A Somerset Lad

It would have taken a poet to commentate adequately on the play of JJ Williams. There was a speed, a litheness, a vision, a commitment in his play that song exceeded the vocabulary of most sports commentators.

JJ played in times when rugby never entered popular consciousness for most of the year.

Rugby was an amateur game, without a great fan base among ordinary people, that seemed dominated by public schools and Oxbridge.  Across the Bristol Channel from Somerset, it was different: rugby was the sport of working men, it went with images of the valleys and the sound of male voice choirs.

For a few weeks each year, names from the other side of the Severn Bridge would fill the commentary on the matches watched on our black and white television.  There was a poetry even in the team sheet: JJ and JPR  Williams, Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett.  In hushed tones there would be mention of the one who had been numbered amongst them, but played no more: Barry John.

One knew when the Welsh were doing well (and they always did well in those years), the sound from the television came like the words of a ballad: a soft telling of a story reaching a lively refrain as a red-shirted back once again crossed the line for a try.

Having turned sixty this month, it seems strange that JJ was just twelve years older than me; that those whose presence filled the cameras at the Arms Park on those early spring afternoons were not so much older than the teenagers who sat watching.

Perhaps the feeling that those encounters belonged to some other dimension; that those who stood and sang Land of my Fathers occupied a universe other than those who looked across at Barry Island on grey February mornings; was helped by the presence of Max Boyce.

Boyce was like some minstrel from medieval times in his retelling of the heroic feats of the army he followed; even those at the sharp end of Boyce’s wit still smile.  The subject of The Sunshine Home for Blind Irish Referees  can look back nearly fifty years and still maintain he was right and Boyce was wrong.

The Welsh had always so much music.  Once England supporters had sung God Save the Queen they hadn’t much else to sing.  In recent times, the adoption of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot seemed only to emphasise the paucity of music available.

Perhaps it was the music that gave Welsh rugby its poetic quality.  It is hard to watch back now the old videos of those matches and not have the strains of Cwm Rhondda echoing around the back of the mind.  When the sound of Bread of Heaven began to fill the Cardiff Arms Park on those Saturday afternoons in the 1970s, it was not hard to guess who was once again on the winning side – JJ among them.

Prior to beginning life as a teacher two years ago, my last autumn half-term holiday was in October 1974, for the school in Devon at which I spent the closing years of my secondary education did not believe in half-term holidays.

There are memories from that week that I recall with absolute clarity. We spent the week staying with my uncle, aunt and cousins in Bishops Cleeve, just a few miles from where I now work. Ken Booth was at Number One in the pop charts with “Everything I own;” he would be succeeded by David Essex singing, “Gonna make you a star.” Were the days not susceptible to such clear recall, the clash of our memories would not be so odd.

Over lunch one day, one of the cousins shared with me reminiscences of silly times. “Do you remember the time when my sisters and I took you to the youth club?” she laughed.

It had not been a moment to disagree and to point out that they had invited me to go to the youth club, but they were altogether too cool and too intimidating for a rustic fourteen year old like myself and that I had refused the invitation and then spent the evening wishing I had had the confidence to go. It was simply the case that she had misremembered the evening and there was no need to revisit my recall of the time.

A while later, one of the other sisters recalled the same moment. “Do you remember the night the twins and I took you to the youth club? When you stood looking gormless?” She laughed at the question.

Clearly there was a consensus between the three of them about the evening. It would have seemed discourteous to have challenged what was obviously something that was a cause of humour. “I have repressed that memory,” I said.

I still don’t believe I have repressed the memory. It would be illogical to have a lucid and unhappy recall of the evening if psychological repression was taking place. But why, then, would my cousins have a shared memory of me being somewhere I believed I had never been?

The disparity of our respective accounts of the same evening is not just a matter of nuance or interpretation, it is a question of mutually exclusive facts, one cannot be at a place and not at a place at the same moment. At some point, we will have to sit down and try to reconcile our memories of that distant half-term evening.

My nephews gave me a set of photo coasters for my sixtieth birthday, the photos of local scenes having been taken by one who is thirteen years old and who has a wonderful eye for light and shape and colour.

Setting aside the packaging in which the coasters came, I realised that the expanded polystyrene would have been put to further use when I thirteen.

Fascinated by stories from the Second World War, I would play war games with a friend in our village. We would set out battlefields with hills made from papier-mache and buildings made from cardboard. The expanded polystyrene packaging might have been painted grey and put into the battlefield as a pill box, a fortified position.

The war had been less than thirty years before, but to us it was the stuff of Airfix soldiers, Commando comics, and black and white television films. We fought and re-fought the scenes that we imagined without ever trying to imagine  the horrors of the times, or the memories that would have still been borne by the veterans, some of whom lived in our village.

It seems unlikely that a thirteen year old now, someone born in 2007, would recall a conflict that had only ended fifteen years before the thirteen year old had been born, without being aware of the harsh details of that war. It is hard to imagine that the current cohort of secondary school students would not be educated in the realities of a war that only finished twenty-eight years ago.

Why was it that we knew so little? Why could we have painted polystyrene packaging, to provide a machine gun post for our battlefield, without thinking about what the reality of battle would have meant both for those who manned the post and those who would have attacked it?

History classes in secondary schools now would explore the experiences of the soldiers who participated in the war. They would be taught the background to the war and told about how the conflict had affected the whole country. Soldiers would become flesh and blood people, not just plastic figures on a paper-mache landscapes.

Perhaps our battles were fought without knowledge because the memories were too raw. Perhaps people felt that it was better if nothing was said to teenage boys. Perhaps there was simply a lack of resources to educate us about the reality of what had happened.

Looking at the polystyrene packaging, I wondered what we were thinking.