The Rechts der Isar hospital, Munich, February 6th, 1958. Manchester United manager Matt Busby lies gravely injured. Bobby Charlton has yet to regain consciousness. Footballer Duncan Edwards hovers between life and death. Others fight for their lives. In the slush and snow and black night of Munich-Riem Flugplaza, the wreckage of BEA flight 609 still smoulders. The Munich air disaster killed 23, including seven members of the Manchester United team. Busby’s Babes they were called. If you’re a soccer fan you know it. But you don’t know it in this telling, David Peace’s stern and beautiful hymn of loss.
The book opens with the crash on take-off after a refuelling stop that followed a tie with Red Star Belgrade and moves through the six weeks up to the May 3rd cup final against Bolton, which United lost 2-0. Busby and others remain in Germany as the funerals take place in England. A convoy of black cars repeated for each death, a stark processional through the north of England. It is winter in Manchester and Salford, in Brynmawr and Woking; names and places resonate. It is winter in Cabra where thousands gather to see Dubliner Billy Whelan brought home. The textures are brick, rain, memory.
The dire tidings are slow to get through. Seven of the dead are journalists travelling home with the team. These are the men who set the great printing presses turning. Men from the Doncaster Chronicle, the Yorkshire Evening Post. This is the age of print and these burly, authoritative figures knew the gravity of their task.
Grief and tenderness run through Munichs. The players are stars of their time, many just-married with young wives. They are fathers and they are sons. The courage required from the women is that of forbearance. It is given to them to sit by hospital bedsides, to support their menfolk and await the moment when it is time to raise them up and give them courage and send them stumbling into the future. “You know Matt, the lads would have wanted you to carry on,” Jean Busby says. Cissy Charlton, mother of Bobby and Jack, knows full well the glory and loneliness awaiting her shy, youngest son as he returns to football.
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There are no big houses and fast cars for these players. They live in terraced houses owned by the club. After the crash young families face uncertain futures. Marion Bent, Geoff Bent’s wife, stands at her young husband’s grave and asks what football ever did for him, ever really did. In their hearts and their silence the women rebuke all that brought them here.
There are portraits of courage: Belfast-born goalkeeper Harry Gregg climbing back into the wreckage to hand out survivors, always remembered; Pilot Rayment trapped in the cockpit telling his colleague Thain to leave him. It is easy to reach for nostalgia in all of this. The end of an era of integrity in sport, old-fashioned virtues of stoicism and making do, that kind of thing. But the poet Roy Fisher said “Birmingham’s what I think with”, and for Peace the past is what he thinks with, the writing always thoughtful, aligned with the present. The majestic cadences of his prose carry the events beyond memory.
For all its fidelity to events and people, Munichs reads like something dreamed. There are strange happenings, portents, the dead speak and fade back into memory. Language turns into incantation. And we’re used to thinking of this as an inarticulate generation but the voices are courtly, measured. They hold themselves to account. Why did I bring so many players? Why did I swap seats in the plane? How do I face the wives, the families, the country?
Then there’s the aftermath. Harry Gregg with a necktie knotted at his temples to relieve the pressure. Bobby Charlton alone in his room for days on end playing records. The prose is laced with tenderness, the moment is allowed. But it can’t go on forever. Resentment starts to build. It’s where the title comes from. Munichs was the brutal terrace nickname for United supporters. In the aftermath of the funerals, malicious voices began to be raised. United were milking the sympathy, going on about it. And then there’s the match against Bob Lord’s Burnley Butchers, the battle of Turf Moor and the cry going up from the crowd “It’s a Pity They Didn’t All Die”.
Billy Whelan, or Liam as they knew him in Home Farm, was seized by homesickness in his first months in England. He told his brother Christy “I wish with all my life that this was over and I was coming home”. In this towering requiem David Peace brings them all home. Munichs is a masterpiece.
Eoin McNamee’s new novel The Bureau will be published next March
