The team of the late 1940s and early 1950s

Here is a second extract from the autobiography of novelist and one time Charlton fan David Lodge, A Good Time To Be Born.

In 1946, Charlton got to the FA Cup Final at Wembley, only to lose ... I listened to the BBC radio commentary and was inconsolable at the end. Jimmy Seed, Charlton's brilliant manager, who had steered them from the Third to First Division in two seasons before the war, vowed they would be back at Wembley next year - and by golly they were, just like a story in one of the boys' magazines, Hotspur,Wizard and Champion.

This time they won! The FA Cup, now overshadowed by European competitions, was then the Holy Grail of English professional football, and I felt privileged to be a supporter of so successful a club.

After that peak a slow decline in Charlton's fortunes began, but I remained loyal. I no longer needed to be escorted to matches by Dad, but travelled to The Valley with a couple of friends in Millmark Grove [Brockley]. My heroes in the team were the goalkeeper Sam Bartram and the centre forward Charlie Vaughan. Bartram was a genial and virile figure, with a grin like Burt Lancaster's and dense auburn hair set off by the green woollen jerseys goalkeepers invariably wore in those days.

Jimmy Seed defined a good goalkeeper concisely as 'a gymnast with ball skills', and Sam Bartram was certainly that, but he also showed, in the instinct of his flying saves, an instinct for what transforms a game into a spectacle.

Charlie Vaughan had been a star of the amateur club Sutton United before he joined Charlton, and something of the gentlemanly amateur lingered in his deportment at The Valley. I don't remember him ever committing a violent foul or protesting against a referee's decision, and when caught offside in possession of the ball, he would place it for the opposition's free kick before retreating. His posture was straight-backed, his arms usually held close to his sides as if to emphasise that football was played with the feet, and he would have been appalled by the holding and shirt grabbing that is now tolerated in professional football. He was a good role model for a football mad boy.

After he moved to Birmingham, Lodge let his Addicktion slide. 'At some point in the 1970s, I went with a friend to watch a professional football match for the first time in at least twenty years, at the Birmingham City ground, and revived the experience of entering the unappealing back parts of a football stadium, squeezing through its stiff turnstiles, mounting a dark, dank concrete staircase, and the thrill of emerging at last into an arena packed with humming, expectant humanity, looking down on a vividly green rectangle of grass on which a contest would shortly be enacted by twenty-two brightly club athletes.'

Fortunately, he did not become a Blew and he sets out a very cogent case against egg chasing.

Brockley man tells story of how he became Addickted

David Lodge's novel about growing up in South-East London after the Second World War contains an atmospheric scene set at The Valley. When the publication of his autobiography was announced, I anticipated an account of his Addicktion and I was not disappointed.

Lodge grew up in Millmark Road, Brockley, a 1930s development shoe horned into the Victorian streets of the district. He writes, 'Dad took me to watch Charlton Athletic one Saturday afternoon after his return home [after the war] and I was hooked. Charlton was not, strictly speaking, our local league club - Millwall was nearer. But Millwall was in the lowly Third Division [shortly to return there] and its ground, appropriately called The Den, had (and still has) the reputation of attracting a rough crowd, whereas Charlton was one of the elite teams of the First Division, the equivalent of today's Premier League.'

'Attendances in those days were high. Charlton's ground, known as The Valley, was a vast bowl carved out of a former quarry which attracted crowds of up to 70,000 spectators, mostly standing on uncovered terraces, a mass of bodies that surged and swayed like the sea in moments of excitement. It has since, I believe, greatly shrunk in scale and improved its amenities.'

In a later instalment, I will look at Lodge's memories of the teams of that era.