The Book of Fame Read online

  By now we were used to seeing ourselves on postcards hawked about town. In a London theatre we’d even seen ourselves up on screen. We got out our tobacco as the curtains parted on a huge white square. The lights dimmed and one or two of us looked around. Jimmy Duncan and Mister Dixon, obviously, as they were in charge of our safety and well-being. Then a yellow beam passed overhead and landed against the screen—not with any force but with the same effortlessness as pulling aside bedroom curtains and light finding the interior wall. Some numbers flickered up there. Then we saw pictures of ourselves. Life-like pictures. Limbs moving. Mona raking his fingers back through his hair. We left our pipes in our hands and moved to the edge of our seats. It was the strangest thing to sit down there and look up and see ourselves as others did. We stared at these shadows of ourselves. These likenesses. Fred looked like Fred, Billy Wallace like Billy Wallace, Jimmy Hunter himself but only more so. We watched our shadows perform knowledgeable tricks; and when you thought about it you realised that the shadows had to know their owners in order to be so convincing on screen. Our shadows remembered their origins spectacularly well. Things, personal things, previously intimate to ourselves. Fred Newton scratching himself. Billy Stead holding the front of his shorts out from himself to look down, looking for what? Massa closing one nostril to blow snot out the other. Now it was up there for all to see. There was some initial discomfort, but this soon passed and pleasure set in. We began to think about our haircuts and what in our appearance could be improved. Once we were able to tear our eyes away from ourselves, we got on with studying the shape of our game. It came as a shock to see what a mess the lineouts were in. Up to now we had imagined we formed a straight line. Then Booth dropped a ball and we all laughed. Bloody hell, any one of us could have caught that from where we sat. Billy Wallace missed an easy goal. Gillett missed two. Someone booed—in jest. But as we sunk into ourselves, our private selves, we realised that we did mind, seeing how gettable the chances were, and yet up on screen we saw ourselves back on our side of halfway, our hands on hips, and that we hadn’t minded the misses.

  On the field we moved to the whirring breath of cameras

  Men crouched under black hoods aimed their tripods at us

  or, as it sometimes happened

  you might look up from breakfast

  with a mouthful of toast

  to find a man with a white napkin draped over his wrist

  staring back

  Moments of intimacy

  when they came

  snuck up on you

  in the bath, alone

  gazing up at the tiled walls

  and on each tile

  the impression of a peacock on its own

  until you realised

  that someone with a sketchpad

  must have observed the moment

  to capture it with a paintbrush

  in order to say

  ‘Here is a peacock alone in its peacock world’

  We learned to appreciate those things

  which are utmost and confidently themselves

  a lily flat on a pond

  the pattern of wallpaper in an empty hotel room

  the last tree in a paddock

  the barefoot beggar dragging his grey blanket past the fires down by the river

  We grew tired of our own company. It was too small a world to confine ourselves. We found ourselves craving news of other lives, and so we parted to visit our favourite monuments.

  Billy Glenn to Speakers’ Corner

  Deans to the Westminster Cathedral

  O’Sullivan & a loose forward trio

  to the Tower of London

  George Nicholson to the Isle of Dogs to find the coal man who sold sheets of his music

  Mackrell, Harper, Wallace, Gallaher and Messrs Duncan & Dixon to the National Portrait Gallery

  Billy Stead to the Euston Railway Station’s public dictation room, from where he brought back story after story

  Stories of terrible loss, and in some cases grief or foolishness. Russian émigrés with frayed collars and still dressed in clothes from a fancy dress ball a month earlier. American heiresses with travel arrangements to send on to distant ports. Pompous voices, others that were urgent and charged with slight. ‘We wish to inform you, sirs …’ Penniless Italian Counts who would offload their sorry tale to Billy and try to hit him up for a florin while waiting for a stenographer to come free. Gamblers. Polish aristocrats who stood in line with heavy eyelids. There were the show-offs—lowly attention-seeking clerks Billy got to recognise and avoided like the plague. They’d borrow a white silk scarf from their employer to dictate in a plummy voice the terms of a make-believe will: ‘…and lastly, to my man Poutney, my horses and hunting dogs …’ Others … sad, dishonoured men with maps of broken blood vessels tracking their cheeks dictated letters of sombre resignation to expensive and select clubs—‘Perhaps put in “no regrets”. What do you think?’ The stenographers were older women who kept a prim and discreet distance. The most they might allow themselves was a clipped, ‘As you wish’, before their bony fingers raced back over the typewriter keys. There were letters from City gentlemen with their inside leg measurements to Indian tailors in Madras. The stenographers never flinched or showed so much as a sign that they had taken in this private information. They didn’t appear interested in unscrambling the mysteries of other people’s lives. So a man’s inside leg measurement was taken down with the same detachment as they attended to the Putney birdwatcher’s weekly correspondence with another in Aberdeen: ‘Counted one hundred and twenty-nine blackbirds on a guttering near Clapham Common at six twenty pm.’ A South London butcher used coarse language in a threatening letter to an Oxford student of Romance languages warning him to stay away from his ‘girl, Peg’. A young woman wrote to her admirer in Cologne. She had received his poem couriered by pigeon, thank you. It was indeed touching and beautiful … unfortunately she was replying with bad news. She wished to apologise from the bottom of her heart for the poisoned bread left out on the windowsill … A spoilt young wastrel in a party hat and reeking of brandy pushed past Billy to the head of the line. Swaying on his thin legs he shouted out the instruction that this was his last letter to his family, that in the future they would find his ‘communications’ written in condensation over the window of a Pall Mall tobacconist.

  One afternoon Billy is waiting in line. As usual there are the familiar faces. A young fop with his inner leg measurement. An aggrieved Slav dictating a letter to the editor of The Times. A club man with his white shirt hanging out the back of his trousers has just finished dictating an apology to the host of a party. ‘The glasses I can replace and Roger, please won’t you convey my heartfelt apologies to Gwyneth. God knows what came over me …’ As the stenographer calls ‘Next!’ a slight commotion breaks out across the other side of the room. Someone has jumped the queue—a young man with dark rings around his eyes who holds his place and extends a hand behind him as if to keep the complaints at bay. He’s in a white suit that is covered in grime and creases. He stands like someone hard of hearing, his chin tucked into his chest, eyes closed. When he speaks it is with difficulty as if the view he is reporting keeps shifting in and out of focus. As Billy watches the man presses his fingers to the sides of his head and begins with one word. Odessa. Something about the man’s voice catches the attention of the other stenographers. It is rare for them to do so but one by one they turn their heads while their own clients continue to pick their thoughts from the air. Billy finds himself shifting closer in order to better hear—

  Six hundred families homeless

  Stop

  Some of the ruffians put their victims to death by hammering nails in their heads

  Stop

  Eyes gouged out, ears cut off, tongues wrenched out with pincers

  Stop

  Number of women disembowelled

  Stop

  The aged and sick found huddling in cellars were soaked in petroleum and burnt alive<
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  Stop

  More to follow in the am

  Stop

  There was a silence—the only time Billy recalled one in the public dictation room. The stenographer finished and dropped her hands to her sides. From across the room another stenographer started up but she too quickly realised her error and a few seconds later that typewriter was silent as well.

  There was silence as well in the lounge of the Manchester Hotel as Billy reached the end of his account. Dave Gallaher awoke from his slumber. He removed his heavy arms from the back of the couch. It turned out he’d been listening after all. ‘All right. All right. Let me ask you all something. In a week’s time it will be Sunday at home. Overnight someone’s favourite grandmother will have died. A young boy, tragically, has drowned while crossing a flooded creek. A small girl places her hands over her ears while the old man goes outside to put a bullet through her lame horse, Rosalind. I could go on … But I’m happy to stack those examples up on one side of the ledger, and, the result of the match against Scotland on the other. Which one do you think the people at home will want to hear and read about the most?’ Dave had us there but he wasn’t finished. Encouraged by our thoughtful silence he bounced up off the couch. ‘Nope, wait. I’ve changed my mind. This is better. Let’s wipe those examples and put in Billy’s news from Russia about the slaughtering and so forth. Stack that one up against our result and given the choice which one do you think the people at home will want to hear? Which piece of news would they give up to hear the other?’

  You could have heard a pin drop.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dave.

  One more word on this subject.

  That night Alec McDonald hears Mister Dixon with an English official in the foyer discussing Russia and the sinking of its Imperial fleet in the Sea of Japan. Alec hears Mister Dixon say, ‘More than a thousand Russians out of their element, drifting in downward fashion to the sea bed.’ And the Englishman’s reply: ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  We began to notice

  variously

  attempts to ascend the greasy pole

  In Rouen, a barber held his head under a bowl of water

  while his ‘assistant’ stood by with a stopwatch

  In Leigh, a piqued ex-Royal Guardsman sacked for inattentiveness

  entered his fifth day of standing upright

  In America

  a white horse dived from a sixty-foot platform

  into a tank filled with water

  In Paris, 49,999 guests

  sat down to lunch in le Galérie des Machines

  to a banquet organised by Le Matin newspaper

  Nine miles of tables, 3500 waiters

  165,000 plates and 13 tonnes of food were provided

  A Midlands toolmaker swallowed a 2lb bag of nails

  In a pub garden in Kent

  a beekeeper

  entered his fourth day

  of staying buried alive

  In Paris, a young man hoping to impress

  a young woman

  crashed

  into the Seine on his paper wings

  From Dublin, a vegetarian set off to cycle to Persia

  It amused Jimmy Duncan. Over his plate of mashed potatoes Jimmy shook his head.

  ‘You really have to wonder, don’t you, what hunger burns in their souls.’

  But this was our milieu—men who would swallow nails.

  Lone cyclists, their front wheel doggedly searching east.

  So, what was our trick?

  In the ‘Cock and Bull’ over pints of Guinness

  to the greengrocer’s daughter Freddy Roberts tries to explain.

  ‘Really, it has all to do with space, finding new ways through.’

  The greengrocer’s daughter smiles. She’s taken a shine to Freddy.

  She strokes her finger around the glass rim.

  ‘If you get my drift.’

  ‘No. All right

  Let me put it this way.

  Nope. Better still. Here’s what we do.

  Let’s say you and I go for a short walk.’

  She led the way to a lightly wooded area and Fred demonstrated the

  various ways through—

  the course of a spooked hare

  the path of angling light in the trees

  then, as it happens—as Fred tells it—

  in the new dusk

  the sky turned black and quivered

  over the spired rooftops

  as a flock of starlings

  switched shape and direction.

  ‘That’s another thing,’ says Freddy

  ‘Think of us as fifteen sets of eyes

  pairs of hands and feet

  attached to a single

  central nervous system.’

  But she wasn’t really interested

  not really.

  She asked Freddy if he could kiss her—

  was it allowed, he thought she meant

  and pictured Mister Dixon emptying his pipe

  and its faint disapproving clatter.

  She had to ask him again

  ‘Can I kiss yer?’

  And after they did that she asked him to write

  ‘Freddy Roberts’ where he kissed her

  because she had seen his name in the paper.

  FOUR

  We visited the great universities. At Oxford, a tiny warden in an enormous black hat walked ahead with a lantern and led us through courtyards with grass so beautifully tended that we wanted to roll around in it like happy dogs. ‘So,’ said Jimmy Duncan, like this was what he’d been looking for all this time and might even have passed through these gates years earlier had he known about it. In some of us that possibility expanded and contracted.

  Cunningham who knew a bit about masonry ran his finger over the stonework.

  Hunter who had planted a garden on the family farm got down on his haunches to dig his fingers and test the quality of the mulch.

  Tyler who knew all about line from his boat-building knelt to draw the bead of the lawn.

  Mister Dixon horrified us all by walking across the lawn to sniff a rambling rose.

  Jimmy Duncan banged out the contents of his pipe on the path then seeing our woebegone faces gathered up the blackened ash and tobacco remains and stuck his hand in his pocket.

  Billy Stead gazed with longing at grass greener than Southland. We stood back and admired these squares of lawn framed by ancient stone walls with ivy climbing up from lovingly prepared rose beds.

  We thought back to our own shabby grandstands and poorly drained fields. It wasn’t as if we lacked for the same elements.

  We had rock.

  We had flowers.

  Decent enough turf.

  We had space and light.

  But at Oxford what we realised was this—

  it was a matter of arrangement, of

  getting the combinations right, and of

  questioning why we thought something should be this way and not that way,

  in other words, a matter of directing thought and a pair of hands back to a guiding principle.

  When we considered the shape of our game

  we saw the things at work

  that we admired and cultivated

  every man’s involvement and

  a sharing of burden and responsibility.

  When we considered the shape of our game

  we saw an honest engine.

  ‘Even men who have played rugby since childhood and grown grey in its service could not help expressing astonishment. It was all so dumbfounding, so bewildering, almost uncanny.’ We did score thirteen tries so we supposed the Oxford Times would say that.

  ‘It was an even game,’ said one wit, ‘because six tries were scored in the first half and seven tries in the second half …’

  After the game we had dinner at Trinity Hall where we sat at long wooden tables beneath arched windows. On all sides of the dining hall figures of importance bore down upon us, robed men, fo
rmer scholars, wardens, sirs, bishops, and ‘Jacob Hall—rope dancer and acrobat’ who was more our thing.

  At Cambridge, Steve Casey was pointing with his fork when suddenly the doors to the dining hall were flung over and in marched a dozen male students. They formed a line on the far side of the hall and then turning to face us, raised three loud cheers and each drank down his pitcher of beer, banged them down empty, and, like that, left the hall in a tidy line, their faces filled with accomplishment.

  What was all that about?

  The Professors looked up from the table or wherever they had turned their thoughts for the duration of the episode and plied us with polite and easy questions—

  where were we from?

  how were we enjoying England?

  had we seen Buckingham Palace?

  A thin-faced Classics Professor cracking open a hard-boiled egg with the back of a teaspoon, turned to O’Sullivan: ‘Ah, yes, your war dance. Are you aware that it bears an uncanny likeness to Achilles’ war cry, you know, in the opera, Priam?’ O’Sullivan did not know that.

  But that wasn’t all that we didn’t know. At Oxford and Cambridge there were inscriptions with Roman numerals that we could not decipher, bits of ancient language chipped out of rock that we did not recognise, statues, busts, columns, and life-like figures from stories that we either did not know or had only half-heard.

  Our industry was football and experiments with space.

  What we knew

  what we understood

  had no beautiful language at its service

  lacked for artists and sculptors

  what we knew was intimate

  as instinct or memory

  Our knowledge hinged on the word ‘like’.

  We could say that, that tree there