Until I was forty-nine, I always assumed that I would not make it past forty-eight.
It was one of those irrational feelings that comes, apparently, from nowhere; not a superstitious fear that I would actually die so much as a general acceptance that I wouldn’t be around after it. More Bilbo Baggins than James Dean.
Most of the time I didn’t think about it, but on the lead up to the critical birthday it was hovering just above my subconscious like a guilty secret, or an unwelcome obligation. On the day before the birthday, I found myself in a French hospital with my shoulder broken in seven places. My decision not to accept their invitation for an operation had much less to do with any clinical judgment than a cheerful spirit of ‘oh no, you don’t’ survivalism. I had made it this far, and no absent minded anaesthetist was going to fulfil lapsed prophesies.
Eleven years on, that old feeling remains only in so far as I am fascinated by what constitutes a ‘good innings’ these days, when someone is lucky enough to go ‘full term’.
‘Threescore years and ten’ was what my parents used to say, which was kind of ironic because, in the end, they only managed a couple of years either side of that line.
It all loomed large in my mind again yesterday when I heard that Peter ‘the Cat’ Bonetti, ex Chelsea and England goalie, had succumbed after a long illness at the age of 78.
Bonetti had an incredible talent for being in the right place to stop the ball, and was recognized as one of the greats, so it is rather sad that he is remembered almost as well today for being the scapegoat for England’s 3-2 defeat to Germany in the quarter-final of the 1970 World Cup, as he is for his brilliance.
Me, I remember him for his loveliness.
In the late seventies, and fed up with the whole football thing, he decamped to the Ross of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, where he ran a local bed and breakfast, and was the postman. And among the people he served was my grandmother, delivering to her correspondence from various bookmaking firms and a wide variety of right wing political groups, and collecting from her lovely letters to her grandchildren, plus all those recycled political tracts.
The basis of their good friendship was her utter ignorance of football and his genuine wish to be far away from it for a time. To her, he was simply ‘Peter the Post’, bringer of mail, purveyor of useful local gossip and an occasional fill in in one of her card sessions. To him, as he told me when I approached him years later at an event at Gillingham FC, she was just someone who saw Peter the human being, and not Peter the superstar footballer. The only opinion I ever heard her venture on footballers was a lament about the length of their hair.
For his part, when he came through the door with the mail, he was impeccably polite to visiting, star-struck grandchildren whilst, in reality, only really having eyes for her.
After a few years, Bonetti went off to play a bit at Dundee, and then made his gentle way back into the coaching set-up at both Chelsea and England. In the limited number of years she had left, my grandmother went on betting on the horses, working in her remorselessly hardscrabble vegetable patch and, of course, preparing for a take-over by the far left.
In their habit of treating all-comers absolutely the same, they had much in common.
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