Billy the Kid was Chelsea football club’s champion striker, but that was before war broke out. His love of the beautiful game sees Billy through the lowest of times, when he is made a prisoner of war …

used to have this dream that I was back home and the crowd was doing their chanting: “Billy, Billy the Kid! Billy, Billy the Kid!” And I’d score a goal and Joe would come running on to the pitch from the Shed End and clap me on the back and I could see in his face that he was so proud of me. Then I’d wake and I’d know I was in the hut. I knew it by the smell of it: wet clothes, wood smoke and unwashed men. I’d lie there in the dark of the hut, and think of home, of Joe, of football.

Once the letters came I felt much better, for a while. Lots of them came at once – we never knew why. But it was good just to hear that Mum and Ossie and Emmy were all right, that they were still there, and I wasn’t alone in the world. There’d been some bombing in London, so they’d sent Emmy down to Aunty Mary’s in Broadstairs for a while. She sounded very different in her letter, very grown up somehow. She told me how she wanted to go back home, but that Mum wouldn’t let her, how Aunty Mary fussed over her and how she was fed up with her. She told me she had decided she was going to be a nurse when she was older. I read the letters over and over again, and wrote home whenever I could. Those letters were my lifeline. The next best thing in the world were the Red Cross parcels. How I looked forward to them – marmalade, chocolate, biscuits, cigarettes. We did a lot of swapping and bartering after they came. I’d swap my cigarettes for Robbie’s chocolate – never did like smoking, just not my vice – I did my best to end up with mostly chocolate. It lasted longer, if I didn’t get too greedy.

As for the Italians guarding us – there were two sorts. You had the kind ones, and that was most of them, who’d pass the time of day, have a joke with you; and then the others, the nasty ones, the real fascists who strutted about the place like peacocks and treated us like dirt. But what really got me down was the boredom, the sameness of every day. I had so much time to think and it was thinking that always dragged me down, and then I wouldn’t feel like doing anything. I wouldn’t even kick a football about.

It was partly to perk me up, I reckon, that Robbie came up with the idea of an FA Cup competition. He organised the whole thing. Soon we had a dozen league sides – all mad keen supporters only too willing to turn out for ‘their’ club back home. I trained the Chelsea team, and played centre forward. Robbie was at left back, solid as a rock. For weeks on end the camp was a buzz of excitement. Everyone trained like crazy. Suddenly we all had something to do, something to work for. What some of us might have been lacking in skill and fitness, we made up for in enthusiasm. The Italians laughed at us a bit to start with, but as we all got better they began to take a real interest in it. In the end they even volunteered to provide the referees.

I was a marked man of course, but I was used to that. I got up to all my old tricks, and the crowd loved it. Robbie was thunderous in his tackling. Chelsea got through the final, against Newcastle.

So in April 1943, under Italian sunshine and behind the barbed wire, we had our very own FA Cup Final. The whole camp was there to watch, over two thousand men, and hundreds of Italians too, including the Commandatore himself. It was quite a match. They were all over us to start with, and had me marked so close I could hardly move. Paulo – one of the Italian guards we all liked – turned out to be a lousy ref, or maybe he was a secret Newcastle supporter, because every decision went against us. At half time we were a goal down. Luckily they ran out of puff in the second half and I squeezed in a couple of cheeky goals. Half the crowd went wild when I scored the winner, and when it was all over someone started singing ‘Abide With Me’. We fairly belted it out, and when we’d finished we all clapped and cheered, and to be fair, the Italians did too. They were all right – most of them.

Next day came the big surprise. Paulo came up to me as I was sitting outside the hut writing a letter. “Before the war I see England play against Italia in Roma,” he said. “Why we not play Italia against England, here, in this camp?”

So there we were a couple of weeks later on the camp football field facing each other, the best of us against the best of them. We all had white shirts and they had blue – like the real thing. Paulo captained them, I captained us. They were good too, tricky and quick. They ran circles round us. I found myself defending with the back four, marshalling the middle and trying to score goals all at the same time. It didn’t work. They went one goal up soon after half time and were well on top too for most of the second half. We really had our backs to the wall. The crowd had all gone very quiet. We were all bunched – when the ball landed at my feet. I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was boot it up the field, just to get it clear. But I had four Italians coming at me and that fired me up. I beat one and another, then another, and leaving Paulo sprawling, made for their goal. I had just the goalie to beat. I feinted this way, that way and stroked it in. It was the best goal I ever scored. The whistle blew for full time. I was hoisted up and carried in triumph round the camp. We hadn’t won, but we hadn’t lost. Honours even. Just as well, I’ve always thought. Both sides could laugh about it afterwards. Important that.