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Authors: Lloyd Jones

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BOOK: The Book of Fame
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A brass band strikes up and Billy Stead immediately removes his hands from his pockets.

This is it then. This is where we’ve come to play.

Bob Deans gathered up all the pumpkins and in the space cleared we clustered around Mister Dixon for a final talk on deportment. ‘There
are just one or two things I have to say on this matter and others. Primarily, I suppose, about how best to represent your country. Questions, dilemmas will arise. For example, which look to present? Which foot to lead with? Is this smile for me or for my country?’ His advice, in the end, was to the point. We should just be ourselves. ‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘Any questions?’

So this was what we were supposed to feel. We adjusted our ties and drew encouragement from Mister Dixon’s confident manner—‘This way, boys’, and with our luggage grips and boots we tripped down the gangway to board the tender. Once the last of us were accounted for the passengers up on deck raised three cheers. We responded with a haka.

The good folk of Plymouth slept on.

We’d left New Zealand in hail and sleet to arrive in England in near darkness. As we stepped ashore a voice from the dark said, ‘Welcome to England.’ It was a reporter wanting a word with Mister Dixon and Dave Gallaher ‘if possible?’. That was Mister Dixon’s first managerial decision. It came as a surprise (unusually for him) and we saw him scratch his chin. ‘I see no reason why not,’ he said. Encouraged, other pad-and-pencil men emerged. A photographer arranged us. Freddy Roberts found a football. The first English photograph finds us in high spirits, Fred balancing the ball on the end of his fingertips, half a mind to pass it on once the photographer is finished and put Billy Wallace away. There was a flash! and Fred flicked the ball behind his head, George Smith took it and in the same motion shot it round his back to Jimmy Hunter who, without lowering his eyes, flicked it back over his shoulder to George Nicholson—who dropped it. ‘First dropped ball on English soil,’ said Jimmy Duncan. Poor George looked sorry about that. One of the reporters asked us if we could do
it
again and Jimmy said,
‘No. We never make the same mistake twice.’ It was amazing how quickly we found our voice and style, without thought so it seemed, like the wilfulness of water or the way light will bounce off in every direction at once.

Now a well-spoken man from the English Rugby Union welcomed the team to England and George Tyler, missing a front tooth, passed his hand across his mouth.

We breakfasted at the Duke of Cornwall, in a blue room the shape of the globe, bacon and eggs, tea and toast, then boarded the train to Newton Abbot.

TWO

We had arrived to a tidy world

a spoken-for world

We lined the carriage windows

and gaped at the thatched cottages

at the tidy figure in the paddock

the tame hedgerows

There appeared to be little in the way of landscaping left to do.

At the Globe in Newton Abbot we sat on the edge of our made beds.

Now what? we wondered.

Jimmy Duncan called a practice.

We felt oddly self-conscious.

We did not want to interrupt England.

We did not want to draw attention to ourselves.

We practised our scrum, our special ‘wedge’ formation devised off

Tierra del Fuego.

Billy Stead got the backs going—Billy Wallace and Mona Thompson in from their wings, weaving inside and out, first Billy on the cut, then Mona. Freddy Roberts on a drifting run, the inside pass to Jimmy Hunter who links with Smithy. In this way we began to sow our patterns onto the lovely English field.

Our first injury on English soil: McDonald tore an ear at practice.

For some days the ocean foamed in our ears. The Atlantic continued to roll beneath the English streets. In the lobby of the Globe Hotel, Frank
Glasgow threw his arms around a column. Billy Wallace steadied himself as if catching his balance on an unsteady log. The English hotel maids giggled behind their hands as Billy Stead’s arms flew up and he yelled ‘whoaaah!’ on a run across the sloping red carpet to the safety of the bar rail.

We woke to English sounds—the scullery, slushing water, roosters, crows, the shuffle of tea trolleys, the song of the washerwoman squeezing her mop at the end of the hall. We lay in our beds, cataloguing these scraps of ‘Englishness’ for future use. Later we sat up in our beds and pulled back a corner of the curtain to see what was happening down in the street. We could see donkeys with kindling tied to their flanks wobbling down the hill lanes to the market outside the hotel, where thick-ankled women in white pilgrim shawls set down vegetable baskets next to the loaves and round cheeses. In the first few days we were like shy crayfish. We weren’t sure how to place ourselves in that scene outside our window. On the first morning we watched Billy Glenn then Corbett try to insert themselves—Billy Glenn with his hands behind his back and the false calm of someone determined to ignore a growling dog; we saw him lean forward then it was as if his feet wouldn’t carry him any further. Corbett took a more direct route to the bread cart; once there, he looked fiercely up and down the main street. Then a local happened to ask him a question and Bill took a backward step, fright took hold of his face, he shook his head and hurried away back to the hotel lobby. Jimmy Duncan wandered at leisure to a park bench by the watch tower. He yawned into his hand and plopped himself down, crossed his legs and lay his head back to bathe in the early morning sunshine. It was a lesson to us all.

We took heart from Jimmy’s lead and soon were a familiar sight about Newton Abbot. We were invited out to musicals and theatres, to public
smoking concerts. At the invitation of Lord Clifford and the Earl of Devon, Gallaher, Jimmy Duncan, Billy Stead and Mister Dixon went for a ride in a motor car and came swaggering back to the Globe with shining faces. They’d travelled over one hundred miles into the English countryside. The rest of us walked. Or we cycled. We cycled through the green countryside to Teignmouth, Totes, Paington. Along the Devonshire lanes we saw elements of ‘time’ and ‘order’ bundled up in thick hedgerows, backed by wide-spreading elms, fern, ivy, mosses and wild flowers. And when you looked at those elms and mosses and wild flowers you found yourself looking past them to the gorsey clay hillsides of home. In one you saw the start of something and in the other the pretty finish.

Did we feel at home? Among the English, and English things?

But we had these things too: sparrows, thrushes, macrocarpas. Tea and potatoes.

On the coast walk between Carbis Bay and St Ives, we found the odd patch of gorse, even cabbage trees.

We recognised the mould from which we’d been cast. In the mannerisms and transactions of the people, we saw ourselves—

the way a barman with one neat action sweeps the bar top dry before setting down a pint of Guinness

the chirpy skill of the fruiterer filling the bag with apples and spinning it to a twist at the opening

the matey banter of the cabbies, and the tenderness with which they spoke to their horses: ‘Go on ’ome with yer Samantha’

the knowledge of oceans contained in the faces of the Devon and Cornishmen

the same measuring sideways glance out the corner of an Irishman’s face when a leg-pull was on

and this! the same nutty obsession for the state of the weather

and that English silence aboard trains, wily as trout

the choreography and fair play of the English in numbers; first, the

women and the children, then the gentlemen

the time given to the discussion of dogs

or, on the stillest of mornings, with the world hanging by a thread, the maniacal urge to laugh at the top of our voices

That was us as well.

Time and time again, we’d catch them looking at us,

measuring and evaluating.

They felt our biceps

asked us to step up on the scales

stared down our throats

counted our teeth

and challenged us to Indian arm wrestles.

Then that first game in Devon

Played in golden farmlight.

On the train up to Exeter we hardly spoke to one another.

Our attention wandered out the carriage window but nothing caught

our interest.

A sail boat.

An elderly couple, the man with only one arm holding a fishing rod.

A dog wagged its tail.

The world didn’t look a serious enough place for our mood.

Where the train left the coast to follow the edge of a marshland Mister

Dixon got to his feet; he scratched himself and looked perplexed. He
walked up and down a few times. He fossicked in his pocket for his speech notes and tips on VIP greetings.

In Exeter we visited the great cathedral and walked around the city streets. We were supposedly taking an interest but O’Sullivan and Stead kept needing to find a toilet, and Mister Dixon kept disappearing into the graveyard with his speech notes.

After lunch at the Half Moon Hotel, our two coaches followed the river to the County Ground. We crossed the river, passed under a bridge and turned down a narrow street of houses. At the end of the street we could see long lines of people passing through the gates, the men in caps and top hats and the women in sun bonnets. We sunk back in our seats, eyes averted to the coach upholstery.

Christ! They were coming to see us! We closed our eyes and silently prayed that we wouldn’t make fools of ourselves.

Entering the ground we tried not to look but couldn’t help ourselves. In every direction you saw people. The stand was full, and the area behind the bike track; between there and the rows of houses people stood five, six, seven deep while up on the roofline solitary figures clung to chimney pots.

At 3 pm we walk out in single file, Glasgow pulling his headgear on. O’Sullivan trips on a clod of mud and reddens with embarrassment. Billy Wallace’s eyes dart to all corners of the field; he locates the posts, takes a couple of backward steps then jogs back. Billy Stead notes the roll of the turf and where at one corner it slopes away on the grandstand side of the ground. Gallaher bends down to pick up a clod of mud and throws it away. Steve Casey underarms a pebble. Jimmy Hunter wipes away a nervous yawn. In the short time that it takes us
to walk out to the middle we look for a dozen diversions.

Then a crow flew across the ground and every one of us looked up to follow its flight. Our eyes swam in the blue skies. The sunny day was nothing like what we’d been told to expect at this time of year. George Gillett wore a tweed hat at fullback.

Our first points on English soil came within three minutes of the start. Fred clears from a scrum to Billy Stead, a sweet transfer to Jimmy Hunter. Jimmy runs hard at the defensive line; the Devon men try to wrap him up but Jimmy’s legs keep pumping and that’s when we first saw the alarm on the faces of the Devon players. You saw the Devon men back on their heels, hands in the air. Jimmy was supposed to fall over. Every other player they wrapped up falls over. They weren’t used to Jimmy’s civil disobedience. But a horse wouldn’t have stopped Jimmy. Behind his maddening release of energy were six weeks at sea, hours of shipboard training, hours spent imagining such a moment as this, through ice storms and tropical heat. Jimmy spins free, as easy as passing through a revolving door and goes over near the posts for Billy Wallace to convert. That was just the beginning. George Smith crossed for four tries. Carbine got three. George Gillett went over for a try with one hand holding on to the brim of his sun hat. We scored twelve tries in all and were up by fifty points before Devon answered with a penalty goal.

The ease with which we did it surprised everyone, the crowd, the newspapermen, ourselves included. We heard later that several London newspapers came out the following day with the wrong score. The telegraph operator transcribing the dots to letters had ‘corrected’ the 55–4 scoreline to read in favour of the English County champions.

Later that afternoon in the chandeliered light of a hotel in Exeter we rose with the Devon men to toast the King and sing our national anthems. We were so happy and with the champagne glowing in our cheeks we belted out a haka that had the ashtrays and champagne flutes bouncing on the tabletops.

Outside the hotel a huge cheer went up. Thousands stood in the dark where earlier in the day we’d passed unnoticed. They wanted to shake our hands. They slapped our backs. They seemed to know us or want to know us. We shook their hands. ‘God bless,’ they said. God bless. We smiled with uncertainty, wondering if this was the right thing to do.

They were so appreciative and we were so grateful.

News of what had happened at the County Ground had reached Newton Abbot around six that evening. The stationmaster was first to hear. He’d tipped his cap and shaken hands with Jimmy Duncan earlier in the day. He wrote down the score on a scrap of paper and sent one of his assistants off with it to the innkeeper. Within a short time the news had passed along the doors, from house to house. Now it was just after eleven at night, and as we stepped from the train a huge crowd of men, women, children and their dogs cheered as we made our way to the drays to take us to the hotel. A brass band walked ahead of us through the main street of town playing ‘The Road to Moscow’. As we arrived at the Globe the hotel manager raced out in his shirtsleeves to greet us. We climbed down from the dray and the excited crowd closed in around us. They wouldn’t let us inside until they’d heard some words. Say something to us. Speak! So, from the upstairs balcony, Mister Dixon leant his weight on the balustrade as we’d seen him do so often at the ship rail and put across a typically modest view. ‘Naturally we believe in our system, but it would
be premature, premature I think, on the strength of one match to express an opinion about it …’ The crowd looked disappointed. The voice didn’t quite match the deed. The content wasn’t quite there. They shuffled restlessly. George Nicholson correctly read their mood and with Cunningham rallied us for a haka. ‘…who! who! ra! ra!’ They loved that; they clapped and begged for more. They pulled on our shoulders and who-raaaed in our faces. They wanted to hear more. Mister Dixon looked at his timepiece. Nicholson, though, slapped his long thighs and Cunningham rolled his eyes. Pakeha atea! Ring a ring a pakeha … The street thrilled. The dogs howled in the English night.

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