Remembering JJ’s team

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.

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Being gormless at half-term

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.

 

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War memories

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.

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Guessing the tune

The turning back of the clocks brought the turning back of the weather, well, for a few hours of the day at least. The clouds broke the sun shone and the temperature rose into the midteens.

Driving southward from Worcester to visit my mother in Somerset, I pondered the beauty of the English countryside in autumn.

An expert explained why the autumn colours are so spectacular this year, but I cannot remember any of the explanation. There is no need to understand the science in order to appreciate the extraordinary vibrancy of the yellows and reds, and golds and russets, and the other shades too numerous to number. It is an autumn that demands the attention of those passing through it.

Thinking music would be an appropriate accompaniment to the paint palette of shades, I decided Classic FM might offer tunes more in keeping with the mood of the moment than BBC Radio Six, to which I usually listen.

There would be the possibility of them playing something I recognised, or something that was vaguely familiar, or at least something that was nice. Knowing nothing about music, I feel quite happy using the word “nice,” and Classic FM does niceness with great panache.

If I had to choose a single piece of classical music as my favourite, it would be the Intermezzo from Jean Sibelius’ Karelia Suite.

I am not even sure what an intermezzo is, but I cannot hear this piece of music without being transported back to our living room when I was a child and the beginning of This Week on ITV.

All of the classical music with which I am familiar comes from television theme tunes or episodes of Inspector Morse, so the chance of recognising pieces played on the radio tend to be fairly slim.

Anyway, I turned on the radio in the hope of hearing something that I liked and the cheery presenter announced that the next piece would be Sibelius’ “gentle intermezzo.”

”Gentle,” I thought, “it must be a different piece of music.” As the sound of brass filled the car, I realised the remark was intended as a piece of humour.

Among the thousands of pieces that I might have heard when turning on the radio, it seems odd that the piece played was the one of which I had thought.

If I could develop such skills in anticipating numbers, I might buy a lottery ticket.

 

 

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It’s a bewildering world

For some reason, I receive an email each evening from something called Pinterest. Generally, the emails are concerned with Clarice Cliff pottery. I know nothing about Clarice Cliff pottery, other than the fact that my mother has a Clarice Cliff jar.

At some point, I must have done an online search for Clarice Cliff jars. How else would Pinterest have come to be sending me details of Clarice Cliff pottery?

I don’t even understand what Pinterest is about. It seems to be people sharing their favourite photographs of favourite things. At some point, I must have registered with it in order for them to have my email address.

Anyway, the latest email included photographs of brown leather shoes and boots on a website called mofylook. I was instantly attracted because, midway through teaching a lesson on Thursday, I noticed the upper of my brown leather shoe had detached itself from the sole for a length of four or five inches.

“These shoes are not even twenty years old,” I complained to the class, “ I only bought them in 2003.”

“Sir,” responded one student, “that’s before any of us were born.”

Mofylook seemed to offer an attractive range of footwear, fine leather boots and shoes at prices far lower than anything that would be available in shops. One pair of boots looked particularly tempting, reduced from $78 to $49 with $7.99 postage from the United States to the United Kingdom.

Googling the company, I discovered from a website called TrustPilot that the company was very efficient at deducting payments from customers’ accounts and less efficient at actually dispatching the items for which people had paid.

It was a disappointment to discover that the fine brown boots would not be mine, that some pair of footwear from a high street store, something much less attractive, would have to suffice.

Why did Pinterest have a posting from a company with such a poor customer rating? Didn’t the appearance on Pinterest suggest to users that the company was one with whom one could deal with confidence?

That is the problem with the world we inhabit, it’s bewildering. Anyone in a high street shop who thought it appropriate to give poor service would quickly find the shop’s reputation would be diminished by word of mouth. People know before they go through the door what they can expect.

The virtual world does not have a comparable level of quality control. Pinterest leaves me to my own choices – and mistakes.

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