A chilly February evening in the boarders' cloakroom in a school in the English midlands, some time between supper and prep. A 10-year-old boy is cleaning his shoes. Another boy enters and approaches him. "Have you heard?" the second boy says. "There's been an air crash and the Manchester United team are all dead."

Perhaps this is the first of modern history's I-remember-where-I-was moments, a precursor to JFK and Lennon, Princess Di and 9/11. On February 6, 1958, however, the news has only just begun to find the means of spreading itself at speed through the global village. An international network exists, although it is a primitive and unreliable mechanism compared with the digital world of the future. This school, for example, has no television set. Not one of the boys yet owns a transistor radio, although a few have crystal sets, cobbled together from RAF war-surplus parts, used for listening to Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers under the bedclothes via the static-drenched signal of Radio Luxembourg. So the news of the Munich crash arrives in imprecise, provisional dribs and drabs.

The effect, however, is instantaneous. The whole school seems to shiver. Even the staff are affected by its significance. After lights-out the dozen boys in the third-year dormitory continue their discussions and, for once, no prowling matron arrives with the threat of punishment. There is speculation on the fates of Duncan Edwards, of Roger Byrne and of Tommy Taylor. None of us has seen these men play, or any of their team-mates, but they are the ones - along with Matthews, Wright, Finney and Puskas - whose identities we borrow in the scuffling playground matches at breaktime. Even the weeds who have no interest in football, who collect stamps and stand miserably in goal or on the touchline during Wednesday afternoon games, are drawn into the urgent conversation. For all of us, born immediately after Europe's emergence from the slaughterhouse of war, this is a first experience of collective loss.

In Manchester, of course, the world has come to a stop. As the news comes through on this Thursday evening, factories close early. Tears are running down the red-brick walls of the great crucible of the industrial revolution. British European Airways Flight 609, scheduled to arrive at the city's Ringway airport at 5pm, has failed to leave the slush-carpeted runway at Munich airport, its refuelling stop on the way back from Belgrade.

The chartered Elizabethan airliner has crashed into a house and broken in two; after hitting a parked truck containing barrels of aviation fuel the rear section has exploded. The exact time of the accident, we later learn, is 3.04pm. Seven of United's players are dead, one more is mortally wounded. Fifteen other passengers will join the list of fatalities: the club secretary and two coaches, two members of the plane's crew, a travel agent, a supporter and eight journalists, including the correspondents of three Manchester newspapers. Matt Busby and Bobby Charlton are among the survivors but Busby is gravely injured.

The heart has been ripped out of his Babes, a team the great Scottish football man will later say were his finest creation, of more substance even than his championship side of the late 1940s or the Charlton-Law-Best swingers of the 1960s. The Babes, Busby would claim, vanished as they were on the brink of dethroning Alfredo Di Stefano's glittering Real Madrid and becoming Europe's leading club team.

A crowd gathers in the dusk outside Old Trafford, drawn by a sense of helpless desolation. At Ringway taxis are taking the players' waiting wives and girlfriends back to their homes; arrangements are being made to fly several of the women out to Munich the next day, to visit the survivors. Ripples of empathy spread around the country. In towns and cities evening paper billboards announce the tragedy. On television Children's Hour is interrupted by a sombre news bulletin.

The ripples spread yet wider. Three thousand miles away a man sits down to write a letter to the editor of the Guardian. It is 4pm on the east coast of the United States and the story of the crash has been broadcast by the radio and television stations in New York.

"Please accept my deepest sympathy on this tragic loss of one of the greatest sports teams in the world," the man writes. "Extend my sympathy to the families of the players and sportswriters and to the sports fans of Great Britain. Sincerely, Gennaro Venturella, 1721 79 St, Brooklyn 14, NY, USA. PS: Though not a soccer fan, I feel very deeply about this. It would be as if the New York Yankees baseball team were involved in a similar crash here in the US."

In La Jolla, California, Charles H Elkington is writing on the notepaper of the Elkington Importing Company. "May I, as captain of the San Diego Cricket Club, in California, USA, on behalf of all the members of our team, offer our sincere condolences to everyone in Manchester on the terrible tragedy that occurred to your wonderful football team," he writes. "We offer our heartfelt sympathy to the wives and families of those who died - they were truly a wonderful team. We well remember their visit to Los Angeles, California, a few years back, when they so ably and nobly demonstrated the spirit of fair play and soccer genius to the American public."

The news takes longer to reach the coffee plantations in the Shevaroy Hills, in the part of southern India later to be known as Northern Tamil Nadu. The aerogramme, written in a scrawling hand on lightweight airmail paper, is dated February 10. "The few British planters here are shocked at the news of the Munich tragedy," the writer informs the editor of the Guardian. "They send their condolences with the near and dear ones of the victims and their sympathies to the Association to which they belonged." The signature is illegible.

The deaths are confirmed in the following morning's newspapers, along with the early testimony of the survivors. Taylor, the dashing centre-forward, bought from Barnsley for a record £29,999, has gone, as has Byrne, the skipper and left-back, who loved all sports, from canoeing and fell walking to rugby and cricket, and dreamed of climbing mountains. And Geoff Bent, Byrne's uncomplaining understudy. Mark Jones, the pipe-smoking 24-year-old centre-half. Eddie Colman, the impish right-half. David Pegg, the Yorkshire miner's son at outside-left, who shared a love of Frank Sinatra's crooning with Liam Whelan, the inside-right from Dublin, also gone.

Edwards, the left-half, the Black Country prodigy who became England's golden boy, is lying in Munich's Rechts der Isar hospital, attached to an artificial kidney, the doctors helpless to arrest his internal bleeding; when Busby's deputy, Jimmy Murphy, comes to visit him, he lifts his head and murmurs: "Oh, it's you, Jimmy. Is the kick-off three o'clock?" Fifteen days after the crash, and despite bulletins that raise hopes of a recovery, he dies. Busby, having held on to life by his fingertips, survives to lead the club out of the shadows of despair and into another era of success.

In one sense, it will be said, Munich is the making of the modern Manchester United. A tragedy that draws the club together, providing an emotional bedrock on which its players, staff and supporters can stand firm through the difficult times to come, also secures them a special place in countless hearts over whom, in normal circumstances, they would have no claim.

Wherever they go, their team - which in the future will include players from France, Denmark, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea and elsewhere - carry within them the legacy to English football of that bitter February day.

Fifty years later the sadness lingers. It is there in the sightseers gathering under the Munich clock high on the wall of Old Trafford's south-eastern corner, a nearby plaque, bearing the names of the Babes inscribed on the layout of a pitch, looking down on the Busby statue. It is there in the churning emotions that lay unexamined for decades behind the polite reserve of Bobby Charlton's public face. It is there in every fleeting memory of young men cut down in their vigorous, blameless prime, their fate touching millions.