The Book of Fame (12 page)

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—

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 drawing 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.

Christmas Day. Corbett woke with boils on his neck. Smithy’s shoulder was playing up again. Bill Mackrell lay in bed coughing. Gallaher was
unable to straighten his leg. The back of Freddy Roberts’ hand was black from a stomping. A poisoned area on Steve Casey’s back needed lancing.

We limped down to Christmas dinner, toasts, crackers, bonbons, cigars and coffee. We presented Mister Dixon with an umbrella engraved with all our names. Each of us received a Christmas card and a portion of Christmas cake neatly packaged in a small china bowl from a Mr and Mrs Clifford of Blenheim, Marlborough, New Zealand.

We stayed in that evening. Bob Deans led a small church service. We stood in a circle and the flames from the fire cast shadow and light over our faces and made our silence devout, and Bob intoned for us, ‘God be in our thoughts and in our words …’

Boxing Day. Fifty thousand packed into Cardiff Arms. We sat in our shed with our pipes while the bloodshot crowd roared out the song to commemorate Teddy Morgan’s try in Wales’ victory.

Jimmy Duncan got up and looked angrily out the door. Whoever was more or less fit filed past Jimmy out to the middle where the Cardiff players in their hooped jerseys stood waiting for us. Within minutes of the start, O’Sullivan broke his collarbone and we played the game a man short, Dave Gallaher switching to the front row and Frank Glasgow to Sully’s place on the side of the scrum. Dave’s move to hooker took him out of view of the crowd’s heckling. With Dave hooking and Billy Stead feeding the scrum we won more ball than we knew what to do with.

We should have been first on to the scoreboard but Deans failed to take in a long ball from Jimmy Hunter, and the honour instead fell to Cardiff. From a lineout Gabe drifted through our lines to hand on to Nicholls who crossed over unopposed. It was too easy, too sweet, heart-breakingly close to what we had done throughout the months of September, October and November. Then when the conversion struck an upright and clumsily dropped over the crossbar the glances of the big men especially—Nicholson, Seeling and Glasgow—sunk into the mud at their feet.

Near half-time Mona Thompson ran on to a flat ball from Deans and went over in Winfield’s arms in the corner. That part of the field was so densely packed that the spectators had to stand and move their chairs back to open a lane for Billy Wallace to line up his conversion attempt. A spectator coughed as he moved in but it made no difference. The ball spun through the uprights and Billy had his hundredth goal on tour.

Midway through the second half, a dribbling rush saw Seeling kick past Winfield. He and Nicholson gave chase as the ball rolled into the dead ball area. Bush who was back covering had plenty of time to force the ball dead. He had all the time in the world, so much time that he thought he would look up and appraise the situation. As he did so he saw Nicholson and Seeling bearing down on him, panicked, took a fly kick at the ball, missed, and Nicholson ‘gathered in that ball as if it had been a long-lost sweetheart’ to score.

Hurray. Hurray
. We limped back across Westgate Road with a two-point win.

They said the better team lost that day. We heard it all night and the next day. We saw it written in the newspapers and on the faces we passed in the streets of Cardiff.

Three days later we fronted up to play Swansea—our thirty-second match.

A wind howled down the field. The spectators huddled next to each other with eager faces. We felt the weight of their hope. The very wind bore it into our faces. For twenty-five minutes Swansea pounded our line before scoring. Duncan McGregor quickly replied for us. But, but … no. The linesman has raised his flag. He is pointing to where Dunk put a foot into touch. No, no. Surely not. The ground had been covered with hay to protect it against frost and when we cleared it away to find the touchline we discovered Duncan had been inside the field of play by several yards. By now, however, the ball was adjudged ‘dead’ and the try was lost to us.