I FALL IN LOVE

Brown: Baker, Henry; Blanchflower, Norman, Mackay; Jones, White, Smith, Allen, Dyson.
It was early on in the Double Season, when Spurs had that amazing unbeaten run. I was at a London day school with three girls whose families were all manic Spurs supporters and they kept talking about it. So I kind of got absorbed into the faith, especially when I saw some photos of Danny Blanchflower, who seemed incredibly glamorous. They were all glamorous - Cliff Jones, the fastest winger in the world, Dave Mackay, who was rugged and beat-up handsome and drove a Jag sprayed in the colours of his first club, Hearts, Bobby Smith, who was Yorkshire and charming in a wicked way, and John White who was a frail, brilliant mystery… I could go on. And I just became obsessed, because the Double seemed such an impossible achievement -winning the League championship and the FA Cup in the same season - and yet they were going to do it.

Young female insanity from Those Glory Glory Days

I HAVE MY JFK MOMENT

I remember the hour, I remember the day. Four years later, and I was home for the summer holidays from the boarding school where I had been sent in order to turn me into a lady. The newspaper dropped on the mat and on its front page was a devastating headline.
JOHN WHITE KILLED BY LIGHTNING
Scarily ironic was the fact that in life John had been nicknamed the Ghost of White Hart Lane because of the way he just drifted behind defenders then popped up: Boo! And then: Goal! John’s dramatic death aged 27 was seared even deeper into my mind by a photo in next day’s paper: John, with his 22 year old wife Sandra and his two small kids. Mandy was two years old and Rob a baby of five months. For years afterwards, I would find myself wondering what had become of that little family.
But meanwhile:

I GET THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD

After I left uni I needed a job and was taken on as a secretary on the Observer sports desk. Which was great, because apart from my Spurs obsession I had been a sports nut practically all my life, in fact I had an almost Asperger’s-type knowledge of sporting minutiae, and I loved the whole Fleet Street ambience. I was a rubbish secretary and it was a relief when they let me be a football writer instead.
The first match I reported was Coventry v Spurs. Coventry won 1-0. My intro was: Coventry have the gift of ebullience. (I think this is where I should probably type ROFL.) It was the first female by-line to appear under a match report in a national paper and the following week letters poured in to the Observer, asking if Julie was one of those man-woman names like Hilary or Evelyn. I went on the Today programme, feeling slightly like National Velvet. Aaah, my fifteen minutes of fame.
Apart from that Asperger’s-like knowledge of minutiae, what was useful to me was a strong bladder as press facilities back then didn’t provide female loos, though the Daily Mail chief football writer Jeff Powell was often kind enough to stand guard outside. It was generally accepted that I was a serious reporter (she said pompously) not a kiss-and-tell houri though sometimes when I interviewed one of the more wet-behind-the-ears players the manager would sit in on the interview like a chaperone. Apart from the occasion when a journalist from the Sunday Times, who loathed women in the press box, drove a chair into my leg at Selhurst Park, it was the best job in the world. Being paid to watch football - can you beat that?

Me in Serious Reporter mode in the press box at Upton Park, somewhere around 1976. Foreground is Sam Bartram, ex-Charlton goalie turned journo. Next to me on the other side is a glimpse of the glinting spectacles of Harry Harris, later to become Bill Nicholson's ghostwriter.

I MEET BILL NICHOLSON
In my other life outside football reporting I wrote television scripts and plays and in October 1983 I was summoned to the presence of David (now Lord) Puttnam. He was putting together a series of films for Channel Four, and the project was called First Love. Would I be interested in writing one?
My first love was, of course, the Spurs Double-winning side, and I described to David how I had met Danny Blanchflower for the first time, 22 years on from the Double season, in the street outside Selhurst Park after Crystal Palace v Middlesbrough, which we had both been reporting, and I was trying and failing to get a taxi to stop for me.
I suppose you could say Danny picked me up. A Mercedes drew up alongside, the passenger door opened, and an Irish voice said, ‘Would you like a lift?’
He drove me back to Fleet Street, me twittering starstruck inanities all the way.
David Puttnam said, ‘There’s your opening scene,’ and it was.
Those Glory, Glory Days was an incredibly significant piece of work for me, because it brought together all the strands of my life - love of Spurs, football reporting, scriptwriting and my future husband: he appeared as one of the journos in the opening scene in the press box. The plot devolved round the efforts of four schoolgirls to get tickets for the 1961 Cup Final, Leicester City v Tottenham Hotspur. Danny Blanchflower appeared as himself. As for Bill Nicholson, legendary manager of the Double side, I actually met him for the first time at a private showing of Glory Glory. David Puttnam and the director Philip Saville had invited him along to see it before it was released. There were just the four of us in this cinema, and I was petrified - I thought he’d hate it. But the first thing he said to me when the lights went up again was, ‘I’d have given you the tickets.’ Special times!

The gentlemen of the press, in the press box at White Hart Lane during filming of Those Glory Glory Days. Front row (left to right): Ronald Atkin of The Observer, otherwise known as Mr Julie Welch; David Lacey (The Guardian); God, otherwise known as Danny Blanchflower of the Sunday Express. Can you spot actors Dudley Sutton and a pre-Meldrew Richard Wilson in the rows behind?

I MEET ROB WHITE
The Spurs Double side had become my specialist subject. In summer 2007 I was working on the Spurs Opus, a tome the size of a Trafalgar Square plinth. My brief was to write about the Double, the people involved and the years before and after. I tried to find out more about John White’s life before he came to Spurs, but there was very little information about him. It seemed sad that the thing he was most remembered for was being killed by lightning on Crews Hill golf course. I found it hard to believe - here was this great, ground-breaking playmaker and no one had ever written a biography.
Then my colleague Doug Cheeseman mentioned that John’s son Rob had let him have some of his dad’s memorabilia for the project, and put the two of us in contact. Rob and I met and talked, and then went on meeting and talking. He and I wrote the book together. It was a huge privilege and I put my heart and soul into it because I wanted to do justice to his dad, and to the great side he was such an essential part of.

The Ghost of White Hart Lane: In Search of My Father the Football Legend is published by Yellow Jersey Press on March 10th.