘You silly, silly boy. I-only-asked-you-to-do-one-thing. You silly, silly boy.’

As the force of the blows diminished, I looked up, my own face now a mass of rushing tears, and I could see through the kitchen the back of Father’s head tilted upwards, looking, as ever, towards the heavens.

‘Dad,’ I shouted through sobs. ‘Dad, I scored a goal. You should have seen my goal. Stanley Matthews crossed it and I smashed it into the net.’

Father didn’t turn around.

A few weeks later they fished him out of the canal.

Details: Match 1, March 1955

Venue: The Waste Ground by Singleton Street

Chris Cockle’s XI 8 v. Lads from Manor Park 8

(Match abandoned after brawl erupts following Eddie ‘Spider’ Linton’s controversial disputed winner)

Line up: Lanky Johnson (Bert Williams), Billy Parks (Alf Ramsey), Tommy Weston (Bill Eckersley), Ginger Henderson (Billy Wright), Topper Winters (Jimmy Dickinson), An Other (some lad with glasses who was never seen again), Archie Stevenson (Alfredo Di Stefano), Peter Scott (Wilf Mannion), Johnny Smith (Stanley Matthews), Chris Cockle (Ferenc Puskas though changed to Nat Lofthouse shortly after half-time), Brownie Brown (Tom Finney)

Sadly, other than Lenny Hansen and Eddie ‘Spider’ Linton, the Manor Park line up has been lost in time.

Attendance: 6 (including Charlie Scott’s little sisters and a policeman who arrived to break up the fight)

3

The first thing I see is the drip. I know it’s a drip and that must mean that I’m in a hospital. But I can’t for the life of me think why? The last thing I remember is looking at the grass on Southwark Park. What was it about the grass?

I look at the drip and see a little blurry bubble – which may be a droplet of my blood – make its way down the drip-line towards the needle that leads, via a vein in my hand, to me.

I’m uncomfortable: I’ve been sleeping at a weird angle with my neck turned sideways in a different direction to the rest of me.

I turn my neck – that’s better, that’s comfy. My eyes close again and I give a warm welcome to the wondrous feeling of sleep without giving any more thought to where I am or why, or the drip that’s happily filling me with some kind of liquid.

Funny how sleep can do that.

The next time I wake up there’s a doctor staring down at me; a smiling Asian fella, who’s close enough for me to taste the cheese-and-onion butty he’s had from the canteen. Behind him are two nurses; one of them is looking at a clipboard and nodding at something the doctor is saying, the other one is smiling at me like I’m some kind of half-wit.

‘Ah, hello, Mr Parks,’ says the doctor. ‘Nice to have you back in the land of the living. How are you feeling?’

‘I’m fine,’ I say, and instantly try to get up on my elbow. One of the nurses intervenes, plumping up my pillow and easing me slightly forward – she’s got nice breath; she must have had the salad.

‘I am Dr Aranthraman,’ says the doctor. ‘They tell me that you are a famous footballer?’

I am. I am Billy Parks.

He doesn’t wait for any response, instead he starts to say things to me in a doctor-type of way, talking quickly in heavily accented English. I can’t understand him. What’s he going on about? He tells me something about some tests. Then something about my liver and only 15% of it working or perhaps he said 50%, I’m not sure. But they were going to clean it or something by giving me some medication.

And how often do I drink?

‘Now and again,’ I say, then I try to smile at one of the nurses. ‘The crowd expects it,’ I add. But the nurse doesn’t appear to understand.

Dr Aranthraman gives me a lecture about not drinking. I’ve heard it before.

‘Your liver is in a bad way,’ he tells me, ‘just one more drink could kill you.’ Then he tells me that he’s placed me on the waiting list for a transplant, but I won’t have one if I continue to drink alcohol. As he speaks I start to feel very tired: perhaps it’s his halitosis?

‘Do you have any questions?’ he asks me.

‘Has anyone been in to see me?’ I ask. The doctor’s lips thin and I see a nurse shake her head.

When I wake up the third time, I am startled by the sight of Gerry Higgs sitting quietly in the corner seat of my room. What’s he doing here? I stare at him. He appears to be asleep, his hat on his knee and his head bowed. What the fuck is he doing in my room?

I remember now, his question, and the park, and what was it he told me he was part of? The Institute or something, no, not the Institute, what was it? The Service. Yes that’s right, the Service.

As I look at him, one of his manic eyes jerks open and stares at me, before the other one joins it. He smiles, like he’s played a really good joke.

‘Mr Higgs,’ I say. ‘I didn’t expect you to be here.’

‘All part of my work,’ he says, then quickly changes the subject before I can ask him what in the name of God he’s going on about. ‘So, what have the doctors said then?’ he asks.