LONDON — Somehow, a media throng did not congregate outside the Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone, northeast London, on Friday, May 2, 1975.
The plain, white, unassuming maternity ward -- "Looks like an office building from the outside," said the hospital's press officer Lucy Reeve -- probably went about business as usual.
Even now, she says, "It's not really something that's brought up day to day. People might bring it up every now and then."
It's just that one of the thousands of births per year turned out to be one of the most famous people on Earth, as Sandra and Ted Beckham welcomed the second of their three children, and their only son, and named him David Robert Joseph.
Even blindingly famous people don't just emerge out of thin air as adults curling soccer balls right onto teammates' feet from 25 yards away.
In David Beckham's case, they might emerge from Leytonstone and Chingford, two of the endless towns in the vast London area, both considered part of East London even if they're technically more north. They might start out in working-class Leytonstone, birthplace of Alfred Hitchcock, where murals honoring 17 of the filmmaker's movies adorn the Tube station. Then they might move farther out, to where London thinks about becoming rural Essex, to still-working-class-but-slightly-less-so Chingford, where the infamous gangster Kray twins are buried.
That's on the outer edge of the London sprawl, historically farmland before London burgeoned out to meet it, and that's where Ted Beckham, a kitchen "fitter" -- prepares houses for gas and electricity -- and Sandra, a hairdresser, relocated from Leytonstone early in David's childhood.
That's also the home of a well-kept village whose outer edge boasts Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge, where, the 92-year-old Chingford historian John Boyes said, "It is alleged Queen Elizabeth rode upstairs on her horse so she could watch the hunt going through Epping Forest."
The Epping Forest would be an ancient woodland just outside the city.
The queen would be Elizabeth I.
That's the Elizabeth from the 1500s.
Supernovas can come from fairly tranquil places where they lead ordinary lives with a soccer ball always present, as a visitor realizes while standing in Chingford next to a large, empty field with healthy trees in behind. At midday on a weekday, the field sits empty, one exhausted soccer goal in the middle.
