The Book of Fame (7 page)

‘You really have to wonder, don’t you, what hunger burns in their souls.’

But this was our milieu—men who would swallow nails.

Lone cyclists, their front wheel doggedly searching east.

So, what was our trick?

In the ‘Cock and Bull’ over pints of Guinness

to the greengrocer’s daughter Freddy Roberts tries to explain.

‘Really, it has all to do with space, finding new ways through.’

The greengrocer’s daughter smiles. She’s taken a shine to Freddy.

She strokes her finger around the glass rim.

‘If you get my drift.’

‘No. All right

Let me put it this way.

Nope. Better still. Here’s what we do.

Let’s say you and I go for a short walk.’

She led the way to a lightly wooded area and Fred demonstrated the

various ways through—

the course of a spooked hare

the path of angling light in the trees

then, as it happens—as Fred tells it—

in the new dusk

the sky turned black and quivered

over the spired rooftops

as a flock of starlings

switched shape and direction.

‘That’s another thing,’ says Freddy

‘Think of us as fifteen sets of eyes

pairs of hands and feet

attached to a single

central nervous system.’

But she wasn’t really interested

not really.

She asked Freddy if he could kiss her—

was it allowed, he thought she meant

and pictured Mister Dixon emptying his pipe

and its faint disapproving clatter.

She had to ask him again

‘Can I kiss yer?’

And after they did that she asked him to write

‘Freddy Roberts’ where he kissed her

because she had seen his name in the paper.

We visited the great universities. At Oxford, a tiny warden in an enormous black hat walked ahead with a lantern and led us through courtyards with grass so beautifully tended that we wanted to roll around in it like happy dogs. ‘So,’ said Jimmy Duncan, like this was what he’d been looking for all this time and might even have passed through these gates years earlier had he known about it. In some of us that possibility expanded and contracted.

Cunningham who knew a bit about masonry ran his finger over the stonework.

Hunter who had planted a garden on the family farm got down on his haunches to dig his fingers and test the quality of the mulch.

Tyler who knew all about line from his boat-building knelt to draw the bead of the lawn.

Mister Dixon horrified us all by walking across the lawn to sniff a rambling rose.

Jimmy Duncan banged out the contents of his pipe on the path then seeing our woebegone faces gathered up the blackened ash and tobacco remains and stuck his hand in his pocket.

Billy Stead gazed with longing at grass greener than Southland. We stood back and admired these squares of lawn framed by ancient stone walls with ivy climbing up from lovingly prepared rose beds.

We thought back to our own shabby grandstands and poorly drained fields. It wasn’t as if we lacked for the same elements.

We had rock.

We had flowers.

Decent enough turf.

We had space and light.

But at Oxford what we realised was this—

it was a matter of arrangement, of

getting the combinations right, and of

questioning why we thought something should be this way and not that way,

in other words, a matter of directing thought and a pair of hands back to a guiding principle.

When we considered the shape of our game

we saw the things at work

that we admired and cultivated

every man’s involvement and

a sharing of burden and responsibility.

When we considered the shape of our game

we saw an honest engine.

‘Even men who have played rugby since childhood and grown grey in its service could not help expressing astonishment. It was all so dumbfounding, so bewildering, almost uncanny.’ We did score thirteen tries so we supposed the
Oxford Times
would say that.

‘It was an even game,’ said one wit, ‘because six tries were scored in the first half and seven tries in the second half …’

After the game we had dinner at Trinity Hall where we sat at long wooden tables beneath arched windows. On all sides of the dining hall figures of importance bore down upon us, robed men, former scholars,
wardens, sirs, bishops, and ‘Jacob Hall—rope dancer and acrobat’ who was more our thing.

At Cambridge, Steve Casey was pointing with his fork when suddenly the doors to the dining hall were flung over and in marched a dozen male students. They formed a line on the far side of the hall and then turning to face us, raised three loud cheers and each drank down his pitcher of beer, banged them down empty, and, like that, left the hall in a tidy line, their faces filled with accomplishment.

What was all that about?

The Professors looked up from the table or wherever they had turned their thoughts for the duration of the episode and plied us with polite and easy questions—

where were we from?

how were we enjoying England?

had we seen Buckingham Palace?

A thin-faced Classics Professor cracking open a hard-boiled egg with the back of a teaspoon, turned to O’Sullivan: ‘Ah, yes, your war dance. Are you aware that it bears an uncanny likeness to Achilles’ war cry, you know, in the opera,
Priam?’
O’Sullivan did not know that.

But that wasn’t all that we didn’t know. At Oxford and Cambridge there were inscriptions with Roman numerals that we could not decipher, bits of ancient language chipped out of rock that we did not recognise, statues, busts, columns, and life-like figures from stories that we either did not know or had only half-heard.

Our industry was football and experiments with space.

What we knew

what we understood

had no beautiful language at its service

lacked for artists and sculptors

what we knew was intimate

as instinct or memory

Our knowledge hinged on the word ‘like’.

We could say that, that tree there

is like

our beech

or that woman’s eye

caught between secrecy

and full disclosure

is sloped

like

a fig

Or we could say ‘like’

when we needed time to think

what it was exactly

that needed explanation

‘Like’ was the hinge

on which unknowingness swung into light

we could say ‘like’

when we meant ‘imagine this’

For example, Billy Stead describing our ‘pleasure principle’ to a newspaperman—

to glide outside a man is

like

pushing on a door

and coming through

to a larger world

Space was our medium

our play stuff

we championed the long view

the vista

the English settled for the courtyard

The English saw a thing

we saw the space inbetween

The English saw a tackler

we saw space either side

The English saw an obstacle

we saw an opportunity

The English saw a needle

we saw its mean eye

The English saw a tunnel

we saw a circular understanding

The formality of doorways caused the English to stumble into one
another and compare ties

while we sailed through like the proud figureheads we were

The English were preoccupied with mazes

we preferred the lofty ambition of Invercargill’s streets

Billy Stead laughed up at the ceiling. He’d been making these points to the newspaperman and had just thrown in Invercargill to see if he could get the hometown into the Cambridge newspaper. Now, at the behest of the reporter, he set about describing the various character of space—

the come-hither appeal of that space between the Plimsoll and the ever-flattering surface of the ocean

the upturned wagering ends of the turf between Billy Wallace’s sprint for the corner flag and the diagonal run of Billy’s opponent desperate to shut down the space

there was the dare of the tightroper who of necessity imagines air to be solid

there was the fox outside Cambridge which he’d seen turn and run this way and that, in and out of the hounds pursuing it—a life-saving understanding of space instantly lost to memory

there were the trails of a life spent in a valley

and the distance travelled between obscurity and fame

There were idle moments

such as

the hour after breakfast

walking beside a slow-moving river

filled with toast and eggs

not really feeling like victors

kicking bronze-coloured leaves about.

Talk of a kind

‘How’s that knee, Jimmy mate?’

The bigger blokes like Nicholson, Seeling

walking with the detachment of giraffes.

There were the trains

the endless sitting and looking out the window

at the cows and the passing farmhouses.

On long trips, between Durham and Edinburgh, say,

we got so used to looking out at the world that we forgot our part in it.

We forgot that we were really bank clerks, foundrymen, farmers and miners.

We moved across the country and it was like it wasn’t really there, and, we weren’t quite in it.

The unquenchable nature of success sat on us lightly

but it meant routines—

Another train, another hotel, another match

Another speech—honoraries, dignitaries, your highnesses, gracious visitors, His Lord and Lady, the Mayor and Mayoress, ladies and gentlemen

Mister Dixon reaching for the same old card—‘Far be it for me to comment on the quality of the opposition we have yet to meet.’

Toasts, and more toasts

then off into the night with old injuries and new ones

black and blue bruises

the rockabye sway of the horse-drawn wagon

our tired silence

the strange voices that called to us from unseen doorways in the fog a baby’s cry sending Stead’s thoughts to Invercargill

the scrape of a shovel in the coal box fetching Corbett and Cunningham

a dog’s bark causing the ears of Deans and Hunter to twitch

and the exact hour in the hills registering in their eyes.

West Hartlepool. After a month’s absence we found ourselves at the edge of the sea. Booth announced the apple and apricot trees around Alexandra would be coming into blossom now. Dave Gallaher got out his sister’s letter and read aloud a description of her ‘first swim of the season’ and of the ‘salt drying on her arms’. Our thoughts turned homeward, to Mission Bay, fruit salad and the smell of hot sand. We remembered old sunburns, the first plunge off the end of the jetty. Our first kiss. That first parting of the flesh. We thought of these home-baked moments, noting the difference between them and this. In West Hartlepool it was cold and grey, the sea had been spread with a knife and we shivered inside our skulls. Even Mister Dixon who, at times like this looked to ward off homesickness with a clap of his hands or a song, fell quiet. Then Jimmy Hunter broke the silence. ‘How’s this,’ he said.

‘In Mangamahu, on a hot day, the gorse bushes explode.’

Mangamahu
. In frigid Scotland a word didn’t come any more exotic than Jimmy Hunter’s patch.

For some of us Scotland meant going ‘home’. Billy Stead pictures himself knocking on an old wood-splintered door in Girvan. For now though he sits in the carriage practising reef knots with his boot laces, pulling one end then the other, seeing how well his Maori and Ayrshire strands knit together. Part of him is going home. Part of McDonald and Glasgow. Part of Jimmy Duncan. A lesser part of Freddy Roberts. A smidgeon of Seeling and Tyler.

At Edinburgh we stepped from the carriages to the cheers of 300 New Zealand and Australian medical students. We waved and shouted back at one another across the divide of tracks and steam. A lone brisk Scots official found Mister Dixon and pointed the way to where the transport from the station awaited us. Through the shifting vapour and steam we looked around for the dignitaries. Well, what do you know. Edinburgh was the first town where the Mayor failed to meet us.

Scotland was the only union in the United Kingdom to refuse us a guaranteed sum ahead of the match. The Scots had lost money on the Canadian tour the year before and didn’t want to invite the same again. So, at Inverleith, we would split the gate. The Scots had not foreseen the fame that rolled out ahead of us, and all week the English newspapers had poked fun at them for offering us the gate; now the Scots looked to retaliate in a variety of petty ways.

We heard that they planned to play a mystery formation against us. We heard they would not be awarding their players ‘caps’ as they did not regard the match as a ‘true international’.

Thursday night we put our boots outside our door to be cleaned and found them in the morning stuffed with crusts of stale bread. We shook our heads. It would never happen at home.

We spent the day looking over the city, visiting castles, fountains, busts, and stamping warmth into our feet.

Saturday we woke to a freeze and news that the Scots had failed to protect the ground with hay.

That would never have happened at home!

Then the Scottish captain, Bedell-Sivright, in the company of an official, turned up at the hotel to suggest we call the game off as the ground was rock hard and possibly dangerous. So Billy Stead, Mister Dixon, Jimmy Hunter and Billy Wallace went off with the Scots to see for themselves. They found the ground was already packed with cold spectators. The crowd seemed to sniff out thoughts of abandonment in the Scottish pair, and seeing Bedell-Sivright prod the turf they began to chant—‘Play! Play! Play!’ We had no thoughts of denying them and after we said as much, Bedell-Sivright gave a stiff nod and marched away with the official. We shook our heads and pretended to be amused.