by Bill James
Tane’s father had been a couple of decades older than Amy, Tane’s mother, but in his early fifties had persuaded an amateur club near where they lived to let him play in goal for their Thirds so as to please his wife and get at least some of her esteem. Although he bought goalkeeper-type mittens he was useless, but brave. In his first and final game, when he’d already let in four goals, he rushed out, attempting to scoop the ball away from the feet of the opposing centre forward, to prevent his hat-trick, got badly kicked in the head and went into a coma from which he never recovered. Amy had the words, ‘In a league of his own’ inscribed on the gravestone.
Several years ago, probably 1981, she had come to visit Tane shortly after his appointment as Principal. It was a Saturday and the Charter Mill soccer team were due to play a Sedge eleven in the afternoon on the Charter Mill ground. A vivid rivalry would be on show in the match because of the geographical nearness of the two universities and Tane decided he must attend as a spectator, to demonstrate solidarity and support. He’d guessed his mother might be keen to see the game and mentioned it when they arranged her visit on the phone. Amy brought white wellington boots and thick, grey socks in her holdall. Tane wore his heavy walking shoes.
Lawford Chote, also, had obviously decided this match was a meaningful occasion in the Sedge-Charter relationship and was on the touchline with what Tane took to be a couple of his male staff, maybe from that special fawning coterie Victor had heard rumours of. Poor sods, if they didn’t like soccer. But, then, Chote might not, either. It was a duty attendance, perhaps. Same for Tane. He’d have to try to nick some of his mother’s enthusiasm. The heavens declare the glory of goalkeepers. As the teams took their positions for kick-off she’d said, ‘Burly and tall enough to close off some of the space, admittedly.’
‘Who?’
‘The Sedge goalkeeper.’ she said. ‘But burliness and tallness are not necessarily enough.’
‘Oh?’ Victor replied.
‘Although yours – Charter’s – himself has some burliness and height, I can read something else there. Let’s call it “inherent purpose”, shall we, Vicky?’
‘What inherent purpose?’
‘Goalkeeping.’
‘Surely the Sedge goalkeeper would also have that purpose, Ma? It’s what goalkeepers do – keep goal.’
‘Not the same,’ she replied. ‘But I wouldn’t expect someone like you to appreciate this.’
‘Someone like me in which respect?’
It had been a fine, cold November afternoon with a mild wind favouring Charter in the first half. There was no seating but a crowd of a couple of hundred, mostly undergraduates, stood around the touchlines, partisan, and noisy.
‘It’s a destiny, Victor.’
‘What?’
‘Goalkeeping. Not some drab job at the back given to someone just because of bulk and tallness to help him cope. No, a mission. A disposition. A designated role. A congenital urge. These are the in-built qualities the true goalkeeper has and they are immediately apparent to some of us.’
‘Designated who by?’ Victor asked.
‘By blood, by fate. He has been singled out. He does not wear the striped, buttoned shirt like his ten colleagues but a single-colour, polo-necked jersey. In the Charter case, green. But you’ll protest and say the Sedge goalkeeper also has a single-colour sweater, but purple. I don’t argue that the distinctive top garment is the only exceptional factor. In some instances – such as Charter-man – it is the accompaniment, the, as it were, frame for all those other required factors.’
‘Surely, Mother, the goalkeeper wears the heavier garment because this is a winter game and he might be required to stand around doing nothing much and therefore liable to get cold. His mittens would protect only very small areas. The mono-colour of the sweater-jersey isn’t really of much relevance.’
She’d clearly found this ridiculously naive and had a good-natured, throaty chuckle at it. Then she said, ‘Gabby twat.’ She wore a double breasted black leather greatcoat which she’d told Tane was of the type used by Swedish army dispatch riders, a grey woollen scarf, tied like a running bowline knot, a navy bobble hat, also woollen, and brown corduroy trousers tucked into the socks and wellingtons.
Charter had made an easy task of drubbing Sedge, as Tane would have expected. After all, Charter had a Physical Education and Bodily Wellbeing degree course. It attracted students who, when they finished, might have a professional interest in sport, and so they devoted most of their university time to preparing themselves for that – skills, fitness, diet, psychology.
But the Sedge team would regard games as merely something aside from their serious work – a break, a relaxation. Charter beat them 6-0, four of the goals in the second half, as though Charter wanted to prove they could triumph just as well against the wind as with it. Psychology. Self-belief. Adaptability. The Charter goalkeeper had only two saves to make throughout, both simple and soft. But Amy Tate yelled ‘Sublime!’ when he made the first of them and ‘Rapturous!’ for the second. Tane, scared of seeming indifferent and/or churlish cried ‘Bravo!’ for each, with credible, robust power.
‘I thought “Bravo!” was what opera groupies shouted,’ his mother said.
After the final whistle, Chote and his mini-entourage had crossed the field and approached Amy and Victor in genial, brisk style. Tane introduced his mother and Chote introduced his companions, Carl Medlicott and Roy Gormand.
Chote said, ‘We must congratulate you, Victor, on a fine win.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Gorman said. ‘Fine.’
‘Deserved,’ Medlicott said.
‘Oh, certainly,’ Chote said.
‘Unquestionably,’ Gormand said.
‘You can see why he’s called Victor,’ Amy said.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Gormand said with a thorough smile.
Tane could tell that his mother was almost into one of her wraths. A Swedish army dispatch rider wearing that type of coat to combat Scandinavian weather would reach his/her destination and hand over the dispatch without any knowledge of its contents or any opinions about the message. Mrs Tane, although in the same kind of coat, was different. She had attitudes, views.
She said, ‘You three are totally content to see your lads conclusively squashed. Your words sound gracious and larded with fair’s-fairness – gentlemanly, bourgeois, upper-crust English civility – but really it’s because you don’t give a fish’s tit about the game. Victory or defeat are the same for you since in your reckoning a soccer match is but a soccer match, of no significance alongside all the academic, intellectual distinction you believe exists in Sedge. You speak de haut en bas and can afford to gush the compliments, patronize Victor and Charter with worthless praise.’
‘There’d be no point in denying Charter were the better side, Mrs Tane,’ Chote replied.
‘That was patent,’ Medlicott said. ‘Our team strove, and strove, but, as Lawford stated, their striving fell short.’
‘Unfortunately,’ Gormand said.
‘Your goalkeeper, dismally ungifted,’ Amy Tane replied. ‘A big lump of a journeyman, no extra-terrestrial glow.’
‘My mother has made a study of goalkeeping,’ Tane said, ‘the inner qualities needed, not just the obvious ones.’
‘This little area of ground behind him or her and immediately ahead is his or hers to patrol, to guard, to launch a counter attack from. If he, she, fails at this she, he is a nonentity, in your case a purple nonentity.’
Later, when the teams had showered and come together for a drink in the pavilion before their meal, Amy had made a path for herself to the Charter goal-keeper to tell him face-to-face how splendidly he performed his designated role and responded to his congenital urge. Tane went with her, but she did the talking. ‘And your name?’ she said. ‘We shall want to follow your golden career. You will be getting many a fan letter from me via whichever top club the media report you as playing for – and I’m sure you will make it to a top club.’ His nam
e was Bernard Optor. She handed lipstick for him to autograph the outer surface of one of her wellington boots.
And Amy did follow his career, presumably sent fan letters, and kept the signed boot dry. A couple of years later she had phoned Tane at home to ask if he’d seen the back page of the Daily Mail. He hadn’t so she read a couple of sentences to him. They said that goalkeeper Bernie Optor had just signed a contract with one of the most famous Spanish sides that would bring him £140,000 a week, beside what he might earn from internationals.
And now, today, the phone rang once more, in his office this time. ‘Principal? It’s Bernard.’ He pronounced it in the American way, Bernard, probably as someone now rather cosmopolitan. ‘How’s Mrs Tane? Look, I hear a situation has developed there, what with tensions over the future for Charter and Sedge. Charter or Sedge. And I wonder if Sedge might be getting ahead on that. We ought to do something. I can’t have my alma mater going to the wall.’
‘What kind of thing, Bernard?’
‘Yes, we ought to do something. After all, Principal, we beat them easily enough back whenever it was that afternoon, ’81 was it? My final year. And I bet Charter have beaten them every year since. In that game – yes, ’81 – I had hardly anything to do and I got almost paralysingly cold.’
‘But you had the green jersey on and black mittens.’
‘I have to work harder where I am now, I can tell you, Prince.’
EIGHTEEN
2014
Gordon Upp (Linguistics) said, ‘What we have here, of course, is a process – the process of arranging, selecting the kind of statues we wish to recommend and their sites or site. Think of the Duke of Norfolk preparing the pageantry for a coronation or Royal wedding. But, also, our statue deliberations are a process that, as it were, looks at itself. It is reflexive.’
‘Oh?’ Theo Bastrolle (Business Studies) said. Instantly, Martin Moss recognized this ‘Oh?’ as, in fact, very much a Business Studies ‘Oh?’ – the kind of ‘Oh?’ that students in Theo’s department would be taught for use in their commercial careers after graduating. For instance, the ‘Oh?’ should be their response to a sterling, euro or dollar figure demanded from them in some big-time company negotiations for bonds or commodities or easements. It was intended to express shock, disbelief, outrage at the preposterous, rip-off amount asked for. It suggested that the other party should think again and quote a charge not entirely unrelated to the one already cited but divided by two.
This ‘Oh?’when uttered as a haggling ploy, said in coded, abbreviated form, ‘Cheap! – at half the price.’ Theo’s ‘Oh?’ now didn’t exactly match that situation, but it contained a similar unwillingness to accept meekly what he’d heard. In this exchange Moss thought the ‘Oh?’ from Theo might have a slightly different coded, abbreviated form, such as: ‘What the fuck does “reflexive” mean?’
But Lucy Lane seemed to have grasped instantly what Upp’s ‘reflexive’ signified. ‘Clearly, Gordon,’ she said. She was viewing with concentration and affection something in her handkerchief, like a passenger in a train stopped at a station catching sight of a friend in another train that has pulled up alongside; proximity but not overdone proximity.
‘What I’m getting at is, we are asked by the present, very current principal, Sir Bert Greg-Peterson, to decide on how the university should honour two past principals, two sequential past principals who had limited respect for each other,’ Upp said. ‘Thus begins the process I’ve referred to. It might appear at first to be a straightforward administrative task. “Pray give me feedback on what we should do with these putative two lumps of stone or brass.” Naturally, however, as Greg-Peterson initiates this process he is bound to throw his mind forward into the unknown future, when the present principal, viz, Sir Bert, has himself become a past principal and therefore due a statue in his turn. “The king is dead or retired or gone to a bigger job. Long live the king, as monument.” Sir Bert will be interested in this process, as a guide to a similar process in the future, of which he will be the subject; while at the same time taking part himself, now, not as subject but as originator in the present, 2014 process. Some future Sedge principal will request a special working party, comparable with ours in 2014, to discuss the type of statue needed for Greg-Peterson and the most suitable site for it, if it is to be a single permanent site; or a duality of sites, if a rotation is favoured, taking in what will by then be the strongly established single university with paired campuses, which at present might still be lingeringly, wrongly, but forgivably thought of as Charter Mill and Sedge, or Sedge and Charter Mill.
‘Admittedly, certain differences between those future proceedings and our own are going to exist. I’ll name one: the kind of debate we had over single or double plinth occupancy will not be appropriate then, since the commemorative statue and its mono-plinth would be for one past principal only – Sir Bert – not, as in the 2014 case, Chote and Tane or Tane and Chote, each with formidable prima facie entitlement, each requiring and deserving fair play.
‘That future planning group would have to take into account that there were already two ex-principal statues on university sites, or a university site if, eventually, we decide on a binary plinth for two statues, one at each end of it, Chote and Tane, or, to phrase it differently, Tane and Chote. The present principal will be thinking as he considers our findings on the Tane, Chote, or Chote, Tane statues, how, in that on-coming future, he would like his own statue sited in relation to the already placed – locationed, if you will – statues of Tane and Chote or Chote and Tane.
‘Several questions would need consideration, the central one being, should the Sir Bert statue be close to or distant from the by then existing Chote/Tane, Tane/Chote statues? If these two are single plinthed and therefore very near each other, more or less plinth-integrated, might the Sir Bert statue seem somehow set-apart if it were deposited close to the pair but not, of course, as close as the two single-plinthed figures would be to each other? Might the Sir Bert image seem excluded, even shunned, by the two in this case? Or, to reverse it, would the Sir Bert statue appear snooty and stand-offish, aloof, as if proclaiming that the other two were elements of an exceptionally messy Sedge, Charter Mill, or Charter Mill, Sedge past, redeemed by the power and brilliance of the masterly, remote, true leader, Sir Bertram?
‘If, on the other hand, the 2014 decision is to go for single statues of Chote and Tane or Tane and Chote, should the Greg-Peterson statue be put adjacent to one of them, and, if so, which one would it be? More rotation? Or are further permutations envisaged? Finally, might it be best to unfix Chote and Tane, or Tane and Chote, from their shared plinth and devise a larger plinth able to provide room not just for Tane and Chote, or Chote and Tane, but Sir Bert, also. Clearly this would require skilled stonemasonry, or brassmasonry, so that the two’s shoes and feet should not be fractured during the severance, but it could be feasible. However, a threesome on one plinth would give rise to additional, obvious contentiousness. Two on one plinth did not suggest any kind of precedence. One end of a plinth represents no superiority or inferiority to the other end. Each statue would be at the end it was, right or left, left or right, simply because it was – no overtones. But triple-plinthed statues must plainly imply a central figure. Might centrality suggest dominance, distinction, as if the other two, one on each side, were aides only or minders? Which statue would occupy this middle position?
‘If order of plinth alignment were decided by length of existence and chronology, then perhaps Chote would come first, on the left, because of Sedge’s age, then Tane, head of the younger institution, then Sir Bert, as principal of a very new combined entity. This would, accordingly, put Tane in the mid position. There might not be general agreement about that. Tane could be regarded by some as jumped-up. They might argue that the new university under Sir Bert subsumes both previous universities and, therefore, his statue should dominate, that is, should be at the plinth’s core and central. We have to keep in mind that Sir Bert is
Sir Bert – he has a knighthood, which neither of his predecessors achieved. Perhaps a central spot on a tripartite plinth would be his proper due.
‘This is what I mean when I say that the process we engage in now, here, 2014, is more than itself in that our present principal will be virtually bound to use our process as a start-up for thoughts of an imaginary but comparable statue planning committee trying to decide the most suitable style and emplacement for his – Sir Bert’s – post-retirement statue, possibly on a unitary plinth share basis, possibly otherwise.’
‘But could it not be, Gordon, that the statue creating mode for ex-principals will no longer apply when our present principal, Sir Bert, might be dead or of an age and/or situation that would put him into the potentially appropriate category for the tribute of a statue?’ Wayne Ollam (Philosophy) said. ‘I feel there is already something of a distaste for the manufacture of statues to mark supposed achievements of a selected figure. Perhaps there’s something crazy about representing in stone or brass a person whose life has been characterized by dynamic activity. We have, after all, the phrase “stone dead”, meaning very dead. Maybe there is much of that about statues.
‘Then again, isn’t a statue discriminatory? Of its nature it discounts credit for all those non-statued folk who might have provided essential help for the one acknowledged star. We’ve heard a while ago about the statue of Aneurin Bevan in the commercial centre of Cardiff, the Welsh politician who helped create the National Health Service. But, obviously, doctors, nurses, consultants, administrators, other politicians were involved in that. Do any of them get statues in a shopping mall? No. And by the time Sir Bert qualifies public disenchantment with statues might have become even stronger. The principal we are visualising – i.e., not Sir Bert but the one who comes after Sir Bert, and is therefore faced by the Sir Bert statue problem – this new principal might be of a socio-political academic background and averse to the creation, indeed the proliferation, of statues on the kind of democratic grounds I have just referred to: elitism.’