Bred of Heaven (22 page)

But Elgan was not my brother's uncle. My older brother supported England, who hoofed over three penalties that afternoon at Twickenham. Result: England 9, Wales 8. Two national histories summarised in scoreline: plodding victory for pragmatism and force, bitter defeat for adventure and romance.

It was the romance of Welsh rugby which seduced me. I was educated by Mr Youle to believe that Wales played the proper way. They created shapes of glistening beauty, never better demonstrated than in the Greatest Try Ever Scored, when the Barbarians playing the All Blacks in 1973 crafted an attack of astonishing dynamism and flair which, started by Bennett and completed by Edwards, involved seven players: one Englishman, six Welshmen. Of course Wales engaged in the rough stuff too. To gain possession of the ball in rugby you have to go about the necessary business of physically subordinating the opposition. But the best teams are remembered for what they do with that possession, and no team in rugby history is better remembered than Wales in the 1970s.

Even before the birth of Project Wales, I start to travel to the Millennium for every home game, hoping for history to repeat itself: for Wales to stick it up the English, to bring home the Grand Slam, to terminate a losing streak against New Zealand which stretches back to the year of the coronation. Hope walks shoulder to shoulder with realism. These things would be nice, but they are never expected. Not any more. However often you go, the All Blacks will always maraud and destroy. I am there when Wales beat Australia, and when Wales win a Slam. Those are very good days. Very good indeed. But I am also there one dreary afternoon when Wales are playing like muppets against Scotland. As ever I have half an eye on the return journey. The queues outside Cardiff Central can be punitively long, even without the cold and the rain. It's always a good idea to beat the rush. And if things are looking
gloomy, why not nip off a little bit early? Half-time analysis with match companion goes as follows:

‘This is shit. Wales are playing like muppets. How many points do they need to be losing by for us to escape five minutes before the end?'

‘Ten or more.'

‘Agreed.'

Wales continue to play in the aforesaid manner. They have never looked less like winning. A Scottish player is injured and after a long delay is stretchered off. The clock ticks down, though we can't actually see it from our seats. The crowd grows tetchy. Time is clearly ebbing away. Wales, ten points down, have a line-out five metres from the try line. It's now or never. The Welsh line-out is as skittish and unreliable as an ill-trained thoroughbred. I'll bet my house on Wales losing the line-out.

House saved. Line-out lost. In unison, 75,000 fatalists groan.

‘That's it,' I say. ‘Let's go.' We get up, shuffle out of our row and walk with heads held high out of the stadium. No one follows. Out in the street it is eerily quiet. But we've made the right choice. On the grounds that we're well ahead of the rush, we slip into a Welsh Rugby Union souvenir outlet where the match is being played out on a screen behind the counter. The first thing we see is the clock. Still eight minutes to go. How could we have got that so wrong? Must have been that injury. Then a Scot is sinbinned. Then Wales score a glorious try. Five points behind. Conversion. Three points behind. Three minutes to go. Wales break, a Scot trips our fullback and is sent off. Scotland down to thirteen men with forty-three seconds left. Wales take the penalty. No points behind. Good comeback, well done, boys, a bit shaming to have missed it, but a draw after all is not a win. We start for the station. We've gone fifty yards when a pub on the other side of the road
all but explodes with noise. The game, inexplicably, is not over. We dash up and are just in time to peer in a window and glimpse through crowds of red shirts a screen on which Shane is touching the ball down under the posts. The pub goes berserk. The air above us detonates. Since we left the Millennium Stadium, the muppets have scored seventeen points. It's the most pulsating finish to a rugby match in living memory. And Wales won. And I missed it. If I'd taken a Welshness test on that day, there could have been only one verdict.

Fail.

Late July. Mount Hill. Early 1970s. The sun beating down on lush green fields flanked by oaks in heavy bloom. Pylons march across distant hills. My grandfather in a garden chair out on the spongy lawn. It's the annual sports day. I am seven or eight. Bert's two junior partners from the surgery have brought their brood. We liked the pair of brothers, one thin, one tubby. The three sisters – we had no experience of girls – slightly unnerved us. We weren't familiar, for example, with gender etiquette in relation to competitive sports. Should we give them a sound thrashing with egg and spoon or keep it courteous?

I went all out for victory. And these were games at which I could win. The race was the blue-riband event. The course consisted of an anticlockwise circuit of the Mount Hill property. You were gone and out of sight for what felt like for ever but was probably less than a minute. And all the time Bert sat there with his stopwatch, keeping an eye on things. One year I was victorious a lot. At the ceremonial prize-giving I'd already had my hand shaken and my palm greased with a 50p bit, when Bert announced the high jump prize. I'd won this one fair and square, so to spare my grandfather the bother of reading out my name I broke from the circle of adult
spectators and junior competitors without waiting for the announcement, strolling up with a proud, entitled air to collect my next winnings. I was met with a glare which shrivelled the soul.

‘I haven't said your name,' said my grandfather with chilly calm. My legs petrified. Confused by shame and terror, the blood had no idea whether to rush to my face or vacate it. I also got a public dressing down from my father, backed up by my mother, because this rebuke would have been meant for them too, the ones responsible for raising such a presumptuous, arrogant little English monster. And then the winner was announced. A girl. Wales, to repeat, was the wellspring of the equals sign. Bert, the former High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire, parcelled out the winnings fairly, and that was that.

In those summer visits the perimeter of our Welsh world would expand with outings to the Tywi estuary, with the castle above Llansteffan on one side and the train chugging along the shore on the other. There are snaps of my father and uncle playing on the same patch of sand in the 1930s, Bert with dark hair sitting immaculately on a blanket. But there came a time when our parents would want to be in and out of Mount Hill as rapidly as they could manage and there was no time to go anywhere. Then the perimeter would not expand but contract as all hours not spent sleeping or eating were passed in the old kitchen down a little flight of stairs off the hall. A large table dominated the red-tiled room. For years it had lain camouflaged under sewing and knitting things. But one day when I was ten the shiny wooden top was removed in three pieces and beneath it was an expanse of green baize. My older brother was the first one to be inducted. On the next visit it was my turn. Finally we were all three of us playing snooker on a round-the-clock vigil. The colours of the balls were odd: the pink was orange, the green khaki, the yellow off-white. For several years we'd tip out of
the car at Mount Hill at perhaps four o'clock, see our way through the minimum formalities, then one of us would ask another of us if we fancied a game of snooker. By five past four we were racking up the balls and cueing off. We stopped playing five minutes before leaving two days later. Thanks to the many hours of Welsh practice, I carried off the snooker championship two years running at my boarding school. They are the only sporting trophies I ever won.

One Saturday lunchtime Leighton takes me to a bowling club in north Cardiff where Clwb Rygbi Cymry Caerdydd meet whenever Wales are playing home. I'm to be introduced to Hywel, his son and the club captain. But the person I really have to schmooze is the club chairman, introduced to me as Rhys the Voice. He's shorter, fairer, with an air of irony settled permanently on his brow. I guess that he plays scrum half – part correctly because he's an actor and he can't afford to turn up on the set of the Welsh-language soap
Pobol y Cwm
with his face rearranged. So nowadays he runs the club from the touchline. He came by his name because whenever Wales are playing at home at the Millennium, the disembodied voice making the announcements over the Tannoy in Welsh and English belongs to none other than Rhys the Voice. I feel as if I'm in the presence of minor Welsh royalty. (‘Ryce, the appellation of the great clan …' said Borrow; ‘of old the regal race of South Wales.') We sit down with a beer and I tell him in Welsh that I'm turning myself into a Welshman and need to play a game of rugby in Wales.

‘Dim problem,' he says. ‘Ti'n gallu chwarae dros y vets.' I can turn out for the codgers XV.

‘Gwych!' I say. Great! I'm lying.

‘Pa safle?' What position do I fancy? Good question. Ideally touch judge, but I fear I need a more immersive role on the other side of the white line.

My optimal efficiency as a rugby player was as a wing at the age of nearly fourteen, when I was taller and faster than the boys around me. Then they started to thicken and solidify in ugly hormonal spurts. I still remember the sickening thud on the side of my head when once I was scragged in possession and smothered by a grunting heap of post-pubertal maulers. I switched to fly half and at the faintest hint of trouble would punt the ball away in an elegant spiralling arc towards the far side of the pitch for a wing to chase. Countermanding the wrathful diktat of Mr Youle, I swore by the kicking game. So handy for avoiding contact. Bugger passing. Sod tackling. Safety first. Keep out of harm's way.

Rhys the Voice is waiting for answer. I've got to play somewhere. Where's the safest place on the pitch? Think. I'm not fast any more, of course. Nowadays I run through treacle. I am halfway to ninety. But fly half – outside half, to use the correct Welsh terminology – is far too close to the action.

‘Asgellwr?' Wing? I'm going back home.

The game of rugby famously took its name from an English public school where, one afternoon in 1823, it is alleged that during a game of football a certain William Webb-Ellis caught a football (which was legal back then) and decided to run with it (which still isn't). In England, the whiff of privilege and entitlement has clung to rugby union ever since. ‘Drop a bomb on the west car park at Twickenham before the Varsity match,' the journalist Hunter Davies once memorably advised upon first experiencing an English rugby fixture, ‘and you'd wipe out Fascism in Britain for the next ten years.'

The game migrated across the border when the Anglican college in Lampeter adopted the rules in 1850. Rugby fanned out into places where there was no middle class or further education, and
took root above all in the industrial communities where choral singing was the only other organised activity. When in 1881 an official Welsh team first took on England – at ‘Mr Richardson's Field' in Blackheath – it was drubbed by opponents who had been playing internationals for a decade. Within a month the Welsh Rugby Football Union was formed. It would require six further attempts for Wales finally to defeat the neighbour. That was in 1890. Rugby rapidly became a defining facet of Welsh identity. In the same decade as the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
's entry for Wales said ‘
see
England', the newly adopted national sport offered the Welsh a symbol around which a country without its own institutions could gather. It was so much the better that the team prospered on the pitch.

Wales dominated the Edwardian era. In 1905 they beat the already formidable All Blacks, then the Springboks in 1906 and Australia in 1908. That year they became the first side to defeat every other home nation and so win the Grand Slam; they did it again in 1909 and, with France newly part of the Five Nations tournament, once more in 1911. After the war, the harsh years of the Depression left its imprint on the national side. Welsh hearts fluttered anew for a period in the early 1950s, including in 1953 the most recent victory against the All Blacks. But it would be another twenty years before the second golden age would return. It lasted for the duration of the 1970s – which yielded three Grand Slams – and came to an abrupt end at Twickenham in 1980 when a fourteen-man Wales was defeated by a single point.

That, at least, is the opinion of the man sitting opposite me.

‘We just lost something. We lost our physicality. That's the way it is. Welsh rugby didn't recover for a long, long time.'

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.'