My husband never got to wear a team shirt in his life and he passed away five days before our son's awards night. The coach rang at eleven o'clock and asked me to bring the boy an hour early.
PART 1 — THE NIGHT BEFORE
Ray was fourteen when his father told him the football would have to stop.
There were four of them and Alf was out of work and Ray was the oldest, so he went into the yard on the Pell Road instead.
He never wore a team shirt. Not once, in fifty-one years.
When Kit was six and asked if he could play, Ray went and got the forms that same afternoon. He had them on the table before the boy's tea was out.
Eight years of standing at the side of a pitch in his work trousers. He knew every single one of their names and he knew which ones had somebody coming and which ones did not.
He kept spare socks in the car because Kit forgot his about once a fortnight for eight years.
Then he got ill in the February of last year.
By the final he could not leave the ward. He watched it on my phone while I tried to hold it still in a stand with the wind going.
And when they won I heard my husband crying down that phone, and he kept saying the same thing.
"Tell him I saw it. Tell him I saw."
Kit rang him from the changing room afterwards with about nine of them shouting in the background.
And he said: "Next time, Dad, you've got to be in the photo."
And Ray said: "I'm planning on it, mate."
He died five days before the awards night.
The night before it I went up and Kit was sat on the end of his bed with his shirt washed and folded next to him.
He said: "Have I got to go?"
I sat down.
"No, love."
And he picked at the sleeve of it for a bit and then said: "They do the pictures with the dads."
That was all he said. Nothing else, all night.
I messaged Dev Marwood at about half nine. I said we might not make it, and that I would talk to Kit again but I was not going to push him, and that I hoped he understood.
And my phone went at about eleven.
"Sorry it's so late," he said. "But I need to ask you for something. Please bring him."
I went out into the kitchen so Kit would not hear.
I said: "Dev. His grandparents are coming and his auntie's coming. But every other boy is going to have his dad stood next to him and he's going to have to stand there and watch it."
And Dev said: "I know."
And neither of us said anything for a bit.
And then he said: "Please trust me on this. And if he'll come, I need the two of you there an hour before everybody else."
I said: "An hour? Why an hour?"
And he said: "Just trust me."
I said all right and put the phone down, and then stood in my own kitchen at about ten past eleven feeling something I was not expecting, which was annoyance.
I want that in. People tell this story back to me now with a woman in it who trusted a good man, and that is not what happened in that kitchen.
What I thought was: he is going to do something.
A school did something at Kit's primary when a boy's mother died in 2019 — an assembly, a tree, a thing with candles — and that child moved schools the following September.
So I stood there with the phone in my hand and I had a very clear picture of two hundred people on their feet clapping and my son in the middle of it with nowhere to put his face.
And I nearly rang back. I got as far as the screen.
And then I thought about Ray, who liked that man, and who had said about four times over eight years that Dev Marwood was the only one at that club who talked to the kids like they were people.
So I put the phone down on the side and went up to bed and did not sleep.
In the morning Kit put that shirt on without saying much.
I picked my keys up and we went out an hour early.
PART 2 — THE HOUR
The clubhouse at Stenby is a prefab with two changing rooms and a kitchen hatch.
Dev was in the car park on his own at half nine with the lights on behind him.
He did not do the face at us. That is the first thing and it mattered more than he knows, because by then both of us had had about nine days of the face.
He said: "Kit. Come in a minute. Your mum can come or not, up to you."
And Kit looked at me and I said it was up to him.
And my son said: "Can she come."
So the three of us went into the home changing room with the strip lights on and the benches empty and that smell that every changing room in the country has.
And there was a kit bag on the bench.
Dev did not make a speech. He said: "Right. Before anybody gets here. This is yours and it's got nothing to do with today."
And he unzipped it.
There is a shirt in it. Stenby Colts, the proper one, same as the lads wear.
Number fourteen.
And on the back it says CATTERALL.
Kit said: "That's mine."
And Dev said: "No, mate. Look at the size."
It is a men's extra large.
And then Dev Marwood got his phone out, and he found a photograph, and he turned it round and gave it to my son.
He handed him the phone. He did not hold it up and he did not stand over him while he looked.
He gave a fourteen-year-old the whole phone and then went and stood by the door with his back half turned, looking at the fixture list on the wall, which he must have known off by heart.
Four minutes. He looked at a laminated fixture list for four minutes.
My husband is sat up in a bed at Marnhill in that shirt.
He is fifty-one and he has lost about three stone and his arms are out of it like a boy's arms, and he has got a tube taped to the back of his hand and he is grinning like an absolute idiot.
The date on it is the twenty-ninth. Three days before he died.
And my son sat down on a bench in a changing room and looked at a photograph of his father in a football shirt for about four minutes and did not say one word.
Then he did the thing that undid me, which Dev had not planned for and which neither of us saw coming.
He put the phone down on the bench and picked the shirt up out of the bag and turned it round and looked at the back of it.
And then he smelled it.
Fourteen years old. He held a football shirt up to his face in a changing room with his mother and his coach watching and he smelled it, the way you do with somebody's jumper.
And it does not smell of anything. It is a new shirt out of a bag; it smells of a printing shop at Ardmere.
He put it down and said: "It's a bit new."
And Dev Marwood said: "He only had it on about an hour, mate. We couldn't do much about that."
And my son said: "No. It's all right."
And that is when he cried, and it lasted about ninety seconds, and then he wiped his face on the inside of his own shirt and said: "What time's everyone here?"
PART 3 — ELEVEN TIMES
Dev Marwood went to that hospital eleven times.
Not once. Eleven, between the April and the first of August, and I did not know about nine of them.
He is a joiner. He does the Colts on a Tuesday and a Thursday and Saturday mornings and he does not get paid for any of it, and he has two of his own.
He went on his way home from jobs. Twenty minutes, half an hour, in his work clothes, and he never once rang me first to check whether it was all right, which I have thought about and which I think was deliberate.
Because if he had rung me I would have organised it. And then Ray would have known it was organised.
They talked about the team. That is nearly all of it. Dev has told me they did about nine hours on that team between them and about forty minutes on anything else.
And at some point in the June my husband told that man a story he had not told me in twenty-two years of marriage.
He told him about being fourteen, and about his father, and about the day he went into the yard on the Pell Road.
And Dev Marwood went away and ordered a shirt.
Number fourteen was not a coincidence either and he will not take any credit for it.
He has told me it was the only number the place at Ardmere had left in that size, which I believed for about a fortnight.
Then I looked at the squad list. Fourteen is Kit's number. It has been since he was nine.
He did it in the July. He paid for it himself, out of a joiner's money, and he had it done with the name on it at the place at Ardmere that does the club's kit.
And then he sat on it for about three weeks because he could not work out how to give it to a dying man without it being a terrible thing to do.
He took it in on the twenty-ninth.
And he has told me that he nearly did not get it out of the bag, and that what made him do it is that Ray asked him how the Tuesday had gone.
I asked Dev, in the October, what my husband said when he saw it.
And he said: "Nothing. He didn't say anything for a bit."
And then Ray asked him to help him sit up, and then he asked him to pass him his glasses, and then he looked at the name on the back.
And then he said one thing, which Dev has given me and which I have not been able to put anywhere else.
He said: "Our Alf would've had a fit."
Not thank you. Not anything about Kit. His father, who has been dead eleven years, who took the football off him in 1988 because there were four of them and no money.
Fifty-one years old, three days out, in a bed at Marnhill with a shirt on, and the first person he thought of was the man who said no.
And Dev Marwood, who had never met Alf Catterall and who had heard about him once, in the June, said exactly the right thing.
He said: "Probably. Shall we get a picture then.
PART 4 — WHAT RAY ASKED HIM
Here is the part that has taken me the longest.
In that room on the twenty-ninth, after the photograph, my husband asked Dev Marwood to do one thing.
He asked him not to do anything at the awards.
I have it almost word for word because Dev wrote it down in his van afterwards, which is a thing I did not know a man like that would do.
Ray said: "Don't do a thing with it on the night. Don't put me on a screen. Don't have them all clap. I'm not having him be the lad whose dad died."
And then: "Give him the shirt in a room on his own and then let him get on with it."
So that is what the hour was.
The hour was the whole of the plan.
There was no banner. There was no minute's silence and no empty chair and nobody wore a black armband, and about four people have been quite put out about that since.
Dev Marwood had a photograph on his phone that would have had two hundred people in bits in nine seconds, and a dying man had told him not to, and he did not.
He told me afterwards that the hardest part was the committee.
Because somebody on that committee had already drafted something for the running order. A tribute, two minutes, with a photograph on the screen in the hall.
And Dev had to go and get that taken off, in the week, without being able to explain why.
Somebody on that committee has a daughter who does the social media for the club, and there were two photographs ready to go up on the night, and one of them was Ray at the side of a pitch in 2019.
None of this was malice. I want that said, because I know the woman who drafted it and she is seventy-one and she has run that tea hatch since 2004.
People want to do something. That is all it is, and it is not nothing, and most of the time it is the best anybody has.
What Dev Marwood had, and nobody else in that clubhouse had, was an instruction from the one person entitled to give one.
And he could not produce it. He could not stand in a committee meeting and say his father told me not to, because the first question would have been when, and the answer to that was three days before, in a bed, and it would have been round Stenby by the Friday.
So he had to just refuse. With no reason. To eleven people who were trying to be kind.
He told them he would resign over it. That is in a message he sent to the chairman on the thirty-first of July and the chairman has shown it to me.
A man of forty-four threatened to walk away from a thing he does for nothing, for free, on a Tuesday, in order to stop two hundred people clapping for my husband.
The chairman, to be fair to him, backed down in about eleven minutes and has not said a word about it since.
And there is one more thing in that message, which is the last line of it and which is the reason the chairman has kept it.
Dev wrote: It's not our grief. We're borrowing it.
Six words. From a joiner, by text, at half eleven at night.
I have had that sentence for three months now and it has done more for me than anything anybody has said to my face.
Because that is exactly what it is, and I had not had a word for it.
The flowers and the cards and the woman in the shop who hugged me — none of it is wrong and all of it is people borrowing it, and the thing nobody tells you is how much of your week goes on lending it out.
PART 5 — THE BARBECUE
And now the part that is mine, and it is from 2016.
Kit's seventh, at ours, about twenty-five people. Ray's brothers, my sister, half a Colts under-eights team in the paddling pool.
And at about four o'clock Ray came out of the house with something in his hand and he was going to tell a story.
It was a photograph. Him at fourteen, outside the yard on the Pell Road, on his first morning, in a jacket that belonged to his father.
And he had it out and he had got as far as "that's me, that is, first day—" to my brother-in-law.
And I took it off him.
"Give me that — not today, love."
And then, because his mother was sat about four feet away in a garden chair and because Alf had been dead about eighteen months:
"Nobody wants that one at a barbecue. You were fourteen. Go and see to the burgers."
And Ray Catterall said: "Fair enough."
And he went and did the burgers.
I did it to protect his mother. That is the truth and I would say it again under oath.
Alf had been gone a year and a half and I was not having that story told across a garden with his widow in it.
And what I actually did was take a story out of my husband's hand in front of twenty-five people and tell him nobody wanted it.
He did not tell it again. Not at the next one, not at Christmas, not in nine years.
He told it to a joiner in a hospital room in the June of last year, to a man he had known for eight years off the side of a pitch, because that man asked him a question and then sat there.
I asked Dev what the question was. I had decided it would be something I could use.
It was not. He asked Ray whether he had played.
That is it. Four words, in a chair, on his way home from a job.
Twenty-two years and I never asked him that. Not once, in all of it.
I knew the facts — fourteen, the yard, his father — because I was told them in about 1999 and then I had them, the way you have facts about somebody.
I never asked him whether he had been any good.
He was. Dev got about nine minutes out of him on it and I have had every word of that secondhand, from a man I had Christmas dinner with for the first time last month.
Left side. He was quick off the mark and he could not head a ball to save his life.
I have been married to that man since 2003 and I found out in a kitchen in the December, from a joiner, that my husband could not head a ball.
Where it is now.
The awards were fine. Kit went up and got his medal with the rest of them and nobody said anything about his dad and that is exactly what he wanted, and I watched him work that out about four minutes into it and go loose in the shoulders.
They did the photographs with the dads at the end. Kit stood that one out and went and got a drink with two of the others whose fathers had not come either, and that was that, and nobody made it a thing.
And the shirt is in his room. Not in a frame. On a hanger on the back of the door with his own one.
He has not worn it. He is fourteen and it is an extra large and he has said he is going to.
And the photograph is on the fridge.
I printed it in the September at the machine in the big Tesco, which took about eleven minutes because I could not get the screen to do what I wanted and because I had to stop twice.
My husband in a football shirt with his own name on the back, aged fifty-one, three days out, grinning like an idiot.
About an hour of his life, and it is the only photograph of him in one that has ever existed.
And there is one more thing, from the November.
Dev rang and asked whether Kit would come and help with the under-eights on a Saturday morning. An hour, cones and bibs, nothing complicated.
He has been going since. Seven weeks.
And in the December one of the little ones forgot his socks.
And my son went out to my car and got a pair out of the boot.
They have been in there since the August. I have not been able to take them out and I had not told anybody they were there, including him.
May you like
He did not say anything about it when he came back in, and neither did I, and we drove home talking about something else.
THE END
