Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  But he knew that there really was so much more, that there always had been.

  When they had been little kids walking to school together along Liverpool Street, right where the park was today, people had joked about what a lovely couple they were. And then, as teenagers, when he had been so painfully awkward and shy that he could scarcely bring himself to look at her, Louie had cracked him, brought him out of himself with chitchat about the footy match next week or the Sheffield Shield team.

  ‘See you at training,’ she’d say, glancing over her shoulder as she walked away. He’d look at the ground, or anywhere else, and nod, intimidated by the very thought of being so near to her in public. The prospect of getting close in private, while utterly dizzying, was even more terrifying.

  But he’d always turn up to meet her at Vic Park. He’d ignore his mates and stand down at the picket fence with Louie instead, watching the seniors go through their paces and trying not to look at her. For a girl, she knew a lot about footy, rattling off player stats and running through strategies. She was also a contrarian; where others reckoned Teddy Rowell had definitely thrown that match against Fitzroy, and that Dicky Condon was too high-maintenance, she defended them, saying her mum knew Rowell’s family and he would never do anything like that. And as for Condon, well, sometimes the loopy ones made the best players. Or so she reckoned. He’d nod, not exactly in agreement, but in open-minded submission.

  While he looked at the players on the ground, he’d dream of being out there too. He’d always known it would happen one day. Ordinarily, he’d wait outside the rooms after training, just so he could brush up against the players, perhaps even carry someone’s gear up Johnston Street or along Hoddle Street. But he wouldn’t do anything so boyish, so fawning, when Lou was around.

  She had perplexed and confused him. He wanted to speak to her, to be the confidant she clearly wanted him to be, but he didn’t know what to say. And every time he looked at her it was as if he was overheating—his face turned to beetroot and he perspired about the armpits and forehead. He was terrified that she might misinterpret his awkwardness as diffidence and just give up on him, but he couldn’t help himself. He would feel sick in her presence, ashamed at his utter incapacity to kiss her wide mouth and cup her breast in his hand, as he so badly wanted to do. But the mere thought of doing so just made him feel sicker.

  Then he’d tell himself she was just Louie—Louie who he’d walked to school with, and swum with near the falls in summer, and kicked a paper footy with around Liverpool Street. She was like a sister. And he’d scold himself for thinking that she could ever be his lover.

  Now here he was, many years later, standing in Gahan’s Reserve, once again urging himself to do something.

  In the trenches, he’d never stopped thinking about her, especially after Percy had copped it. His mate’s death, and the war in general, had underlined life’s fickleness. How could fate and luck and God and whatever else conspire to kill one man in a trench, and yet deliver salvation to another such as himself?

  But his family had taught him about survival long before the war. Growing up with holey shoes, often cold and hungry, only one of eleven children, his instincts had told him to do everything he could to help himself survive—each for himself. But he had also been taught, not only by his family but by footy, too, that you were nothing without the people around you. War had only reinforced those lessons.

  Footy had also made him stronger and taught him about justice, about the importance of being true to himself. He had hated the flash pretty boys of Carlton and St Kilda, the way they had looked down their noses at the black and white—‘The Purloiners’—because they represented the toughest, most poverty-struck part of the city, the stinking, polluted Flat that produced the shoes and the beer and the fancy hats and the furniture for the rich buggers like them who lived up the hill.

  He watched the other young mums as they pushed their strollers around the park’s pebbled paths, winding their way between the neat little flower beds, and he wondered if it was too late for him to ever be a father. He was thirty now, almost thirty-one, and he’d not yet met a woman who he could possibly foresee marrying or starting a family with—with one exception, of course.

  He thought he understood what he wanted from women now. He’d had one or two back in Collingwood, worldly girls who’d been drawn to him because of the footy. And he hadn’t baulked at the bar girls in France and Belgium. They had worked their magic alright, reminding him throughout their efficient couplings that he was alive today, even though he could be dead tomorrow. It was a momentary comfort, neither more nor less, that transported him from the ugliness, misery and death all around him. But he had also realised that intimacy without love left you empty.

  He had only ever really loved one woman. And now they might have a second chance.

  He was like a brother. For Louie, that had always been part of Doc’s appeal. They had been babies together, sat together in class, gone to Vic Park every Saturday as kids. Even lived in the same street, a few doors apart, before the council had knocked down all the houses to make way for the railway line.

  That had been the thing about Doc. Louie had known that she could always count on him, that he was the type of man who would protect the people close to him. Even in his dark eyes and stormy temper, there was a depth, an understated intelligence, that at once intrigued and calmed her.

  As a teenager she’d known what she wanted, and she used to pity Doc for his excruciating shyness. She tried to bring him out and put him at ease, acting like a sister as a way of getting him to confide in her. She had always been able to talk the leg off a chair, Louie had. Which was just as well, because she could scarcely get him to say a word. So Louie had talked and talked—about the weather and the footy; about the bloody annoying Salvos, how they tried to buy the souls of the poor in return for a feed; about the fight outside Perversi’s wine bar the other afternoon and all the goings-on up at Wren’s Tote.

  Doc had listened, he’d nodded. But he could only look at her when she wasn’t looking at him. He couldn’t hold her eyes for more than a second or two before turning away in a blush of embarrassment. She could only lead him so far. Yet she’d tried for years and years—it wasn’t like she had ever actively given up on him.

  The funny thing was that she had known what Doc was doing when he introduced her to his mate, Paddy. He was another one of Wren’s boys, brought down to box and to play for the club. More front than Foy & Gibson and a wit and charm like you wouldn’t believe. He was a dark, dark Irishman—black-haired, brown-eyed and as tough as any boy brought up on the Flat.

  Percy and Doc were different sides of the same coin. No wonder they became inseparable as soon as they met at the oil factory. On the footy ground they looked out for one another, too—Percy the lightning-fast follower and Doc the enforcer, shepherding with a lethal hip and shoulder or a clandestine kick to the shin when the ump’s back was turned.

  She had had to choose. And Doc had made it easy for her, pushing Percy towards her at the same time as he pushed her away.

  And so Doc had been best man at the wedding at St Philip’s, her already pregnant and him signing the register and passing Percy the gold band with which to marry his best mate’s sweetheart, the girl he loved so much that he just couldn’t tell her and gave her away instead.

  It had been a strange, odd affair, that wedding. Like Percy hadn’t wanted to be there. He was distant and anxious and he wouldn’t look her in the eye. Then he and Doc had raced off to play that afternoon.

  Then came the war. She’d begged Percy not to go. But he wouldn’t hear of it, even with the baby on the way; said he and Doc had joined up as mates and he couldn’t let Doc down.

  And now, as she looked out the window of her house on Park Street, there he was.

  He’d thought hard about exactly why he was there. On the ship home he told himself it would be for his
mate. And for the kiddie. A lone woman with a kid on the Flat meant one of two things: the mother had never known who the dad was, or he had been killed at the front. Either way, she was vulnerable. He’d promised Perc he’d keep an eye on them, and he would keep the promise.

  By late morning, with the sun beating down, making him perspire under the big coat, he had decided to cross the road and knock on her door. He had one more smoke, nervously rubbing each of his boots on the calf of the other leg. Then, as he crossed the narrow street, he saw her looking out the window at him.

  He stopped and smiled, held her gaze. A minute later she and the boy, a wild mane of hair and the biggest and bluest of young eyes hiding in her skirts, filled the doorway.

  ‘Doc,’ she said.

  She took a step, leaned into him and brushed his cheek with her lips, then put her arms around him. He lent into her, tentatively at first, but then his body relaxed. He began to lose himself in her smell, her warm cotton softness.

  ‘Louie.’

  This was home.

  20

  Between the Cracks

  Allan Monohan says that the romance between Louie and Doc began reasonably quickly after his grandfather returned to Collingwood. ‘So he wasted a bit of time,’ says Allan, ‘but not a lot of time like had in the past, in coming forward this time. I do know for sure that when Doc got back from the war he went around to see Lou very soon afterwards. I suppose he just went around to see her to make sure she was okay and to make sure the young bloke was okay, and I suppose Uncle Perc was only three or four years old … And it just kicked off from there really. I don’t know what the courting ritual was—I’ve no idea. But Nanna would go to the footy all of the time I suppose and watch Collingwood, and Doc would be out there playing. You know, she supported the team for her whole life and there Doc would be, out there playing in 1919 certainly and in 1920 … until he got rubbed out for hitting that Carlton bloke in the semi.’

  Having moved back into ‘Birkenhead’, his parents’ place in Hoddle Street, Doc had then set about making good his promise to Percy. What he saw when Louie opened her front door would have brought back the wartime loss of his mate. For despite his great tresses of golden ringlets and vivid blue eyes, Percy Henry Newby Rowe was, even as a boy of three, starkly reminiscent of his father. In time he would inherit his father’s athleticism, his fine masculine features and his wavy dark hair. And despite entering the world with a distinctive red birthmark on his forehead, young Perc could only be regarded in adolescence and then adulthood as extremely handsome.

  ‘All of the girls used to swoon over young Perc,’ says Dorothy Seddon. ‘They all thought that he was very good looking, dashing, which he was.’

  Louie, despite her grief over her husband, had already indicated to Doc in the clearest terms possible that she and little Perc were there for him. And now, their shared history, their emotional familiarity, made them closer than many siblings. There was probably very little that Doc and Louie did not already know about one another. And that which they didn’t know, such as what had happened throughout their wartime separation, they could soon share. They had the enviable foundations of a successful long-term relationship.

  Of course, they also had in common an affection for that young man who had shot across their horizons like a blazing comet. It was ironic: while Percy had forced them apart, he had also, ultimately, brought them together.

  By the time the Cluny Castle berthed at Adelaide on 21 May 1919, three weeks had passed since the first bounce of the new VFL season. Doc, despite his maladies and injuries, a lack of match fitness, and, not least, the fact that he was about to turn thirty-one, was keen to get back onto the paddock. He didn’t waste any time, running onto a footy field barely a fortnight after getting home in the round 7 grudge match against the team he had played against in the 1915 Grand Final—Carlton.

  Following the war there had been a resurgence in football’s popularity, with nine teams set to compete in the 1919 Premiership season. So there was enormous anticipation ahead of the Collingwood–Carlton clash. On the day, a comparatively big crowd of 25 000 packed themselves into the Blues’ home ground, Princes Park—Melbourne’s newspapers later reported there had been a virtual ‘riot’ in Elizabeth Street as football fans from across the city converged on the trams going up past the university to Carlton.

  Collingwood lost the game by 11 points. Afterwards, several chances missed by Doc were highlighted as significant contributing factors in the Magpies’ defeat. ‘Commencing the last term, Collingwood missed opportunities at a critical stage in the game, Seddon, their returned soldier, failing in a couple of shots [at goal],’ reported the Argus. Doc had found redemption of sorts in the latter part of the final quarter, kicking a goal from the half-forward line to bring Collingwood within 6 points, a moment when ‘the game got exciting again’. But it was too little, too late.

  The Magpies’ coach, Jock McHale, was cognisant of Doc’s steely commitment to training and persisted with his veteran. McHale’s faith paid off, as noted by a report in the Argus of the round 8 clash between Collingwood and Essendon, in which ‘Seddon showed marked improvement, both his marking and his kicking being good’. For the rest of the season, Doc was consistently mentioned among Collingwood’s best players, and he was usually among the side’s goal kickers during each match.

  Collingwood, 1919 Premiers. Doc Seddon sits on the extreme right of the second row. Collingwood Football Club Archive

  Then, on 11 October, Doc finally fulfilled his dream, that of every Australian Rules footballer, by playing in a premiership team. A dangerously in-form Collingwood defeated Richmond by 25 points before a crowd of 45 000 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. It was one of Doc’s best games for the season. In the second quarter he completed what one paper described as ‘a surprise Collingwood rush’, kicking a goal to put the Magpies in front, and in the final quarter he sealed the match, kicking another goal after receiving a short pass from fellow forward Ernie Lumsden. ‘Seddon,’ the Argus reported, ‘served with distinction.’

  For Doc, the road to the 1919 Premiership had been long and difficult. Although an exceptionally talented and tough youngster, he had not been a stand-out, Dick Lee–style wunderkind whose addition to the senior list at Collingwood was a fait accompli. He was twenty-three by the time he finally made the squad in 1911, and he missed out on playing in that year’s grand final, while his mate Paddy Rowan, an outsider to Collingwood, made the side (albeit a losing one). The infamous route march before the 1915 Grand Final arguably cruelled Doc’s, and therefore Collingwood’s, chances that year. And then war intervened. But now, Doc had finally won a premiership with the team that he loved, for the suburb that had raised him.

  Louie was, as always, in the crowd. It must have been an intensely emotional experience for her to watch Doc, with whom she was steadily becoming romantically involved, achieve that which war had denied to her husband.

  Of Doc’s return to the game after World War I, Collingwood historian Michael Roberts wrote in A Century of the Best:

  He was a fitness fanatic … who had enough stamina to run all day. Even after his years at the front, where he had been gassed, he was still super-fit. He relished training and liked nothing better than a hard night’s work on the track, so much so that he did not miss a single night after he returned from the war—a performance which earned him a special award of one guinea at the end of 1919.

  Doc, encouraged no doubt by Jock McHale and Wal Lee, decided that he would play on in 1920. Despite being about to turn thirty-two, his form was as good as it had ever been and he was as fit as some men who were a decade younger—which was fortunate, as the game had changed dramatically in his absence.

  Magpies chairman of selectors, Doc Seddon, ensures that the legendary Collingwood trainer, Wal Lee, wins a running race at a club family picnic in the early 1930s. Collingwood Football Club Archive

  McHal
e, a coaching innovator, though a traditionalist when it came to matters of loyalty and to equality of remuneration for his players, constantly shifted his men around the field. The followers, for example, would run hard for ten or fifteen minutes before being spelled in the forward line. Other clubs and coaches naturally used McHale’s method as a template for their own. As a result, the game had become much faster, more physical and athletic, more exciting, and more beautiful to watch.

  Throughout the 1920 season, a buoyant Collingwood shaped up as a likely back-to-back premiership winner. Doc was again one of the team’s mainstays around the centre and in the forward line. In an echo of his time as the protector of Percy Rowe—or Paddy Rowan—almost a decade ago, he formed a symbiotic on-field partnership with a new recruit from the Victorian town of Rutherglen. Like Doc’s old mate, this new recruit was a handy boxer. But this man stood well over 6 feet tall, and once Doc had finally hung up his boots, he would inherit a reputation as the toughest player on the Collingwood list.

  In a long article about Doc’s final playing years with the Magpies, the Herald reported that:

  Nowadays he [Doc] is partnered with Percy Rowe, a recent and valuable recruit to the team and it is no longer the custom to stay in for a quarter. When Rowe and Seddon are in together, the former, being the taller of the two, goes for the ball and the latter acts as a shield to his colleague. This system has been so finely developed in recent years that in present games it is a rare sight to see more than one man from either side going for the ball. The shield has a valuable part to play and it depends largely on his efforts whether his partner is able to dominate the ruck. Seddon knows this and he rarely gives a chance to the man he is told … to watch.