The Book of Fame Read online

  Inverleith. They wanted you boys stewed and served up on toast. They wanted your balls battered and fried. Am I getting through?

  So, listen. You know what Wales is doing, right now?

  I’ll tell you. They’re thinking about us. They’re thinking about a team who’s arrived on their doorstep with 801 points for—and just the 22 against. Don’t tell me they aren’t quietly shitting themselves. Don’t tell me.

  No one did.

  We stood up and all of us stared at the door, each waiting for the other to open the damn thing, till Jimmy Duncan muttered a profanity.

  As we left the pavilion for the team photo the singing picked up, louder than anything we’d heard before, as though a section of the crowd had deliberately held back. Now as we entered more fully into view their mouths opened wider—Wales! Wales!

  During the singing of the national anthems the Welsh team did not look at us but to a holy place somewhere between the crowd and inside their hearts, their mouths moving slowly and tunelessly.

  On their own they began to sing Sospen Fach, and the whole crowd stood as one to sing with them.

  We stood in a line facing them. Our shoulders touched, and we thought back to a sleet-filled day on Wellington Harbour.

  If you looked to the rear of the vast crowd you saw an easy breeze stroke a light smoke from the chimney tops. Ground conditions were good. It was a perfect day.

  So what happened?

  First, the excuses—

  a rising injury toll

  fatigue

  poor refereeing—the endless persecution of Dave Gallaher for every imaginable offence, until Dave told the front row they weren’t to hook:

  ‘Better they have the ball than a free kick.’

  We could even put it down to curiosity:

  we knew all about winning but what did failure feel like?

  We pushed on that door—we pushed a little harder than we needed to.

  Or we could blame it on our failure to change.

  We had stopped being original.

  At the first scrum we saw the Welsh adopt our formation.

  Wherever we looked we found a mirror image of ourselves.

  How did it go now?

  dum de dah dum de dah bang whooshbang whoosh clickety-click bang

  Our music, only to Welsh names—

  Owen feints to the open side and goes the blind, sends the ball on to Pritchard, Bush, Gabe and Morgan who flies for the corner.

  The ball slickly changing hands and Morgan crossing our line without a hand laid on him. It was as if we had swapped jerseys.

  We hadn’t known defeat. We had no idea that it had a shape to it. Or that past a certain threshold there was no way back. At lineouts the forwards avoided eye contact. Newton with his hands on his knees. O’Sullivan’s eyes came over heavy-lidded. Gallaher looked fed up, hands on hips, head cocked to one side then the other.

  The magic spark that enabled Simon Mynott to carve up Cheshire has flickered out. Now he looks ordinary, mishandling the ball, misdirecting kicks. Time and again, anticipating a touchfinder, Billy Stead has run along the touchline with his flag only for Simon’s kick to stay in play. Outside him a bewildered Jimmy Hunter stares at his numb hands. They seem incapable of holding anything thrown to him. For three-quarters of the match the back three of Gillett, Wallace and McGregor look on in frustration and disbelief.

  ‘Everything must be done at speed otherwise the value of the movement is lost.’ How often did we hear that from Billy Wallace?

  Sixty minutes into the game a lineout forms on our side of halfway. From a long throw-in the Welsh gain possession and break through; seeing Fred in their way they kick past him a loose and aimless kick. The ball rolling with a left-to-right bias. The Welsh charge after it, changing course as the ball does, their shoulders touching. Now Billy Wallace comes off his wing, scoops up the ball and cuts across the face of the oncoming Welsh forwards. You could freeze the moment and countless others like it, from street games of pick-up five-a-side, to similar half-chances flowering at Thorndon Primary School, through to club rugby and all those tropical hours spent with Billy Stead theorising and arranging the quoits on deck.

  The Welsh backs are spread. Billy lines up the midfield, then straightening between Nicholls and Gabe explodes into space. He’s through with just the fullback to beat. Winfield is on the twenty-five, his arms spread ready. Then Billy Wallace hears ‘Bill! Bill!’ He draws Winfield and pops the pass to Deans.

  From the moment he started his run Bob was aware of the Welsh winger Teddy Morgan shadowing him. Now the breath and the soft thud of Morgan’s feet ghost in his ear. He can keep on the diagonal, running farther from Morgan, or he can straighten up for the shorter course that’ll bring him alongside the posts. He straightens up.

  Along the near touchline Billy Stead is sprinting with his flag yelling at Bob—it’s not an instruction or anything really, just release, pure joy as Bob goes over the line in Morgan’s tackle. Backfield Gallaher mouths a silent ‘yes’ in the direction of heaven. Mynott is catching up wth a shy smile. Gillett walks towards the Welsh line with his arms raised. A huge grin stretches Tyler’s muddy face. Seeling and the rest of the boys rush forward to congratulate Bob.

  A word here about the crowd. They were silent. We had experienced something similar that time George Smith broke the Scots’ hearts at Inverleith. We knew silence in all its guises—

  the silence of English hotel lobbies

  the deathly night silence which is broken by a horse’s snorting

  the tongue-tied silence of forests

  the silence of icebergs and awe

  the silent language of clouds over oceans

  the conspiring hand signals of haystacks

  some of us knew about the silence that can fall between a man and a woman

  and the timeless silence that collects inside domes

  The Cardiff Arms silence we would later recall as ‘a form of evidence’.

  Deans is spread-eagled, his chin on the ground. His eyes sting with sweat but he can just make out the wreaths of silence up and down the Cardiff Arms embankment.

  Now the voices of Seeling and Tyler arrive singularly. ‘Bob. Bob. Bob …’ At different moments it sounds like ‘thanks’ or it’s a ‘you bloody beaut’ kind of sounding Bob.

  Then, weirdly, the ground begins to slip away from under him. He’s being pulled back from the line. Someone has his legs, someone else has his jersey, and it’s like a sitting-room wrestle where you struggle for every inch of the rug. ‘Hey. Hey. Hey,’ he says. His arms are outstretched so that the only part of him touching the ball are his finger tips, then they too lose contact and the ball is left on its own like an island receding into the distance with fond memories and ‘adieu, adieu’ hanging over it.

  About now we picked up a different register in the crowd’s silence. It began to shuffle and become uncomfortable with itself. An unravelling of silence, if you like. The referee arrived on the scene, slipping and sliding in his street shoes.

  Over at the touchline Billy Stead is leaning forward the way you do at the edge of a lake factoring in unknown things. The scene on the field has become confusing. Players are talking and arguing.

  Owen, the Welsh half, is gesturing to where the ball has been laid. And now the referee points to the ground where he wishes to set a five-yard scrum.

  The silence of the crowd broke then as several thousand relieved voices find one another.

  We put down the scrum under the Welsh posts and after Bush found touch the crowd resumed their seats with a variety of embarrassed looks.

  The game moved on to the final quarter with us launching ourselves at the Welsh line. We ran at them with a kind of blind terror. Now we had an inkling of what defeat might be like we were desperate to avoid it. On one occasion, Simon Mynott was held up over the line. Simon tried gamely to wriggle through and it was like watching a sheep try to free itself of fencing wire.

  On another occasion Fred
went to the blindside and found Duncan McGregor who ran like a spooked deer. He went over in the corner but before we could throw up our arms in triumph the referee pulled him back for a ‘forward pass’.

  Then the whistle went

  The whistle went

  The whistle went and we hadn’t won

  We had lost

  They had won

  The whistle went and the 45,000 Welsh invaded the pitch. We were picked up and swept out the gates into Westgate Road. From time to time we caught glimpses of one another. Gallaher shoving down on Welsh shoulders as if trying to make his way along an overgrown bush track. Jimmy Hunter helpless, one hand raised, caught in a fast water. Newton shoving against it. Bob Deans looking like a man deep in argument with himself.

  In ones and twos we found our way back in to Cardiff Arms. Once we’d all assembled we walked across to the Welsh shed to offer congratulations. Every minute or so another Welsh player arrived with a stunned or joyous look and Gallaher shook his hand. O’Sullivan greeted each one with a ‘Well done.’

  In our shed Seeling lay back in the tin bathtub, his eyes closed, his weary arms resting along the bathtub rim. McDonald threw his boots down and pulled his socks off any-old-fashion and dragged himself to the bath. No one mentioned the referee. No one uttered his name. No one mentioned what we’d heard in the Welsh shed. A reporter asked Morgan if he thought Deans had scored and over the slap of water had come another of those silences that you don’t forget. We sat in our tubs and found ourselves smiling with grim hearts at Morgan’s clever and evasive choice of words: ‘I’m too elated to go into details.’

  We crawled out of the tubs, dressed and dragged ourselves across the road to find the doors of the hotel flung open. The hinges had come loose. Police were everywhere after a rampant crowd had run through the bar. It was like a storm had hit.

  We dragged ourselves upstairs to our rooms where we fell on our beds.

  Defeat.

  It was the emptiest and most confounding of feelings.

  Feeling may not be the right word because none of us could testify to feeling anything. We’d lost all feeling—in one shot then the rest through a slow seepage.

  You’re on your way to your wedding when you hear that your bride has changed her mind. She’s had a change of heart. You grin. You look out the window of your carriage. There is the countryside, more strange and distant than ever before. You look for help but instead find everyone looking back at you, and asking you over and over, ‘How do you feel? How do you feel?’

  We met on the landing to go down to the dinner. Mister Dixon fixed his tie in the hall mirror until we were all accounted for. No one said a thing until Jimmy Duncan spoke up while going down the stairs. ‘I’d’ave accepted a draw. A draw would’ave been right. A draw and you wouldn’t hear a peep out of me.’

  We sat down to eat with the Welsh the following items—

  Oysters

  Consommé à la Princesse

  Fried Smelts, tartare sauce

  Boiled Turkey, chippolata sauce

  Welsh Saddle of Mutton

  Wild Duck

  Salade à la Française

  Orange Jelly

  Nesselrode Ice Cream

  Sunday morning. Bill Mackrell lies in bed, listening to the gurgling in the downpipes and the silent run of the night rain in the guttering. He’s sick again. For three months he’s been sick. He arrived in England feeling sick. All across the Kingdom he has looked up at different ceiling patterns and counted the cracks. All night he listened to the Welsh passing beneath his window, singing, carousing, drunk in their language. Now, outside his door he can hear his own kind. The monotones of Bunny Abbott and Eric Harper. And that’s George Tyler. That’s Frank Glasgow. That’s Alec. He can hear them going down to breakfast. He can see them as he would were he in the same room—

  Dave Gallaher with that fasting stare of someone sitting at the back of a crowded hall

  Jimmy Duncan will be on his feet. They won’t get him into a chair, not today they won’t, not while that fleck of irritability rolls about in his eye Mona’ll be kicking doors

  Bronco most likely the same

  George Nicholson looking on from the edge of group despondency; not quite part of it but wanting to be

  Mister Dixon, like God, finding different expressions for every conceivable moment

  The refusual of Jimmy Hunter’s gaze to travel beyond the tip of his nose The downcast look of Billy Wallace; privately prohibiting himself to smile, but sullenness not finding a peg either

  The solid porcelain object Tyler’s face becomes when that near-permanent smile is tugged from it

  Alec? McDonald’s the only one he can see with a newspaper open, buttering his toast as he reads the match reports

  Newton’s probably there with him, a napkin tucked into his collar, and in deference to the circumstances shoving the sausage to one side

  ‘It was the first defeat of the New Zealanders whose long sequence of victories had established with them such a habit of winning that it was difficult to realise that they had at last experienced defeat.’

  Defeat took us back home and we saw in our different ways where we lived and the effect on that place that the news had—the way the small houses appeared to move back from one another men sat through church services completely deaf and unable to speak.

  Much later, when we caught up with the mailbag in New York, we heard how the news appeared to affect natural phenomena.

  How clouds in strong winds were seen to come to an abrupt halt.

  A bird thought about flight, changed its mind, and appeared to drop like a stone.

  A brown column of smoke from a distant scrub fire appeared to lose all heart and was seen to drift earthwards in a tumbling staircase of white and grey ash.

  None of us could imagine laughter again except as something that might happen to other people.

  Smiling Welsh officials turned up with drays and drove us out to Penarth. It was three miles through wooded countryside to the coast. We passed the day walking out our bruises and aches along the shore and skipping flat pebbles across the tidal flats.

  We had lost heart. Lost interest in the Crusade. Now we’d lost, what was there to defend any more?

  Recognising the problem, back at the hotel we returned to our shipboard games. Mister Dixon shook a handful of dice and came up with a suggestion. ‘Why don’t we try inventing a place where there’s no such thing as fame. No one’s ever heard of it.’

  Eric Harper’s eyes followed a smoke ring to the ceiling. He said, ‘A place where there’s no mirrors.’

  ‘Or portrait galleries,’ he added.

  ‘Crowds are never known to assemble.’ (McDonald)

  ‘There are postcards but they’re only of natural stuff, flora, the odd bird perhaps.’ (Mynott)

  ‘No one knows you except as somebody’s son, brother, cousin, or in-law.’ When Jimmy Hunter said that we all looked up at the same moment. This wasn’t a mythic place at all. It was nothing of the kind. We’d just described ‘home’. And the notion of that collected in our faces like an ocean wave crashing ashore.

  Two days after the Cardiff Arms Test we turned up to play Glamorgan. Tries to Bunny Abbott, Alec McDonald and Billy Wallace—Billy off a nicely weighted kick through from George Smith who was back briefly from injury. A gale blew across the ground and it was impossible for Billy Wallace to find the uprights. We had hoped for better things. We’d hoped to put the Cardiff Arms misery behind us, but on the eve of the match twelve of the Welsh internationals withdrew, and while Glamorgan fielded a weakened side we sensed in the crowd their wonder at what the fuss was all about. We looked no better than ordinary.

  The Times stood by us and gave the 9–nil victory 58 lines, 34 more than the article on the ‘defence of Australia’, 28 lines more than strikes leave ‘Moscow in Darkness’, and 52 more lines than the Prince of Wales’ attendance at an Indian military display of ‘elephants and bullocks employed in drawin
g guns’.

  We returned to Cardiff and spent the Friday playing billiards and thinking about Newport.

  Now that we had lost we felt we could safely do it again and nothing would happen.

  On the field we couldn’t decide if we wanted to be there or what it was we were supposed to do.

  There were momentary flashes of old form. Harper scoring on the end of a pretty passing move. Mona came close before he was tipped out in the corner. But our confidence had gone. Everything we did took a crucial second longer than it had before Cardiff. Jimmy Hunter’s wonderful corkscrew runs were now demonstrated by a man who couldn’t decide which door to go through. Speed of hand required speed of thought but we’d lost that. We’d lost our confidence to be ‘who we were’.

  Billy Stead, who was captain for the day, had to bully Billy Wallace into having a long-distance shot from a penalty awarded near halfway. The great Carbine is in a pessimistic mood. He says, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ And Billy says, ‘You won’t know until you try.’ And Carbine says, ‘I know what’s possible. I know it like I know I can’t hold my head underwater for ten minutes.’ Meanwhile the crowd is sitting in its silent thousands trying to follow this discussion. Finally Billy says, ‘Give it a go anyway. Have a dropkick.’ So, reluctantly, Carbine turns the ball in his hands feeling for its inner shape. The rest of us stand back, hands on hips, heads tilted back to watch the ball sail between the uprights.

  Still, no one spoke of grace any more. It was like it had been rubbed from our limbs. In the changing shed we were a muddy ruin.

  The Times judged us accordingly with 48 lines, ten lines less than the article on ‘Christmas Dinners to the Poor’—‘Each family of five and upwards received 5lbs beef, 1¼ lbs suet, a quartern of bread, ¼ lb tea, 2lbs sugar, 1lb raisins, 1lb currants, ¼ lb peel, 2 oranges, and a flag for the pudding.’ Still more than that given to the debate on the number of Jews killed in Odessa; and a description of the fighting in Moscow.

  Christmas Eve we spent walking the Cardiff streets looking in the festive windows and wishing we hadn’t spent all our allowance.