The Book of Fame (11 page)

A house servant all the way from Bristol asked for a full description of the match to be telephoned through to his employer—the information should include scores, those involved, and in addition, those promising moves that otherwise came to nothing.

A young mother with a baby clinging to her side told Owen her ‘dae’s lungs’d collapsed’. He was to telephone his wife who would walk the result five miles to the tuberculosis ward in Swansea. She said, ‘You can cable the result as requested but I can tell yer, I knowt my ma will tell me dae that Wales won, regardless.’

The Great Western Railway Company laid on thirty extra trains. The first to pull in were from the West of England.

Then at 10.40 am the Ogmore and Garw Valley contingents arrived. They were followed by people from the western valleys of Monmouthshire, from Weymouth, from Birmingham, Liverpool, Swindon, London, Paignton.

Between 10 am and 1 pm another fifteen trains arrived with folk from the Rhondda Valley. Still more arrived at Rhymney Station—trains from Llanidloes via the Cambrian Line. People from Abergavenny, Merthyr and Aberdare … and so on, until the valleys had emptied out and there were just women and small children left.

Our hotel sat across from Cardiff Arms, and from about mid-morning at an upstairs window you could pull back a curtain and see the crowd muster outside the police barriers. You saw them walking along and reading their ticket of entry—just to be sure. Men in cloth caps, buttoned-up suits and heavy boots. In twos and threes, or large numbers from a particular mine or village, or a man on his own with a coat draped over his arm, in single file they entered Westgate Road. Some were too excited to smoke and allowed their cigarettes to burn down to their fingers. Their heads nodded at conversations to which they weren’t really paying any attention. Faces swollen with calculation looked anxiously to where the bank was filling up by the second.

A woman later wrote about her village after all the men left. She said:

Then, the hour before the men came back:

We had an early lunch. Some of us stared at our plates. Simon Mynott who had been picked ahead of Billy Stead stirred his food around with a fork. Duncan McGregor and George Gillett kept getting up to go to the toilet. Mister Dixon dipped his head to taste the soup then must have sensed he was alone; he looked up and finding the rest of us staring at our plates he set his spoon down, pulled the napkin from his collar, and pushed his bowl away.

At 1.15 we walked across to Cardiff Arms and our pavilion. Billy Wallace brought up the rear and a section of the crowd that happened to catch sight of him roared like dogs. Billy shut the door behind him, his back pressed against it, like he’d just got in from atrocious weather. We regrouped and lit our pipes and listened to the band’s programme of music—

Then—

at which point the crowd joined in.

Instinctively we glanced up to the rafters and the shifting space between gable and iron.

Those of us who could not make a comparison sat spellbound.

What a fright we were to Jimmy Duncan’s eyes.

He banged down his pipe. He got up and began to pace up and down.

We were nowhere we hadn’t been before, right?

Right, says Jimmy to his own question.

Think back to Crystal Palace. Was that a crowd or what?

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.’