Do I Remember Billy Bertoft?

Could I forget Billy Bertoft? Could I ‘eck! Unforgettable. As a lad the football ace Bertoft the One-Cap Wonder captured my teenage imagination. Then, to my delight our paths crossed at the English College in Rome. Do we still meet up? Nowadays my parish is on the grassy shores of Windermere and Billy is in Yorkshire, on the other side of the Pennines, so no. Meet at the odd funeral yes, but Old Romans meetings? Not our glass of ale.

But that name, Billy Bertoft, it’s never far from my imagination. His story was the kind of tale that even The Victor wouldn’t publish. Even though fact is stranger than fiction, it’s considerably more difficult to sell, even to 8 year-olds. Could you blame them? Imagine the scenario Billy put before me, remembering that fateful spring…

———-

Spring 1947. A young man stands outside a chip shop at the humbler end of Rotherham’s College Street. His cap is pulled down over his eyes, and he has bought the portion of chips partly to warm his numb and whitened knuckles. He has the furtive look of a man between trains, soon to hurry back to Central station to catch his connection home. No time to hang around. It is no longer wise to dally in this area where he is so well-known – in that little village outside Deneby people had been quite open in their suspicion of that lad they had seen in the papers who neither had a job nor sought one. Why could people not leave him alone just for a while? He had decisions to make…

Though he meant to just swallow the chips quickly and get out of the drizzly chill of another April evening, his eyes were diverted to the grease-splattered snippets of news offered by the newspaper that wrapped his chips. The headline he noticed almost immediately, it left him irritated but resolved – but held no news for him:

BERTOFT SEARCH, TO SAVE ENGLAND

Even before he left school Billy had been a darling of the talent-spotters. First the amateur sniffers for the county schoolboys, then the professionals from the two big Sheffield clubs, and finally the scouts for England Schoolboys and Under-21s. School behind him, Billy settled comfortably into dividing his time between carrying messages and brewing tea for Shuttletwistle and Son (Solicitors,) and playing midfield in a long and varied fixture list of post-war matches, tours, and ersatz international with a selection of Poles and former Free French. Young men were still being called up to clear the debris of the world war, but not Billy. Agonizingly for him, the soccer starlet was deemed unfit at the medical which followed his call-up. He was so disgusted that he did not even ask why. The prompt letter which summoned him to Rotherham General two days later clarified matters. What he thought was a troublesome cough was in fact pneumonia, a death sentence in those days.

It took twelve months to drive the disease away, and over that year Billy changed. As news reached him of the fears, hopes and fatalities of ex-classmates taking part in more public hostilities, he shared a life of similar regimentation in the battlefield of his well-drilled hospital. There he came across matters of life and death far from what he had ever experienced before.  Especially when he met young Sarah Overton.

They were brought together by the ravages of an inquiring tortoise called Stanley, who shared the hospital garden with those patients able to bear the chilly sunshine of a Yorkshire morning. Stanley lurched towards a fallen Bible and Billy saw a girl stretching sideways out of her wheelchair to save her Good Book. He crouched to assist her, and Stanley made off with a broken biscuit instead. Sarah smiled in gratitude and the nervous 18 year old, two years her senior, wondered out loud if he had seen her at St. Bede’s, his local church.

“Oh, that would be the Catholic one on Station Road, wouldn’t it? “, Sarah enquired with interest.

“Yes, founded by Benjamin Badger they say, an Anglican”, replied Billy informatively.

“Well you wouldn’t have seen me there, we’re Methodists. Do you know our church on Masborough Road? Well sit down here, I’ll tell you how to find it”, she said invitingly.

And so their acquaintance began, a daily hour to share the developing saga of his gradual recovery and of her enduring consumption, which never waned. It left her body wasted but her mind was calmed by her prayer with her family, and with Billy.

Billy sought frantically to find a reason for her suffering, from the Bible and from his parish clergy. He brought any news back to Sarah, hoping to understand what they were exploring together.

Another search was also shared; What was Billy’s future to be once his convalescence was just a memory? Should he to apply for National Service? Unlikely, so soon after recuperation. Or should he get back to climbing the ladder to sporting excellence, popularity, and success? Or, that other alternative in the shadows of his mind: To look to God to make sense of the mystery of this illness that had turned his life around – for the rest of his life, perhaps?

———–

So, a young man stood in the shade of a chip shop serving its last few customers, reading from the newspaper wrapping his food. Raindrops danced off the awning above him and on into the gutter below. A tear drop might have joined them had he not blinked it back, for the three lines at the foot of the third column (beside the ‘Ovaltine’ advertisement) announced the tragic death at the age of I7 of Sarah, daughter Mr Albert Overton, the Methodist Minister of Langthorpe Road church. It had been a year since Billy had seen her, a year during which he had wavered between the counsel of those who bid him to sign on full-time for Sheffield Wednesday, and the advice of the Bishop of Leeds – who was willing to provide a place for him in the seminary at Rome.

“It’s Bertoft… and it’s there! “. So had run the familiar couplet of wireless and Pathé News commentators during that golden age of English sport when Alf Tupper clinched the cross-country laurels at the last water-jump, Roy and his Rovers won the Cup, and Bertoft dazzled us all time after time with that familiar scorcher in the top left-hand corner of the net.

The intensity of Billy’s hospital discussions with Sarah had given way to listlessness. He was letting his life’s decisions be taken by others. Mr Shuttletwistle had offered him a career but Bert Stoates, the Wednesday manager had insisted, so Billy signed a contract and played weekly, but in his mind no decision had been truly made. It was a time when the English College seminary in Rome enclosed its wards with an almost contemplative rule, and home was far away and seldom seen. Is that what he wanted?

As he stood on that street corner in Rotherham the question arose once more: Was fifteen years as a footballer the true future for a man who had seen beyond the sporting life to eternal life?

Contemplating Sarah, Billy found himself making his way back to the railway station, stopping only to crush the newspaper into a ball and propel it into a nearby dust-cart – a deft flick of the left instep. The ticket-seller was a little surprised to see that furtive young man back again, and asking for a refund on the ticket he had only just bought! But when he then enquired about the times of trains to London the clerk put down the refunds pad, scratched the lobe of his left ear, and stared sidelong at Billy asking:

“Ee…you’re not that Bertoft chap that’s been missing these last two matches, art thou? I do believe you are…”

“Don’t fret, I got lost but I’m found again”.

“Where’s tha’ been lad – England manager’s after thee!”

“Hmm, they call it a ‘retreat’ I think…”

———

The 1947 Sunday Chronicle Football Annual records that Billy Bertoft went on to complete his last season for Sheffield Wednesday that year before going away to train to become a Roman Catholic priest. That England match? The game was a 3-0 win against France at Wembley. A useful centre from Bertoft began the move ending in England’s decisive third goal.

On his way home after the match Billy stopped once more at Rotherham, not to visit the chip-shop (no soft-hearted sentimentalist, is Bill), but to visit the grave of Sarah Overton and to tell her of the decision he had finally made. There too he left his only England cap.

John Kenny

24 July 1984

Inspired and approved by a bemused Fr William Burtoft, Leeds Diocese.