Bred of Heaven, page 17
Elgan Rees has silver hair nowadays. The eyes and cheekbones are still sharp, the body trim. At fifty-seven I imagine he can still execute a proficient sidestep.
‘I could if it came to a situation where I had to.’ He laughs. Elgan is a sales rep for a company which manufactures protective clothing – has been for over thirty years – and spends much of his time on the M4, which is why we have met in the motorway service station just to the west of Cardiff. If he’d played in any other era he’d be a more integral part of the Welsh collective memory. But injury would curtail an international career which had taken longer than normal to get going. With Gerald Davies and J. J. Williams parked on either wing for much of the decade, there was simply no way into the team.
‘I think I’ve got the record number of caps for Wales B,’ he says. Elgan had the very rare honour of being selected to tour with the British Lions in 1977 two years before he represented Wales. He recalls the welcome he received in the Welsh squad. This was back in the amateur days when no one did warm-ups or stretches, Sunday-morning training was at low tide on the beach at Aberavon and players paid for their own boots. ‘I remember Gareth Edwards said to me, “What size boots are you?” I said, “Size nine, Gareth,” and the week after I had a brand-new pair of Adidas boots. I just could not believe it. It was like Christmas. And having them given to me by Gareth Edwards? Oh my gosh.’
Elgan made his Wales debut at twenty-five, away to Scotland. ‘I had one of the worst first halves ever. I dropped a few high balls. They could see there was a weak link there. My head was really down at half-time. I remember I had a word from J. P. R. Williams: “Keep your head up and don’t worry about it.” And fair dos, J. P. R. chipped ahead for me to score in the second half.’ He scored on his debut at Cardiff Arms Park too. By the following year when Wales went to Paris for the first game of the Five Nations, he was a fixed member of a side which was tipped to win yet another Grand Slam. He scored, Wales won easily, but the game cast a long shadow.
‘We were accused of over-rigorous play. And after that game there was a build-up during the week in the press of the Welsh being too physical. And I think it set the tone for the Twickenham game. I’ve never been in a game where the atmosphere was so intimidating. British Lions that you had toured with just blanked you. After ten minutes Paul Ringer brushed past John Horton and he was sent off. For nothing! And from then on in there were skirmishes going on all over the field, physical battles going on everywhere. We were criticised by our own union after that game. A lot of English players were at fault as well and we were blamed for it.’
Wales would not win another Grand Slam for twenty-five years. It didn’t help that the great generation retired. Nor that Thatcherite policies caused the two main sources of Welsh rugby talent – the mines and the grammar schools – to dry up. But that game, says Elgan, was a watershed.
I tell Elgan that it was the first international I ever attended and I vividly recall that sense of menace. But I’ve got something else to tell him too. We’ve been talking for an hour about his memories of the golden age. Elgan is a delightful man, modest and apparently thrilled to recall with a stranger those now distant years when he strutted, jinked and sprinted upon the world stage. I’m suddenly nervous.
‘Elgan, I need to come clean about something,’ I say. ‘When you broke into the Welsh team I used to identify with any player called Rees.’ I’m easing him in.
‘And Clive Rees as well obviously,’ he reminds me. ‘He was called Billy Whizz.’
‘You were a lot cooler than Clive. And I have to say it went a bit further than that.’ Deep breath. ‘The thing is, Elgan, when I was at school, in order to enhance my Welshness I used to claim that you were my uncle.’ I take care not to mention which school it was. Having no idea how a former Wales international will greet this bizarre form of hero worship, I am relieved when his face creases up and a peal of laughter echoes around our bit of the motorway service station.
‘Well, if you can get away with it, Jasper, get away with it, I say!’ He even thanks me. I rather feel that thanks are due to him. But anyway, now that’s out of the way I have a question. At the age of forty-five, I tell him, I’ve booked myself in to play for Clwb Rygbi Cymry Caerdydd. Does Elgan have any advice? He doesn’t hang about.
‘Don’t play!’ he says. ‘Don’t take the risk. It is a physical game at the end of the day and your body is not quite used to taking the dumps and actually having to do tackles and being tackled as well. It’s difficult to go on the field and just do it. I wouldn’t go there, to be honest.’
Oh. I tell Elgan that’s not exactly the advice I was looking for. Does it make a difference that I’ve been asked to play on the wing?
‘On the wing you’ve got a chance,’ he says. ‘As a winger I would try to run away from trouble.’ He’s laughing again. ‘I tried to avoid tackling as much as I could.’ This is an excellent development. Beyond the coincidence of our Welsh surname, my rugby uncle, who scored six tries in thirteen internationals for Wales and twice toured with the British Lions, and I have something in common after all. If Elgan Rees can run away from trouble, then so can I.
An ebost arrives from Rhys the Voice offering a choice of two Sunday games, a week apart. I’m busy elsewhere in Wales on the first, so plump for the second. Rhys the Voice hopes I’m fit and healthy. I get into training. Running round the park. Running round the river circuit. Press-ups. Sit-ups. Sit-ups. Press-ups. The usual malarkey, utterly hellish. My knees in particular set up a protest. I am a victim of cartilage complaint and joint malfunction. But I must face my Welsh destiny. Then two days before the game a text arrives.
‘Dim gem! Wedi canslo!’
The game’s off. I can cancel my appointment in casualty.
To soften the blow, Rhys the Voice issues an invitation to watch him work at the Millennium. Thus a few Saturdays hence I turn up at Gate 4 in Cardiff and am handed a laminated pass with my face on it. I am inordinately proud to be an officially badged insider. Rhys the Voice leads me through the tunnel from which in a couple of hours the simulated dragon’s breath will be snorting and the XV men of Wales emerging.
I have taken the precaution of wearing my Welsh rugby shirt. Sadly, the appropriate attire does not qualify me to trespass onto the actual pitch, nor even the grass this side of the touchline. The turf really is that hallowed. I stand and look up at 75,000 empty seats, all of them to be filled within two hours. Voices of stadium workers echo around the vast hollows. Rhys the Voice is in conversation with someone from the outside broadcast team. A message has come down from very high up in the Welsh Rugby Union that he’s not allowed to be so pro-Wales in his pre-match announcements. Apparently it’s not very hospitable. So ‘Ymlaen, Cymru! Come on, Wales!’ will have to go. His patriotism has been gagged.
We wander along the side of the pitch down to another tunnel in the corner. From down the slope comes the magnificent noise of a choir and band in rehearsal. We walk towards the sound of ‘Sosban Fach’, past a glinting semicircle of red-jacketed brass-bandsmen (and women, and boys and girls). A well-fed conductor is tucked tight into his livery, face puce under a steepling bearskin hat. Rhys the Voice and I plant ourselves next to a box on which a small conductor stands, the same man I’ve often seen from the stands. In front of him is a vast choir – two choirs, in fact – consisting in the front row of young blowdried men in black suits and shirts with white ties, and behind them white-haired gents in thick zip-up anoraks. You can tell which choir are the nancies coached in from London.
They pump out a rousing national anthem. Surrounded by hard walls and ceiling, the sound pings cleanly around the space like a bullet around a room. I stand and sing, a few more words having gone in, but I still start Redwoodising somewhere in the third line. No one’s looking at me. When it’s over and the choir wanders off, Rhys the Voice introduces me to the conductor, who rejoices in the name of Haydn James. There are a lot of Haydns and Handels in the Valleys, he explains, a legacy of the oratorios first performed in the nineteenth century.
The stadium is now no longer quite empty. Rhys the Voice takes his place behind a bank of equipment next to a dapper silver-haired man in pinstripes called Iestyn who shares the announcing duties. Their schedule is full of highly specific timings. Announcement of this at such-and-such a minute, choir to sing so-and-so precisely here. Teams to warm up at this point. We are right by the tunnel. I sit next to him as these predictions come precisely to pass. Rhys the Voice holds a microphone to his mouth, speaks into it and lo, his words boom out of vast speakers mounted high above us. It’s as if the stadium is responding to his disembodied instructions. The choir walks on. The squads jog out past our left shoulders to do their drills. Rhys the Voice appears supremely relaxed as he addresses an audience of 75,000 in English and Welsh. The choir is now in front of us, the brass band led by its spherical conductor off to the right. The barrels planted around the touchlines start to spit vertical flames the heat of which lightly toasts my eyeballs. To my left the tunnel froths with bilious smoke, though close up the effect is curiously less dramatic than up in the gods. And here as if at the command of Rhys the Voice come the contemporary deities of Wales into a stadium detonating in welcome. Iestyn announces the anthems. Haydn James, mounted on a box, raises his baton. We stand to sing and I give it currently my best shot as just out there on the grass the XV men of Wales put their arms round one another’s shoulders. Their inflated torsos bulged and rolling like bald Welsh hillscapes, they look up towards a middle-distant heaven and draw on the moral sustenance offered by a whole stadium singing ‘Gwlaad! Gwlaaad!’ Country! Country! The choir marches off with the band to their corner tunnel. The teams line up. As usual I expect to hear the bilingual exhortation for the boys from the Tannoy. But the source of those stirring words is obedient to the command from high up in the Welsh Rugby Union. There is no ‘Ymlaen, Cymru! Come on, Wales!’ I am sitting next to Rhys the Voiceless.
On 20 September 1977, fifty years after they married in the Capel Yr Annibynwyr in Lammas Street, my grandparents celebrated their golden wedding. All Carmarthen made its way up to Mount Hill for the party. My main memory of the gathering is of a short, middle-aged guest collaring my father during drinks before lunch.
‘Dr Rees,’ he said, ‘I got a terrible problem with my back.’ There was a lot of this for Dr Rees whenever he returned home. In those days particular respect was reserved for doctors who plied their trade up in London. This stuff was discussed in the car on the way back home. ‘Dr Rees, I got a terrible problem with my back’ became a catchphrase – English shorthand for classic Welsh hypochondria. How we roared.
But then not long after, and without the slightest complaint, Bert lost his sight. Near total blindness didn’t keep him from the golf course. His friends parked him in front of the ball and he would stoically make his way round as if his disability simply didn’t exist. A Christmas or two later Dorothy, now nearly eighty, kept slipping away to the bathroom and staggering back a few minutes later as if nothing was wrong. Being glued to the snooker table, we didn’t notice much, but within days her gallstones had been removed in London and a woman who had spent a lifetime cooking in the luxuriant Welsh way was put on a penitential dairy-free diet. Again, there was no self-pity.
We went to Wales for one last Christmas, driving to a local carvery to guzzle all we could eat. It wasn’t the same. I wonder whether having to spend the following Christmas with us in England wasn’t the end of Bert. By April, at the age of eighty-four and preceded by all of his eight siblings, he had died.
I took the train from Oxford to Carmarthen for the funeral. The small diesel chugger from Swansea rounded the corner into the Tywi estuary, yards from where Bert and Dorothy had taken their small boys to the beach before the war. This was my first journey into Wales under my own steam. I was dimly conscious that, from now on, I’d be seeing it through my own eyes.
St David’s was an Anglican barn thrown up at high speed in the 1830s, its spire hurtling importantly to the heavens, in order to give the Church of England a more visible presence in Carmarthen as people defected in droves to Nonconformity. We went to the front row, five Reeses each put through five anglicising years at Harrow School. Behind us it felt as if the whole town was there, arrayed in black. His Grace the Archbishop of Wales read the lesson. I remember feebly attempting the one hymn that was in Welsh, the language Bert didn’t speak with his wife and sons. Light peered dimly through an impressive stained-glass window behind the altar, donated by my grandparents in 1962: Christ in majesty surrounded by images of music and dancing. It must have cost a fortune. But then Bertram Rees had done very well for himself until a crash at Lloyds took much of it away. A cortège of black cars prowled through Carmarthenshire countryside in the rain towards the crematorium in Narberth.
The next day Dorothy decided to sell Mount Hill. The contents were duly auctioned off but for the most treasured items of furniture, and she moved into a bungalow with a small garden and a view of the Tywi Valley. She then disbursed many of her financial assets as gifts, and in order to prevent the recipients from having to pay tax on them she determined to survive for the next seven years. So at eighty-three she took up an exercise regime which involved walking around a small circuit in her garden for a mile and a half every day. She kept a check on the distances with a pedometer. If it was raining, she’d do the even smaller circuit inside. She continued walking in circles for five years until, nearing ninety, she started falling over and was persuaded into a home. But she more than met her target of surviving those seven years. Steady tapping breaks the stone.
DOUF! A rock-hard shoulder thwacks head on into my right thigh. I can feel myself toppling backwards and brace for impact with the earth. OUGH! My coccyx crashes into the turf. I tense and my tautened neck whiplashes on landing. CRICK. That hurt. A lot.
Not that I haven’t been warned.
‘Bydd e anodd heno.’ It’s a text from Rhys the Voice. It’ll be hard tonight. ‘Physical iawn am awr.’ An hour’s worth of jerks. ‘Llawer o contact.’ The interpolation of English words in these dire predictions suggests that Welsh doesn’t have the vocab to encompass the sheer ghastliness of what’s in store. Needless to say, my feet turn to ice. But I am in the area and Clwb Rygbi Cymry Caerdydd are meeting for their regular Tuesday evening training at the university grounds in Llanrhymney. I drive through Cardiff as if to an execution. My own.
There’s no sign of Rhys the Voice as young Welshmen reeking of ointment clatter in studs across the floor and out into the floodlit night. Time ticks by. I study the noticeboard intensely, twice. I don’t think I’ve felt this out of place since …
‘Sh’mae, Jasper! Ti’n barod am y sesiwm?’ Enter Rhys the Voice, club chairman, full of the usual complement of beans. I’m not particularly ready, no, but I do seem to be changing into the appropriate gear, although how appropriate it is to wear a Welsh rugby shirt in this company is a moot point.
We jog out onto the pitch. A wooden H towers overhead as we gather, perhaps forty of us, in a circle and listen to a head coach address us in Welsh then English. I don’t know the average age of the veterans, but no one else here seems to be in their forties. It emerges that Clwb Rygbi Cymry Caerdydd is under a cloud after the first team the previous Saturday snatched feckless defeat from the jaws of victory. We are to be punished with a gruelling workout, even innocent parties such as myself. We fan along the try line and start jogging up towards the twenty-two. Then back. Then up again. Then back faster. Then to the halfway. And so on. Jogging, sprinting, walking, breathing, stretching – this could go on all night and I’d pass with flying colours.
Our next drill involves finding a partner and scrumming down opposite him. I select Rhys the Voice. We lock shoulders and in turn try to use our upper-body strength to twist the other out of the horizontal. Upper-body strength and me are not often found in the same sentence, but Rhys the Voice is half a head shorter than me, and besides, I’m determined not to look like some floppy-sleeved nancy from over the Severn. So I put a lot into it and come up unbelittled if ever so slightly twingey in the neck area. A side effect, I tell myself. Ignore. Go with this feeling of macho empowerment.
We gather in the middle. Two blokes in their twenties are pulled out of the group and one is asked to tackle the other, who is stationary. He piles in, grabs his quarry round the thighs, lifts him off his feet and dumps him upside down. Traditionally known as the spear tackle. The perpetrator is roundly chastised for dangerous play. If someone does that to me I’ll be more than twingey in the neck area, I think, as a co-coach demonstrates how to tackle safely: shoulder to the thigh, head on the hip.
We are instructed to form groups of six and mark out a square of five metres by five. On the whistle, one player in the square has to put in as many tackles as possible in thirty seconds while the rest provide a moving target. I start jogging about while a rhinoceros in shorts charges around, crashing into moving objects. Thump. Down goes one of the five. Up. Sprint. Thump. Another one. I try to veer out of his eyeline. Thump. Another one down. But sooner or later he’s going to catch my eye. Up. And I am conspicuously wearing red. Sprint. So far he’s got three of the others. It’s my turn any min– THUMP.
My instinct is to stay on the deck and gently recover. However, it wouldn’t do to lie about looking wounded so I roll onto my front, push myself very slowly onto all fours, gingerly stand and re-enter the square. The others are still being biffed by the rhino. When the whistle blows it’s now the turn of a compact, bow-legged unit who gets me twice; after him a tearaway whippet whose tackles make up for in snap what they lack in heft.
On the grounds that I’d look like a wimp to put off my turn till last, I volunteer to go next. I’ve not tackled anyone for the best part of three decades. Even Elgan Rees avoided tackling where possible. The whistle goes. I look around the square and size up the options. Five young Welshmen are circling. A cheetah must feel something like this upon sighting a pack of wildebeest. A cheetah approaching retirement, with arthritic knees. The whippet is closest, so I have at him with maximum force, shoulder on the thigh, head on hip, and wait for him to crash to the floor. He is conveniently light, so only a bit of extra shove finds him toppling, and me with him. THONK. Hitting the hard earth is slightly less painful when someone under you is cushioning the blow. I lever myself up and look for more prey. Another player is passing so I thwack into him. Down he goes. Up I get. This is actually quite bracing. I can feel my testosterone levels surging. I don’t know why I didn’t do more of this at school. The rhino is in the corner of the square. Time to take him down. A three-yard sprint and BIFF! My arms barely reach around his tree-trunk legs. He barely budges. Tumble, dammit, you lump. He’s immovable. I dig my studs in, drive with all my middle-aged might and begrudgingly he sinks like a slow-mo sack of spuds. I get up and keep going. Hit. Down. Up. Sprint. I’ve already done more tackles than in my first term at prep school. Hit. Down. Up. Sprint. Surely Mr Youle, now deceased, would look upon me more favourably. The tackle board would record five, six, seven new ts, some of them Ts. Hit. Down. When the whistle blows I’m on the floor, panting heavily.
