Looking back: a self-portrait
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 33: Such Is Life
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones’ biography and other articles by this writer
‘The past it is a majic word,
Too beautiful to last.’
– John Clare
I HAVE stepped inside a replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s cabinet of mirrors, and here I am, as I have never before seen myself. The back of me, the sides, as well as the usual frontal perspective – in other words, the whole of me. I am delighted. I am vainly fascinated. Then, just as quickly, the excitement of discovery subsides. I don’t look as I have always thought I did or, more to the point, as I feel I should. I quite like the reflected image at forty-five degrees, where I look like the start of something promising, and therefore its appeal lies in its incompleteness. But then I notice the back view of my head and that is very disappointing: all that grey hair, and it isn’t just the grey but its fringe which, after a long and critical investigation, I am forced to concede is less the start than the end of something. I look very much like my father, whose side I had stuck to all those years ago on our ritual Saturday afternoon walk from Wellington’s Petone Railway Station to the Petone Recreation Ground to watch his beloved Petone play, and there is nothing quite as dismal as the realisation that you aren’t quite your own work.
On the walk from the station to the Udy Street entrance, little was ever said. Apparently there was nothing to say to a nine-year-old. But there was the smell of his overcoat, of ash and smoke from his rollies; a butt always stuck cartoonishly to his lower lip, even when he spoke. Little was said, but I felt connected by our common destination. We were off to watch Petone, as we did every Saturday afternoon through winter. As more and more people arrived out of side streets, I drew closer to his coat. I didn’t want to lose him in the crowd. All I could see were coated men to the front and the back of me. Little was said, that’s true. But things were still passed down. Things were absorbed. Either you got it or you didn’t, and I got it.
Still some distance from the ground we heard the crowd’s violent roar and I sped up. I didn’t want to miss anything. Soon I would become good at gauging the noise of the crowd. A hilarity around its edges probably meant a dog had run onto the field. Dogs were always running onto the field at the Petone Rec. Or else a low-quality match, or a one-sided one, had been brought to life by an unlikely hero, an overweight prop intercepting a ball and launching himself on an improbable thirty-yard surge for the try line. The crowd wanted such things to happen. It wanted the fat bastard to score the try.
Inside the gate, the world changed to a festive place. I quickly identified the club colours of the two teams going at it on the No 2 ground, and picked up the pleasing aromas of the carcinogenic hot dogs from the van parked at the northern end of the stand, and felt a general sense of uplift and appetite that had nothing to do with wanting to eat anything.
I left Dad to climb the concrete steps to the stand and hurried on to the players’ entrance, where I waited with the other kids. We sneaked envious looks at the older ball boys who were allowed to roam in the unpopulated green verge of privileged access between the fence and the touchline. For the moment, however, all eyes were trained in the one direction. From the dark tunnel under the stand we heard the sound of cleats on concrete. A slow march to begin with. The sound of cleats gathered, it grew heavier until faces up in the stand were drawn to the balustrade to look down. Then out of the gloom the giants emerged – huge, bandaged men reeking of liniment. There was the colossal figure of the All Black and Petone prop Ken Gray. He absorbed our prying eyes. His hands were huge. His eyes stared out of dark sleepless shadows. He slapped his hands, and as he passed through the gate he dropped his head and broke into a big man’s jog. That he did not appear to hear the cheers coming out of the stand always puzzled me.
THAT YEAR, 1965, I travelled up to Auckland with my mother to see off my oldest sister, Pat, on a ship sailing to Europe. On the wharf we stood in a different crowd from the usual Saturday crowd. This one held handkerchiefs and wept and remembered to wave up at the excited and mostly young faces hanging off the ship rail. As the passenger liner moved out from the wharf the streamers broke and fell into the dark harbour waters. We turned away, my mother with a tear in her eye, alone with her silent companion for the 450-mile rail journey home. What an enormous country we lived in. Its grassy emptiness floated by in the carriage windows. We passed out the end of nameless towns. I couldn’t wait to get back home to Stellin Street, Lower Hutt, where everything was perfectly proportioned.
Soon postcards from another world arrived in our letterbox – from Siena, Florence, London, places which didn’t feel very real, let alone relevant. I felt sorry for both my sisters (by now the younger one, Barbara, was living in Rome, and with someone called Stefano); I felt sorry for them both because they weren’t here. They were missing out on all my fun. They didn’t know about my place on the back porch, shared with the dog, where I polished my boots and rubbed dubbin into my rugby ball. My sisters would not have known this, but in those days no two rugby balls were the same. Unlike the balls spat out of industrial moulds today, these leather balls quickly lost their shape, and their rotundity gave away their vintage; the older balls had the same shape as airships.
The dog must have started to feel shut out of my affections, because, for one thing, I just liked to hold the ball. On a trip up to the corner dairy the ball came with me. I tucked it under my arm. The ball was also something to look after, and unlike my dog it didn’t chase cats or shit on the neighbour’s lawn. It also provided me with hours of joy as I practised my place kicks with monastic application. I would build a mound on the front lawn, mount the ball, and line up the neighbour’s lawn on the other side of the street. The key was to swing through the ball so that connection was barely felt. The payoff was as immense as it was immediate. The perfectly struck ball would lift towards the power lines, spinning end over end to land with a pleasing drumming echo on the neighbour’s lawn. I don’t recall ever kicking the ball from the neighbour’s lawn back towards the house. My mother probably had something to do with that. So I would cross the road, pick the ball out of the neighbour’s hedge, tuck it under my arm and march back across the road to our lawn and make a fresh mound.
In a world where I had little control – someone else decided when I went to bed, what I read and ate, what I wore, listened to, looked at and looked like – here was a moment where I could impose myself. By understanding the aerodynamics of the ball I could influence its flight. In factoring in these things I was building a critical faculty. I had just kicked the ball beautifully – so effortlessly I hardly felt its weight against my toe. What had I done to achieve this? Or, for that matter, what had I done to make it float so half-arsedly across the road like a wet rag?
Struck the wrong way the ball was designed to pay back in kind; it wobbled and flopped and turned itself into a grief-stricken bladder of air. But when it rose in a perfect arc, spinning elegantly from top to bottom, briefly you felt as though you were playing with the cosmos, participating in the natural laws of gravity and physics. I understood this not in so many words but experienced it as a rush of joy. It lasted until the ball began its earthly descent, but this brevity added to its beauty.
Years later a spiral punt would deliver the same satisfaction. The kicking foot swept under the ball. Instead of spinning top to bottom it spun through the air like a torpedo. Close to the touchline a spiral punt carved off more yards than the naked eye expected, first by moving in-field, thereby adding territory, before curving back towards the sideline.
It’s rarely seen today. Dan Carter, for example, favours the less aesthetically pleasing and lower trajectory of the drop punt borrowed from Aussie Rules. It’s useful enough into the wind, but does not hold the eye in the way of a spiral punt. Mick Williment, the Wellington and All Black full-back, during this period of my apprenticeship, had a terrific spiral punt. He had great hands as well, and a sort of front-of-house managerial air about him. I was in more than one crowd that rose to its feet in a kind of operatic mid-performance applause as Williment caught a towering punt from his opposite and slid elegantly across the sideline. Laughable when compared to the attacking flair of the Hewson-Gallagher-Cullen-Muliaina model, but during my apprenticeship years in the 1960s and ’70s the sideline was the safety rail that the game clung to. A team would be happy to chew off bits of territory along the sideline. A midfield attack was considered pure folly, even irresponsible, as it ran a risk of the tightly controlled pattern of play falling apart. For god’s sake, anything might happen.
The games we played on the front lawn in Stellin Street were much looser affairs. Most afternoons after school we played on the next-door lawn of Mrs White. She was a solo mum, a swollen-faced woman. Although I never heard her referred to as a solo mum, an air of fallen grace hung in her doorway from where I once looked in at a cold and bare kitchen. I don’t remember ever hearing her speak, and at home she was hardly ever mentioned. She was a neighbour but not considered part of the neighbourhood. She wasn’t a gardener and didn’t appear to care (not that we ever bothered to ask) that we chewed up her lawn into mud – which, by the way, of all the lawns in the street was also the one that the dogs had figured out they could shit on with impunity. So usually there was some dog shit to move before we played, and these matches stretched on until well after the streetlights had come on, right up until Mum yelled from the end of the drive to come inside the house, your dinner’s on the table, thus signalling the end of anything good left in the day. There was nothing to do but to wait for morning and the prospect of rugby at lunchtime, then after school on Mrs White’s dog-shit lawn.
When a very famous All Black, Bob Scott, visited Dyer Street primary school, I was invited to the front of the hall in order for Mr Scott to demonstrate the correct way to pass a ball by passing it to me. It must have been during that visit that I heard that Bob Scott could kick a kerosene can from halfway in bare feet and that he did so regularly in order to harden the toes on his kicking foot. That I continued to believe this well into adulthood is embarrassing, but hardly surprising given my susceptibility to myth. (Years later, aged twelve, I visited the menswear shop owned by Bob Scott and Andy Leslie on Jackson Street, Petone. I wanted a Petone club jersey. Bob Scott made it clear he wouldn’t sell me a Petone club jersey because I hadn’t earned the right, since I was still at school and didn’t play for the club. Instead he sold me a Petone Tech jersey, also blue – although a lower grade of blue, without any history, and inferior as such in every possible way.)
In the interests of promoting a broader education my mother had taken out a subscription for me to Knowledge magazine. Once a week Knowledge arrived in the letterbox, and I flicked through pages crammed with science and history to get to the regular Greek myth feature. It was in Knowledge magazine that I first encountered Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, Helen, and Agamemnon, who in my mind joined another list of heroes whose names included Lochore, Conway, Gray, Meads, Laidlaw, Herewini, all key members of the 1965 All Blacks.
That same year the South African Springboks toured the country and my sister Barbara, who had returned from Italy to treat us to risotto night after night, bought me a souvenir magazine. There was a photo of the Boks playing in the snow. Was it Mt Taranaki (Egmont, as it was called then) or Mt Ruapehu? What I remember was the open-mouthed fun of the Boks and the feeling of pride that their having fun at our place engendered in me. What also struck me were their names. They had an otherness that I did not associate with rugby. It was hard to believe that such a strain had taken to the game. It was also beyond the bounds of possibility that they could play it as well as we could. I was quite sure of this. The Boks were here for our entertainment, and in order for us to enjoy our country through their experiences, because look at how much fun they were having playing in the snow.
On the eve of the Fourth Test in 1965 Dr Verwoerd made his famous Loskop Dam speech reaffirming the ban on Maori players touring South Africa. Years later I would read how New Zealanders turned against their tourists as a result of that speech. I don’t recall that happening at all. At least, it didn’t happen in that brick house at 20 Stellin Street. I cannot recall a single conversation about apartheid either at home or at school. I only mention this in order to underline the fortress aspect of my childhood.
Keith Oxlee, the Boks’ first five, visited Dyer Street School. I was a first five-eight so I felt an immediate bond. What I remember about that visit was the particular green of their blazers, unlike any green that was familiar, and the Springbok emblem, and also Keith’s smile – one of those smiles whose owner just wants to be everyone’s friend. About a hundred of us beamed back.
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