The Book of Fame Page 11

  Billy Wallace up to Newcastle where at Freddy Roberts’ cousin’s house they recorded ‘Tenei te tangata pai rawa atu’ on a wax cylinder.

  Smith, Tyler, Cunningam and Stead to a Fulham boarding house.

  For others, London meant a return to those temporary loves we had met and now needed to say goodbye to …

  Lori’s story

  That night, well, we’d been playing with a make-believe future. We’d worked it all out. He said he would become a professional. I said I’d sell flowers at the club gates. He said, ‘No fear, Lori. No you won’t.’ Then he leant over to tap his pipe on the floorboards. He says to me, ‘Who’ll look after the kids?’ I laughed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’re out there selling flowers and everything …’ I said, ‘What kids would they be?’ And he answered quick as anything, ‘Tom and Beatrice’, smiling like he’d already met them and I should know them too. He caught my eye and we both burst out laughing. Then a funny thing happened. After he fell asleep and I lay back looking up at the ceiling, I began to think about Tom and Beatrice. What they might look like. Red-haired, I hoped. With fair skin and eyes like black coals.

  In the morning … well. In the morning everything was hurried. Everything we’d said was left behind in the night. There was a rush for the bath along the hall. We left our teacups half-drunk. I lost a glove in the hurry to get to the station. There was just time for a thanks-love-write-to-me-won’t-you-peck-on-the-cheek, then the train snatched him from me. I could see them in the windows. And they were smiling. They looked so happy to be on their way. I could see the shadows of those others getting on and moving behind all those smiling faces. I imagine his was one of those laughing and joking. They were going home and it made me sick to think it might be to somewhere better. I watched them. There was a cloud of steam, a burst of the train’s whistle, until everything was of itself. The platform. The wooden seats. The withered sky. And my life—as he had found it.

  Steaming down the Solent past the Isle of Wight, Cunningham turns to Stead and says, ‘You know, it has just dawned on me that corned beef and cabbage are not far off, and I suppose it will be back to the old pick.’

  The first night out into the English Channel, a French tender met us off the coast of Cherbourg with ‘400 emigrants from mid-Europe’.

  It was a wild night, the moon hidden by thick cloud and a blinding rain flew at us. Waves hit us beam on.

  We were out on deck whacking the dried mud from the cleats of our boots when we noticed the narrow bow of the French tender rise and drop into a trough, and as it rose again tiny voices could be heard. The tender swung the mail across on a wire hawser. After the mail the basket came back with a woman and two tiny girls. The basket hit the rail and the girls spilled on to the deck. Sully and Nicholson were quick to help them to their feet, and the tiny girls stared at them bug-eyed and clung to their mother. Back and forth the basket went. Someone said they were Russians. Someone else altered that to ‘Jews’. A third person mentioned Odessa and it dawned on us that two stories had found each other. In the months of October, November and December we’d shared column inches, side by side, in The Times, and now we were sharing a boat to New York. The basket went back to the tender and soon after swung on to the SS New Yorker with an elderly man clutching a violin. We stared at one another. Us at the violinist’s white beard and pink eyes. The violinist at us with our football boots in our hands.

  The wind had got up and now a sea washed against the side and tipped over the deck to cries of, ‘Get back with you! Get away from the rail!’ The basket went back for one more family: two boys and a terrified woman swung out of the sleet screaming in their foreign language. Then the captain said, ‘Enough.’ We left with families split; some with us, fathers, grandparents wailing into the wind from the deck of the tender.

  America. As it came into view we took our place at the rail with the refugees. At Sandy Hook we took on doctors, port officers and customs officers till we were up the Hudson River ‘under the shadows of New York’s skyscrapers’. Along with the Russians we stared at what we had failed to imagine ahead of our arrival.

  We had loosely thought about Indians

  Wild Bill, hillocks, bison, and prairie

  Time and again, the city galloped away from us.

  In New York we attracted a different crowd

  Curious onlookers shopping for a game

  Professors from Princeton and Yale

  A young reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle

  A group of bank vice-presidents who chomped on cigars at our practice

  An officer from West Point, his sabre at ease alongside his striped leg

  A clothing company’s representatives

  A publisher of popular postcards

  A boot manufacturer who souvenired one of Steve Casey’s

  We played New York on a hard baseball field in Brooklyn

  or ‘Brooklands’ as Billy Wallace called it

  We lent New York Abbott, McGregor, Duncan, Casey, Newton and Mynott, and walked and talked the game’s finer points on our way to a 46–13 win.

  From England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and France we carried injuries, bruises that showed no sign of healing, boils, slow-mending cuts from areas lanced to release the poison.

  Now we passed through America in a haze of fatigue and dream.

  In Chicago Billy Wallace and Jimmy Hunter visited the meatworks which boasted they used every part of the animal except the squeal: ‘…the pig goes in one end of the machine and comes out the other as hams, sausages, lard, margarine and binding for Bibles …’

  At the station men with shovels and grain bags and suitcases boarded with their wives and children with red-rimmed eyes and combed wet hair. Swedes, Germans and some Dalmatians. Men who held the handle end of their shovels between their legs for hundreds of miles across an unchanging prairie. How they knew where to get off and why this place recommended itself ahead of any other was a mystery.

  We watched them from our window take a deep breath, the men putting on their hats as they turned to face their future.

  One woman—she refused to get off. She’d looked out the window and seeing the prairie grass waving in the wind and nothing else but sky and a horizon froze her will.

  We watched to see what would happen. Outside, her old man with the shovel looked back over his shoulder, dug in his shovel, and turned his whole slow body round to the carriage door. We saw him say something to the boy. The boy came back down the carriage. We waited to see what would happen. The boy spoke to his mother in a foreign language. He pulled his mother’s sleeve. She tucked her elbow in and closed her eyes. Her mouth cut a hard line. She wouldn’t look out the window at her old man either.

  Finally, Jimmy Duncan got up and went and sat next to her. He said, ‘Pardon me’, American style. We watched Jimmy cross his legs and look down the aisle. He winked at the boy, and to the boy’s mother he spoke in a gentle voice about the business of arrival, which is something Jimmy could claim to have first-hand knowledge of, the opposition’s field, an unfamiliar ref, nasty changing sheds, a home crowd; that, and anxiety for how it will all turn out. Can I do the job? By now the woman was looking at him closely. Jimmy kept firing his words down the aisle. Now he uncrossed his legs and easing himself forward and taking hold of her wrist, he said to her, ‘Go on. Take the bit between your teeth. I see your old man and kid waiting for you beside the track. Go out there and make history.’

  A week later, in Frisco, we were to read a newspaper account of a prairie woman who’d arrived in town penniless.

  She said her boy was bit by a rattlesnake

  That was okay, though

  Then a horse kicked the side of his head

  He’d taken to his bed and not woken up

  Then her husband had left—where? she couldn’t say

  She woke up one morning, the door open to the prairie

  and his favourite hairbrush gone

  We were still on the train and it didn’t feel like
we were any closer to home. From England the world just stretched farther west. Distant hills gave way to more plains and start-up towns; then the whole thing repeated itself, hills, plains, start-up towns.

  On to Cheyenne where we got off to walk beside the tracks, in night air

  so cold it was thin and brittle and stung our nostrils.

  We spoke in whispers and stood with our backs to trackside fires.

  In the window of the station we could see Billy Stead and Mona Thompson studying their hand in a game of poker with a Polish Count and his former housemaid; they were looking to California to start new lives.

  They knew very little about football.

  On the long journey west we told old stories, went back over our favourite matches, played cards, emptied our pockets to see what mysteries we’d picked up en route. Carbine offered a bill from a Chicago barber—

  hair cut—45 cents

  shampoo—15 cents

  blackheads removal—23 cents

  nostril hairs—17 cents

  Total to be settled—$1

  Eddie Booth produced a London Underground ticket

  from the day

  we entered the earth like moles

  at Waterloo

  to re-emerge at a place

  called Shepherd’s Bush.

  One by one we had come up to street level

  straightening ties, re-setting our caps.

  Between Waterloo and Shepherd’s Bush

  we’d temporarily left the world

  and McGregor and Gillett had checked their timepieces

  until Mister Dixon confirmed that time

  had indeed marched on.

  We shared out tobacco and gathered round to exchange lists of ‘firsts’—

  the Negro shiphand on the SS Rimutaka

  the Atlantic as seen in naval paintings

  afternoon tea that time 376 feet up the Eiffel Tower

  meeting the King at the Royal Cattle Show and Bubs Tyler shaking his hand

  French latrines

  promenading (Jimmy’s word) in the Gallery of Battles at Versailles Carbine’s wind-assisted monster field goal against Swansea

  the music grinder outside Paddington Station with his shirt open to a chest tattoo: Jesus RIP

  the cruel metal spikes on the rafters at Paddington Station to discourage pigeons from roosting

  ice hockey

  a Turkish bathhouse in Chicago

  the ‘suicides’ propped up in chairs at the Paris morgue

  the dappled giraffe led by a man in a turban past the smouldering

  bonfires of the circus’s camp in Putney

  the farcical acts of the Italian Circus: jugglers fumbling tea cups, and time and again the soaring acrobat missing the outstretched hands of the red-nosed clown

  We crossed the Nevada desert

  climbed down the Grand Canyon

  searched for old Indian arrowheads

  traversed the Rockies

  wound in and out of fruit orchards and cornfields

  and after six days and seven nights on the train

  in Port Richmond we boarded a ferry

  and shipped across the bay to a city

  back-lit by a bejewelled light.

  We toured Chinatown,

  a Chinese boot factory

  soaked in saltwater baths at the Olympic Club.

  At Berkeley, the authorities ploughed up a perfectly good playing field in the mistaken belief that the game conditions required mud … and at the last minute we switched the contest to a nearby baseball field where we twice beat All-British Columbia before a crowd of fifteen hundred, including newspapermen—

  ‘…there were plenty of plays that could be styled brilliant. Long runs, with difficult passes at just the moment when the runner was tackled, made the exhibition more than a pretty sight to see. It was beautiful …’

  We’d left Harper and Glenn in London. They had chosen to tour the continent before sailing home via Suez. We left Seeling in London to nurse Massa Johnston who was too sick to travel. In Frisco we shed two more players. A ship’s doctor said Freddy Roberts was in too bad a way to continue. Mister Dixon asked for a volunteer to stay behind to nurse Fred and Billy Wallace stuck up his hand.

  A doctor in the city had cut out Fred’s tonsils without anaesthetic. And Fred, though he didn’t complain, hadn’t reacted all that well. His weight dropped to nine stones. He couldn’t eat, drink or talk. He couldn’t raise himself out of bed. Fred didn’t care where he was for the time being so long as no one moved him. It scared Billy Wallace half to death just to look at him. Fred’s white face. His raw throat bled into the third day. Billy stood at the door asking Fred if he could do anything. Poor Fred had to shake his head on his pillow, and as he did so, the blood leaked and dribbled from the corner of his mouth, a bright red trickle of a kind that caused Billy to stand straighter and take his hands out of his pockets.

  To show Fred there’s nothing to be alarmed about he begins to reminisce. ‘Hey Fred, remember that dive you did off the upper deck of the ship at Tenerife? You’re lucky to be here at all. Lucky to be alive, mate. And that’s the God-honest truth.’ Fred manages a smile. He’s turned his head to the wall, and Billy thinking that he’s delivered Fred to the sunny harbour at Santa Rosa, murmurs into the dusky light this final thought: ‘Sunshine, pineapples and whatnot.’ and closes the door.

  Out in the street the afternoon fog is rolling in from Ocean Beach. Already he has that local knowledge; like in London, always knowing the whereabouts of Hyde Park, and in Paris the river; in New York sticking to Broadway and looking for the straw boaters; here, in San Francisco, city of light, it is the fog that turns his head in the direction of Ocean Beach.

  The busy sidewalk pedestrian traffic parts either side of him. Women with happy flowers in their black bonnets look to either side, none with a spark of interest in him. So this is what it’s like to be a nobody in an unfamiliar city. He could be anyone. Why, he could be a Polish Count. He smiles at that thought, and at the thought of the boys carousing south on the Sonoma, and thinks how scattered they’ve become. Billy Glenn and Eric Harper in Egypt by now, gazing up at the pyramids. Massa Johnston and Seeling in London. He pictures Massa in his sickbed, his bored face staring at the pale London sky in the window pane, drifting in and out, waiting for Bronco to enter the room from the world of big movement and noise, a hot lemon drink breathing through its lace cover in his big dumb hands, that gash over his right eye.

  He wonders if they will ever meet again.

  In Jones Street, Billy Wallace climbs aboard the tram that’ll run him out to Ocean Beach. He’s told the boys he intends to ‘see them off.’ He’s promised them that if he sees the ship stuck on the horizon he’ll give the stern a little tap to free it on its way south. He had better do what he said he would do.

  At Pago Pago we were rowed ashore by the natives

  The air was made up of banana and coconut—and

  when Corbett idly mentioned the mud and bog at Middlesex

  we strained to remember that world.

  Cunningham played marathon games of draughts with a missionary. In the thick afternoon heat we listened to the click and snick of the draughts and Cunningham’s clerical summing up—‘That’s one hundred and thirty-five games to your hundred and thirty-three.’ We’d see the missionary come out of the shade and blink in the dazzling light, and rest his hands on the ship rail to try and find resolve out to sea.

  Now that we’d left the great continent behind we slid down the long sloping banks of the Pacific for home.

  There were the usual shipboard games—skittles, quoits, cards. But we had given up deck running, blind boxing and pillow fights. We did nothing to improve our conditioning. We took to deckchairs and waited for home to show on the horizon. That was the life waiting for us. The other we’d left behind in Europe. We were somewhat betwixt, lame in our deckchairs, like old folk sharing memories.

  We laid out our mementoes, our exotic
trinkets, old match programmes, postcards in which we featured, newsclippings—this story we’d created for ourselves, this new idea of ourselves

  We didn’t have an exact word for it

  not yet we didn’t

  but we thought we knew it when we saw it

  and began to amass examples—

  The closure of the Great Western Railway Workshops for the afternoon, in Gloucester, and for none of the traditional reasons, the funeral of a Royal, the marriage of a Royal, the Coronation of a new King or Queen, but to see ‘us’

  In West Wales, just before kick-off, rainclouds had come no farther than the river

  The afternoon the birds around Crystal Palace retired from the air, content to sit and watch when the silver ferns took the field

  The French, delirious with joy, celebrating their first try with head-stands, handsprings, Catherine wheels and somersaults

  In Oxford, the scholars stood dazzled by the new design and form of play that came and went, like rare speech describing new concepts heard once and never after repeated

  The request of the small paralysed boy to George Smith to sign his name over his dead limbs

  At Blackfriar, a beggar girl selling matches running to light Jimmy Duncan’s pipe

  Up and down Elephant & Castle Bridge unsainted women lifting their skirts to offer themselves

  The marriage proposal to Smithy with the caveat—‘if not him, then one of the other backs’

  Arriving to the ground at Lansdown Road to find touts selling five shilling tickets for 45 shillings

  A professional wizard, a predicter of fortunes, a seer, and three witches were driven out of town following the Irish defeat at Lansdown Road

  The English shoeshine manufacturer’s brilliant new brand—‘All Black Nugget’

  The way the New York skyline appeared out of the sea mist, highly charged, knowing, in anticipation of travellers with new tricks

  The shoving match between chaffeurs outside the hotel in Paris for the right to drive Gallaher, Duncan and Mister Dixon to Parc des Princes