The Book of Fame Read online

  With Dave out of action, Billy Stead took over the captaincy and we ran out as follows—

  Drizzle continued to fall.

  A huge punt sent the ball over the grandstand into a Dublin back yard. Another ball was found but this one exploded after a scrum collapse. Waiting for a third ball to arrive we mingled with the Irish players. The Irish fullback Landers jogged upfield to chat with Billy Wallace. Billy Stead and the Irish half looked over folded arms into different sections of the crowd. George Smith grinned at the feet of his Irish opponent—both of them with their hands on hips and legs in an ungainly outsplayed stance, like farmers familiar with each other’s problems. Tyler and the Irish hooker, Coffey, moved warily around each other. O’Sullivan and the Irish loosie leant on their respective knees and stared at the ground while picking mud out of the soles of their boots. The tall locks Hamlet and Wilson grazed in the same space as Seeling and Cunningham.

  This peaceful scene was interrupted by the arrival of a third ball.

  We freed up Jimmy Hunter. Jimmy’d have been across but slipped just short of the line.

  After that the Irish came at us with renewed purpose, a mad glint in their eye, pitchforks in hand, ball at the toe. The huge crowd of 40,000 roaring at their backs.

  At times it felt as though we were playing two different codes. We saw the paddock as an ever-changing pattern of lines. The Irish, on the other hand, saw the field as a sort of steeplechase, covered with low barriers and walls which as far as they were concerned were there to smash into. They believed in luck. They were like kids taking it in turn to kick a pebble down a bumpy road.

  We longed to tell them what they were doing wrong.

  We worked our way down to a lineout on the Irish twenty-five. George Gillett won us good ball from his unfamiliar wing forward position which was shifted with quick hands to Bob Deans. Deans dropped his left shoulder, and drawing the giant Basil MacClear in that direction, wrongfooted him, and moved off in the opposite direction to score beneath the crossbar. It was a tidy piece of work from Bob; but Bob being Bob looked a bit guilty about the deception and the flush in his cheeks was a rush of sympathy for MacClear who’d been obviously stuck in the midfield to stop such an eventuality.

  In the second half, the wind behind us, we ran at the Irish. Freddy Roberts and Billy Stead in tandem breached the defences and Bob picked up his second try. He couldn’t bring himself to look at MacClear as he jogged back from the try-line.

  The final scoring moment saw Alec McDonald peel off a scrum to score handily by the uprights and Billy Wallace convert for the final score—15–nil.

  That night we ate at the Gresham Hotel, and Irishman and New Zealander were placed side by side. In speech after speech the Irish said we were the finest bunch to ever take the field. We were magicians. We’d given the ball eyes and ears and taught it the basics of our language. We were irrepressible, a force of nature; they, a fallen leaf with no will of its own. Mister Dixon raised an eyebrow at Gallaher. It was true. The Irish charmed our hides off.

  A final toast, and as glasses and tumblers are raised Billy Wallace finds Billy Glenn, who, raising a white napkin to his lips, nods back.

  Part of Billy Wallace and part of Bill Glenn are returning ‘home’.

  Outside in the cold stinging air they climb up into a jaunty car and swing through the Dublin night for the train station. They arrive just as the train to Londonderry is pulling out. They sprint across the platform and crash through the doors of a reserved compartment. The wooden gable of the station passes in the top of the window, and flushed with champagne Billy Wallace looks up from the floor. A man with a thick bristling moustache and several chins is looking from one to the other with a postcard in his hand. His companion nods over his shoulder. ‘I’d say dat one dere is Billy Wallace. And the other is Bill Glenn.’

  Londonderry. 1 am. Billy Wallace looks out the carriage window. A few people are waiting on the platform, among them his relatives. He’s never seen these people before in his life but at once he recognises them. It’s like seeing how he will eventually look when he’s very old; and not so old. As he steps on to the platform his father’s father and his father’s brother crush him on both sides. They hug him then hold him at arm’s length to look at him. One sees a son and the other sees a brother. Billy sees his origins.

  The next day rain falls in long thick beads down the windowpane. Billy’s grandfather hasn’t seen his son (Billy’s father) since he was eighteen years of age. There is so much to tell. The questions come at him all day long. Then when his father’s schoolmates arrive on the door the questions start again. Questions about his father and about the country he’s made his life in; soon Billy finds himself giving the one answer, descriptions that seem to cover both the place and the person—quiet, warmish, given to long silences, the contentment of lakes and the way they reflect their surroundings. Billy looks at the folds of his grandfather’s face. The old man is grinning down at the pipe he is packing—‘So is ee a good worker, Billy?’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘The best.’ His grandfather looks behind to one of his father’s old schoolmates. ‘Did yea hear dat? The best. Not just “good”. No. The best.’ He smiles in a secretive way and turns back to Billy. ‘So, tell me. How does ee spend his Sunday mornings?’ Billy has to think about this. It could be a trick question. He isn’t sure whether the old boy is a churchgoer or abstainer. Either way he’s bound to be a zealot about his choice. Billy looks up from his teacup. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘What was the question?’

  His grandfather leans forward with a cagey grin. ‘I asked how my boy spends his Sunday mornings.’

  ‘Thoughtfully,’ answers Billy, and this time his grandfather rocks back and slaps his leg with delight. He finds Billy’s uncle smirking in the corner of the room. ‘Did you hear that?’ Now the uncle is shaking his head; his eyes are watering with mirth. The grandfather refills Billy’s whisky glass. ‘Thoughtfully. I like dat. I like dat a whole lot, Billy.’

  The hours pass. Family lore. One or two photographs. Now for some history. The grandfather shows Billy his firearms collection. He picks up an antique weapon, and as he runs his fingertips over the smooth cherry stock his grandfather tells him: ‘Dat was used back when Londonderry closed its gates to the English. About two hundred years ago. A relative used dat to kill King James’s explosives man.’

  ‘Really?’ says Billy.

  The old boy purses his lips. ‘No. But you can tell that and no harm will come. The next part I’ll tell you is one hundred percent true though.’

  ‘The next part’ he shared with Bill Glenn on the train back to Dublin. ‘The siege lasted over a hundred days and people were reduced to such a state they ate dirt and gnawed on hides to stay alive. A dog’s paw sold for five shillings!’

  ‘Really?’ asks Glenn.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure, Bill, to be honest.’

  In Dublin they meet up with the team and hear about the rout at Limerick. We cut Munster apart with five tries, but at a terrible cost. George Smith is carrying his arm in a sling and we have England next.

  9 pm. The slick dark of the road leading down to the docks where a huge crowd had assembled to see us to Holyhead. We stayed out on deck, sharing the freezing night with the crowd, and as the ferry departed they threw their hats in the air.

  We were back on water, back to that indeterminate space that we had first liked across the Pacific then grown sick of across the Atlantic. We retired to our cabins and to kill the hours Mister Dixon called for an exchange of ‘things never before seen or experienced’. Fats Newton lay on his pillow, his feet up against the cabin walls, and recited his list—olives at the Irish dinner

  street lamps glowing through the bleak London fog at noon

  champagne

  elephants (in Regent’s Park)

  a ride in a motor car

  black people and Spaniards

  Maria George in The White Chrysanthemum

  The huge swi
mming pool at Montevideo, all enclosed, two hundred and twenty dressing rooms

  on Fats droned—

  solid ice over a football field (at Inverleith)

  A large wave slapped the porthole and a memory of the Pacific storm tore through us. Into that dark pause Mister Dixon spoke, surprising us all with a list of his own—

  shouting Spaniards selling raisins from their rowboats (in Tenerife) the spume of a whale off the coast of Uruguay

  Freddy Roberts’s dive from the upper deck of the Rimutaka into the clear water of Santa Cruz harbour (Tenerife)

  Then he said—‘The look on Emma’s face in the window when we said “goodbye” at the wharf,’ and no one had the instant reply we would have hoped for.

  None of us could think what to say. No one could guess at this new thing

  that revealed itself in the face of Mister Dixon’s wife.

  It was an uneasy moment. Then George Tyler spoke up. George said he’d seen a cabbage tree growing out of a rowboat.

  ‘Where might that have been, George?’ It was Mister Dixon, and we silently congratulated George on disengaging him from that mysterious look on his wife’s face.

  ‘The platform at Saltash Station,’ said George. ‘It was as we came through …’

  ‘Pennycomequick.’ That was from Seeling. He spoke slowly, careful to place the emphasis so we were in no doubt where the humour lay. Then, to ward off Mister Dixon he added, ‘That’s the name of the station near Plymouth. Pennycomequick.’

  Booth laughed but shut up at once when he realised he was alone.

  Jimmy Duncan rolled off his bunk and stood up; once there seemed to not know what to do with himself.

  Then someone said ‘Sleep’ and off we trailed to our dreams.

  A cold and dirty London day

  We smoked our pipes and gazed at the windows

  An inordinate amount of yawning

  The click of billiard balls

  The horsey neigh of Dave Gallaher appraising his poker hand.

  Our ‘lazy day’ before the match against England.

  On match days we had our special routines

  Some liked to go out for a brisk walk

  Gallaher to find a beggar to tip for luck

  Freddy Roberts to find a wall to throw a ball against

  Massa Johnston liked to lie in a deep bath and look up at the ceiling cracks

  Jimmy Hunter drank one pot of tea after another and peed nervously Simon Mynott pretended to chew in public even though there was nothing in his mouth

  O’Sullivan lay on the floorboards of his room

  Fats Newton and Bill Corbett swept the remains of breakfast from the plates of those too nervous to eat onto their own plates

  Mister Dixon checked the team tobacco tin was full

  Billy Stead and George Nicholson set up shop in the corner of the hotel kitchen or rooftop, whatever availed itself, and laid out their trade instruments—pliers, new laces, Nugget, Dubbin, sprigs, some gut thread and needles of varying length and width. At their feet, a sea of boots in matching pairs, left and right toes appealing to them.

  We left the hotel in Aldersgate Road at 10 am to avoid the traffic. An hour later we were wandering across a heavy and boggy Crystal Palace field.

  Some of the boys shuffled off to the pavilion to look at the Egyptian and Ottoman displays. Jimmy Hunter and Billy Wallace sat in the stand, Billy’s eye noting the goal line at both ends, the angle of the posts, placing the ball here and there in his mind’s eye.

  A line of impoverished-looking trees stand on three sides of the ground. They are different from the stricken ones Jimmy Hunter’s seen in cleared land around Taranaki. There the trees left standing are white as bone and bear the shape of surrender. The trees around Crystal Palace have simply shed their leaves and in the dull light the sooty branches look drawn against the sky, as if they’ve never known a decent wind to blow through them. And as Jimmy’s looking, he sees the branches move. He doesn’t say anything to Billy Wallace; doesn’t want to interrupt his flow. Now, squinting into the distance, he can make out a number of small figures crawling along the branches. One at a time, like a bead of water off a sill, they drop from the ends of the branches overhanging the ground. A cap fell off one and as the man bends to recover it suddenly Jimmy can see hundreds of them. Hundreds are climbing the trees and dropping over the fence then picking themselves up. In another direction he can see the top hats of the crowd moving slowly along the fenceline for the entrances. The entrances are too few, and as the lines back up more and more people are climbing up those trees. He’s watching them, small as ants, when the sound of a bellbird echoing from afar, across oceans, has him looking past these English trees to the heavily dressed branches of an elm brushing back the hurrying brown water of the Wanganui; the elm and the water, home and a girl he knows, and about now, Eric Harper presses down on his shoulder, and says, ‘It’s time, Jimmy Hunter.’

  In our tiny changing shed

  our thoughts turned to all that glass above

  and the weight of silence

  We found comfort in our routines

  The noise of the players banging their pipes

  The team bowl filling with cinders and ash

  Now the hanging up of pipes

  The tucking in of shirts

  Now stamping warmth into our chilblain feet

  ‘Gentlemen,’ says the official at the door

  Freddy Roberts spins the ball through his fingers (Freddy, as always, like a dog at a gate)

  George Gillett, apart, stares off to a distant sunny day

  Deans fussily folds his trousers along the crease

  Billy Wallace smiles at what he already professes to know

  ‘Right then,’ says Gallaher, his lead-dog eye picking up each one of us

  ‘One final thing,’ says Jimmy Duncan. ‘Remember who we are.’

  We’d beaten the Scots.

  We’d beaten the Irish.

  We told ourselves, ‘We must not lose.’

  We told it repeatedly—‘We must not lose’—

  until it began to sound like a direction.

  ‘Go to the end of the street but there you must not turn right …’

  It had its own logic. Its own ring of truth.

  But at 2.45, when we walked out to the pitch and looked up and saw all those people, our hearts dropped. No one had ever seen a crowd like it. In the stand the tall hats of the gentry; to the sides of the stand the numbers were packed in, up and down the banks, and across the field we saw figures on the skyline, perched on the ends of branches, others hugging the trunks. And who were we they’d come to see? A bank clerk clutching his leather headgear, a couple of farmers, a farrier, a couple of miners and a bootmaker.

  We looked to Gallaher for a lead. We saw his gaze circle in a smaller space than that which had threatened to overwhelm us. He clapped his hands, winked at Freddy Roberts, gave Frank Glasgow’s shoulder a pat, said to Billy Wallace and O’Sullivan, ‘Don’t forget what those English bastards did to your Irish forebears.’ One by one Dave patched us up and by the time of the national anthems we were back intact.

  The English tactic was a variation on the Irish one of deploying the giant Basil MacClear in the midfield to create a kind of log jam. The English stacked their backline with five wing three-quarters.

  They hadn’t thought about the blind side, though, and while they guarded the front entrance we ducked down the alleyway, Freddy Roberts scampering crossfield to draw the English wing and flick on to Dunk McGregor who crossed for four identical tries. The second one saw Billy Stead draw the winger to create the space for Dunk. The English were so slow to catch on we shook our heads in disbelief. We told ourselves, ‘You’d think they’d know by now.’ The English didn’t seem to know what to do. They scratched their moustaches and tried to look bemused. It could have been worse for them. Deans got across but was called back for a forward pass from Jimmy Hunter. Then Billy Wallace was over but the referee judged
that he had knocked on. Debatable. Highly debatable. Still, it didn’t alter the outcome. A greasy ball and the inability of Billy Wallace to kick out of a bog saved England from an embarrassing halftime score. It was all a bit too easy. In the second half we went about our work. The loosies dribbled over the line for Fatty Newton to score a soft try. Shortly after, Dunk followed up with his fourth try, this time on the end of a good pass from Deans in open field.

  The newspapers praised our ‘wonderful passing—the best ever seen with such a ball on such a heavy field’ and noted the almost ‘corporate instinct’ of our pack. ‘They played like eight men with one eye, and that an all-seeing eye …’

  It was our last game in London and 75,000 people stood as one to cheer us from the field.

  That night we were fêted under the glittering dome of the Alexandra Room at the Trocadero and souvenired the menus—

  Consommé Sarah Bernhardt

  Queue de boeuf licée

  Turbot d’Ostend

  Sauce hollandaise

  Selle de mouton Niçoise

  Salade romaine

  Ris de veau

  Poires Melbe

  The toasts and speeches came between courses.

  ‘Your Worships & other dignitaries, His Lordships, ladies & gentlemen … please be upstanding … to toast the greatest team to ever visit England’s shores …’

  SIX

  Was there ever the time

  to do anything other

  than march under the banner

  feed the horses

  see to their shoes

  sharpen weaponry

  and make sure everything was in good working order?

  We had Sunday afternoons

  ‘down time’

  on the edge of the Serpentine, say

  smoking our pipes