As a fifteen year old lad I was what you call a plane spotter. My plane spotter mates organised a coach to London on the day of the World Cup final to visit all major airports and some of the surrounding smaller airfields in the hope of "spotting" international, both commercial and private aircraft to collect their identification numbers.
We set off in the early hours and were about to approach London when the main organiser of the trip announced that he had got a ticket to the World Cup final and we would be diverting to Wembley to drop him off. As you can imagine all were quite jealous but duly dropped him off and continued to tour the airports in between which we OR some of us listened to the game on our radios. When Germany equalised late in the second half those football supporters amongst us, me included, thought that was it but as we all know it wasn’t.
We then had to pick up our World Cup watcher and I remember approaching Wembley and from what I remember was a fairly cloudy day when the sky opened up above Wembley and sun rays poured down into the stadium.
After picking our mate up we headed to Gatwick airport I think and went in the terminal to see hordes of German supporters returning for their flights home waving the German flag with 1966 on them. I, with some of my mates being naughty boys managed to grab some of these flags from the supporters and ran off with them. I brought mine home and had it on my bedroom wall for some weeks. Unfortunately I came home from school one day to find it missing and when I asked my mum she told me my Dad had taken it down and destroyed it. I asked why but my mum just said with my dad being in the 2nd World War and although he never talked about his experiences did not want anything that reminded him of Germany in the house.
Sad but true but I have never forgotten the events of that day in my life and relate them to you now.
Steven Howarth
Memory added on August 25, 2016
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