Dream On

by Dai Smith

  Crowd disorder at the turnstiles at the Wales v. Scotland Rugby International, at St. Helen’s Swansea. The crowd capacity was 35,000. The Attendance was 60,000.

  * * * * *

  “If the South Wales Miners’ Federation has decided … to affiliate to the Communist Third International … perhaps it is the beginning of a new era. How many miners are there in South Wales? 25,000?”

  Lenin, August 1921, a misplaced hope, a misplaced guess.

  The number of miners in South Wales was 250,000. The resolution to affiliate was overturned.

  * * * * *

  “Who whom?”

  Lenin, October 1921, his definition of power and relationships.

  All Frittered Away

  It was the immediacy of things that always got to him. The heat, first, as it bounced off the shoe-black tarmac to the fish-white underbelly of the plane as he tottered down the too-narrow aircraft steps. And then the unfiltered intensity of the light which gave the shabby and tawdry buildings an enamelled sheen so far removed from the damp, concrete-crazed greyness he’d left behind only two hours ago. He sniffed the air, a redolent mix of pine and jet fuel shimmering and distorting the couple of hundred yards he had to cross to be first through passport control. He sucked in his sixteen stone plus gut and moved at a calculated speed from his pole position as front-runner to guarantee he would hit the car rental desk before anyone else. He glanced over his shoulder at the pack of men half his age who were rapidly closing in on him. No chance, he thought. Not bloody likely with the start he’d had, not with her blocking the aisle so that he could pull down the overhead bags and swing them, just sufficiently, into the backs of whatever geriatric or family or backpacker might be reaching up to do the same. There was an art to it, he reflected. And it required practice. And, at sixty five, Richie Davies was still agile enough and forceful enough to move past foreign bodies and through foreign parts like the wing forward of imminent destruction he had once been, forty years and a lost lifetime away.

  Only, passport ingratiatingly given and listlessly returned, then with only a glass partition to circumvent, there was the annoyance that she did go on, and on, just a bit. Bringing him to the mark, so to speak, all too like a hard-driven mid-week training session before a big Saturday match day.

  “Make sure now, Richard, you’ve got the voucher. Identification number. Driving licence. Don’t take the excess insurance again. Waste of money. And check it’s not an automatic this time.”

  These words shouted as a final binder. They’d ricocheted down the tube of the fuselage as he had set about the first of what he knew would be a continuous list of tasks, readied in her mind for what he had grimly come to call his “working holidays”.

  The trouble – the word he reached for all too often to label these twice-yearly, lengthy forays to the Sud, or Pseud as he glossed it when he was back safe in the Club – had begun four years previously when Geoffrey, her bloody cousin he muttered to himself whenever his name was invoked by her with gratitude, had died suddenly and left them his petite bloody maison de campagne. It seemed, just a couple of years into full retirement, a gift. Some gift, some horse, some mouth, was what he had quickly decided. And petite, he concluded, it was bloody not. She, though, could see only charm and the faintly exotic, “Our little bolthole in the Midi. Not grand, mind you,” was the phrase she shared with their friends, letting it trail away in their imagination.

  He did not need to imagine it. After four years of ownership he knew it and its surroundings only too well. It sat at the top end of a narrow, dry gulch valley, rock-strewn brush-covered hills on either side for a mile down to the main road, and a five minute drive down the stony single track to the red-and-ochre roofed village complete with church, tower and shaded handkerchief-sized square. It was a village from which every native inhabitant aged less than fifty had long moved to the mod con villas with air-con, pool and lawn, which sprawled across the countryside like a rash contracted from California to be downsized in France. He had every sympathy with this low-cost, low-maintenance decision making and secretly applauded the alacrity with which the locals had abandoned their past.

  The vacuum, to the sound of euros exchanged sous la table to avoid tax, had been filled by younger people. Incomers. There were some Dutch and German, he’d noticed, but mostly it was indeed the professional, romantic English who now nested in the low-beamed, uneven-floored, tiny-windowed, overlapping clusters of village houses which morphed one into the other to keep out the sun, retain the heat and ward off all those outside their walls. He often thought of them as cave dwellings dug out of one continuous face, or better still like the undulating terraced housing of the Valleys. But if they had been the actual terraces in their actual place then, he was sure, they would have been shunned, avoided, like they did the Welsh from his own Sud, too prickly, too damp and too close to home. People and houses both. He, anyway, had never felt more Welsh, something he had rarely had to contemplate in the past, than when he sat in the village square on the swing seat placed outside the one-room bar, sipping a thimbleful of their pasteurised lager, and having to listen, for you could not avoid the nasal decibel level, to the Saxon herd who popped in and out of the caves they had paid local builders to re-model to fit the pics in the glossy mags which she pored over. He hid behind his Ray-Bans and noted how – absurdly he thought – they kept kissing each other three times on alternate cheeks as the locals did – only they weren’t, were they? – whilst ignoring (what a gift of being unselfconscious, they had) their ill-behaved, bilingual children racing in and around the cars which were stuffed into the square as if in a scruffy municipal car park.

  Cars, that was another thing which burrowed as an irritant under his skin. The residents, incomers or not – and some of those he had learned to his amazement actually commuted by air to well-paid City jobs from Monday to Friday – all had their ramshackle run-arounds to hand, but he had to hire every time, and it cost a fortune. That and the supercilious desk attendants at the car rental who always set him off into a grumbling mood.

  It was happening again as he fumbled with the documents he’d slipped into a transparent plastic folder, until he found his licence in an inside jacket pocket. Behind him in the queue his rivals, he sensed, were simmering. He handed over his torn and folded green paper licence which he had not yet bothered to replace with the new laminated card. It was taken gingerly by a woman in her thirties, he guessed, appraising her quickly, with that peculiar colour of dyed hair which reminded him of bilberries strained and sugared over the meringue of her head. He noticed the eyebrow raised behind the canary-yellow plastic frames of her round glasses. That’s what in the lingo it meant, she’d told him, that supercilious. Just that. A cocked eyebrow raised to indicate a superior position. A desk. Authority. Being French. He braced himself for what he knew was coming – and where was she, when her sixth-form French, not his phrase-book ‘O’ Level, was required – the message from afar that would come to him up close and personal from those purple painted lips in an impenetrable Midi accent which actually enunciated all words ending with “Ts”, and elongated end-stopping “As”, like an Italian tenor intent on slathering the backrow of the upper circle. He had no doubt it was deliberately intended to confuse and humiliate. Him anyway.

  So he had a strategy prepared. He would regard these close, enforced encounters with the waiting disdain with which he had once viewed opposing fly halves of the twinkle-toed or swivel-hipped variety. Dancing dicks, fancy-arsed crowd-pleasers who would, he guaranteed it to himself, get their full come-uppance at some point in the game when, the ref conveniently unsighted, he himself would come, just a trifle prematurely, off the back of a wheeling scrum to crunch whichever type of his tormentors was about to receive the ball and, either the side-stepping or gliding kind momentarily transfixed, smash fourteen stone of bone and muscle, hardened by working on the building and construction sites her father owned, into their shocked fragility. Few had survived those particular close
encounters intact. None ever forgot them. He ensured that by delivering some tasty “afters”. It was his trademark, a calculated ferocity which had led to his nickname in the Press – “The Gravedigger”, affectionately shortened by those on the Bob Bank to just “Digger” – and to the lasting awe in which his playing days were still recalled by the favoured fans lucky enough to have been there to witness the mayhem, see the bodies separated, hear the protestation of innocence, note the shaky legs with which he’d left the No. 10s for the rest of the game. It was all, he’d argue, within the laws, wasn’t it? After he’d barrelled into the playmakers he’d underline his destructive intent with an elbow rammed into the ribs, a finger pushed into flesh or tissue, a knee dug deep into a groin, a hand imprinted onto a chest or a throat. He sometimes, even as he physically marked the bodies prostrate beneath him, wondered to himself if this was all somehow in retaliation for a week of sweating and fetching and carrying. The work, her old man had said, which he had to put in before the partnership – Braithwaite and Davies – would materialise. He had been given the promissory wealth, as a wedding present, on the day he’d stopped shagging Myra without the benefit – that was a laugh, too – of a marriage licence.

  Over forty years ago now, with an imperceptible shake of his head to acknowledge it, and here, before this day-glo desk attendant, he was still sweating and fetching and carrying, with only the memory of “Digger Davies”, best openside flanker the Club had ever had, and who should, in the opinion of the cognoscenti, have had more than that one cap, and that off the bench, against the All Blacks to show for it. His body had the scars and the breakages to prove it for sure, but it was the scarring of his mind and the damage to his spirit which truly haunted his memory. How much of that unrepeatable star-tapping, that glimpse of glory, had he himself allowed to fritter away? For others, even then, it was just rugby football, only a game, something to grow up from and go beyond, but, and even then, he knew better.

  He sighed audibly at the desk, waiting for the high-speed drivel of question and information to end. His strategy was to cause annoyance by muttering, in his best Welsh, “Uhh?” at the rising of any plucked eyebrow and then punctuating the end with the full stop of “Mais oui” when he sensed the time for a thrice-scrawled signature had finally arrived. A bit like gobbling up some passing fly half but then, inevitably, like the blindsided referee suddenly restored to vision, at that precise moment Myra would appear at his shoulder, joining him at the front of the queue and about to prolong matters, as pre-planned, by fishing out her own plastic laminated licence embossed with the passport photo she had had taken professionally, four times, until satisfied that she “looked her best”. Digger Davies grimaced and shifted to one side for Myra to inform his inquisitor in the impeccably accented French of a Parisienne:

  “Moi aussi. Je suis un conducteur, s’il vous plaît.”

  The point was, as she never failed to point out, that he had to be first in the queue, and so exposed to Gallic superciliousness for a time, if they were to implement her planning instructions. They had to come together at the closure of the plan. Or rather, if they were together at the start, they would be last at the end whereas if he hurried, a trifle illicitly, and so started the action, why then, by the time he came to the end she could be with him, as she had to be in person, if she was to be put down as the alternative driver. Simple. He could see that, couldn’t he? Well, yes, since she put it like that, he could, but, as he once put it in rebuttal, she never bloody well drove anyway so what exactly was the point of it? That’s not the point at all, was the conclusive rejoinder.

  Digger looked down at her as she held up proceedings further by asking for precise directions to the location de voitures, though they’d been there regularly, and the number, en français s’il vous plaît, as if that mattered, which you had to punch in to get out, though it was invariably 1789 he seemed to remember and never 1940, which was bloody typical, and all this to lubricate and demonstrate her grammatically correct and colloquially hapless French in a mincing accent she’d acquired, he was sure, from Leslie Caron in Gigi. Still, he had to admit that even in her early sixties his own re-incarnation of Gigi looked eye-catchingly enticing in a loose cotton blouse of a red-and-green abstract pattern – gypsy was it? – and the blue-grey poplin trousers, cut away at the calf and fitting appropriately around what the boys in the club would have said – to his inward satisfaction – was an “arse that hadn’t dropped”. She was still what they had all said she was forty years earlier: “the complete package”.

  He first saw her at the club’s Christmas party. She was back from her second year in teacher training college. He was making a name for himself amidst the mud and rain of Valleys’ rugby pitches. A future International was what he heard whispered around him as pints were pressed on him and squat committee men squeezed his formidable elbow. That particular night the booze had worked sufficiently for him to lose a natural shyness and not enough to make the collective oblivion of male camaraderie more enticing than conversation. He told her his name was Richie and asked for hers. She had her wheat-coloured hair cut in a severe bob. Her eyes, more green than grey and yet neither, were set boldly in an oval face. Her mouth, generous to the point of insolence, was a vivid glossy red. She was, he could, see, a looker but, more, that there was an air of proprietorial command about her which he couldn’t quite fathom from her accent, which was local, or her interest, which was decidedly casual, in him. In those days, Digger was raw-boned and big-chested but with surprisingly liquid brown eyes fringed by unexpectedly long lashes beneath a mane of fashionably long, black hair. It would soon have been exhausted, that conversation hook-up at the bar, if Bobby Braithwaite had not come up on his blindside, gripped his elbow and pirouetted past to take Myra around the waist of her short and spangly party dress.

  “Met my daughter, then, ’ave you, Digger. Mind you watch your Ps and Qs then, eh?” he said, and waltzed off.

  Bobby was a key sponsor. He had coughed up for the free bar for players and committee for the Christmas do, with the club proudly topping the unofficial league of those amateur days. And it was Bobby, the town’s principal builders’ merchant, who mostly stuffed the brown paper envelopes with the fivers, in varying multiples, which the 1st XV picked up from the club’s treasurer at the end of every game. Her father’s warning was what seemed to ignite a spark for Myra. He had fretted over her incessantly, suffocatingly, since her mother, Tegwen, had died when she was still just a toddler. By the end of the evening Digger and Bobby’s daughter were, everyone could see, “an item” and, the boys muttered, the kind of package they’d all like to open. Almost casually, whatever lives they might have had in mind, separately, ended that night. “Richard” would be the name by which Myra would choose to call him, not the familiar “Richie” and certainly not the crudity of “Digger”. She had plans for him.

  He’d left the grammar school with a clutch of indifferent ‘O’ Levels and been steered by his collier father and doting mother away from the pits and into the Tax Office – “Security for life, see, boy,” his father had intoned – where a lifetime of columns and figures and mechanical calculations awaited him. He still lived at home, and the 1960s passed him by, at least in their subsequent alleged and clichéd manner, in a blur of commuting to work by train, pocket money for beer and fags, the occasional piss-up, back lane fumbles where he “scored” more and more often with more and more willing girls and, of course, the rugby. That grew in intensity with a move from the school team as fullback to centre for the town’s second string and, aged 18, his first appearance for the real deal, the town’s XV. By the time he had, in the parlance of the Bob Bank supporters, properly “filled out” – steaks, Guinness, Easter Tours of Cornwall and skin band, or bare bum, performances that saw the entire Pack once held on bail in Gloucester – he had graduated to the back row. Every Monday his father, home for early morning bed after the night shift, would run his coal-pocked fingers down the column of Saturday match rep
orts and read out loud the sporting encomia which garlanded his big, gentle, daft, lethal lump of a son:

  “Early in the second half the tide of the game – which Llanelli had dominated with astute kicking-out-of-hand and two calmly struck drop goals by their young will o’ the wisp Bennett at fly half – changed when Richie Davies, possibly offside, caught the Scarlet Number Ten hesitating whether to run or kick in midfield and clattered him to the ground with a flying tackle to the midriff. It took Bennett a full five minutes to recover as the flanker seemed, almost literally, to bury his opponent after bringing him down and, quite properly, this particular gravedigger received a severe reprimand from Mr Leyshon the referee, which was accompanied by a caterwaul of booing from the home crowd, who seemed to think their promising wing forward guilty of no more than robust play. Either way, Bennett played on shakily until he was replaced, and the Away side lost all their earlier fluency. And indeed the game by 13 unanswered second period points (3 penalties and an unconverted try by Davies in the corner from a disintegrating scrum) to six (the two first half drop goals). Surely the unfortunate Bennett will be a Welsh star for the decade to come and one probably protected, in the red of Wales, by the man who creased him this Saturday for shining, briefly, in scarlet?”

  Old timers, and good judges, saw his style of play as a welcome throwback to the 1950s and predicted great things. Yet he seemed, maybe because it was an unfashionable club and he refused all blandishments to move to the grander coastal clubs, to hover on the brink of a breakthrough that never quite happened. In the early 1970s he was, in his mid-twenties, at his peak, honed to a physical edge by training nights and working days for Braithwaites, mixing cement, wheelbarrowing bricks and swinging a sledge. His wages had been trebled at a stroke and Myra, no snob in such matters, had made it plain both to her Richard and to her father that she regarded the graft as an apprenticeship which would end with their eventual marriage. She didn’t quite say, though her disdain was clear, that she expected the extra rugby graft needed for International recognition – its sweating, fetching and carrying for no purpose she could see other than some absurd and passing back-patting – to end at the same time.