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Carwyn
By Alun Richards Parthian
Copyright © 2015 The Estate of Alun Richards
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-910409-91-6
CHAPTER 1
The Flat on the Via I Monti
'Come to Italy?'
I was not very keen.
'Why not?'
'Don't fancy it.'
'Come on! I'll have a flat. You can work in the mornings. Rovigo's in the North.'
'What's it like?'
'Just like Llanelli!'
'That rules it out then. If it was like Pontypridd, I might be tempted.' Where Welshmen are concerned, a blade of grass can form the frontier making foreign territory.
'Come on! You'll like it when you get there. They're very friendly people.'
'I'll see,' I said. 'Drop me a line when you arrive.'
'That'll be the day,' a mutual friend said.
Carwyn James was notorious for his unanswered letters. At this time in 1977, although I had met him previously and known of him for most of my adult life, I did not really know him. He was a West Walian and I am an East Walian, and, as I was fond of telling him, we were as different as chalk and cheese. We had some things in common apart from a lifelong interest in rugby football. We had both been teachers, had both given up teaching – he, quite recently for journalism and broadcasting, whereas I had long since become a professional writer and, if I was known for anything in Wales, it was for my critical views of the Welsh Establishment. He, on the other hand, apart from his differences with the Welsh Rugby Union, was one of the most confident Welshmen of his generation and moved easily in those Welsh-speaking areas of Establishment Wales which, in my view, stubbornly refuse to admit that there is no greater dividing line than that formed by a language. It is a difficult thing to explain to an outsider, how a man can feel a stranger in his own country, and the indifference of many Welshmen to their nation springs from the feeling, often justified, of being excluded, especially from those organisations in broadcasting and education where executive positions and a good many others are reserved for those with bilingual qualifications. It is an old complaint, and a lost battle as far as many Welshmen are concerned, but Carwyn (who would not accept this view) was not only the epitome of Welsh-speaking Wales, a Welsh scholar, a chapel deacon and Plaid Cymru candidate, but an ex-Welsh-international fly-half, the triumphant coach of the 1971 British Lions in New Zealand and a regular broadcaster who brought wit and intelligence to bear on whatever subject he spoke about. He was a man always in demand, who crossed dividing lines with ease, and because of rugby football, one of the best-known men in Wales.
'Rovigo's near Venice and Padua. It won't just be rugby. There's the opera.'
'Duck-shooting as well, I expect?'
'Why not?
When Carwyn wanted something, he persisted. I did not realise it at the time, but I see now that he was then a man almost at the end of his tether. In the first place, it was a shock to see how physically unfit he was – and his general health never really improved. In the second, he felt a compulsion to get away from Wales, to breathe a different air, and what was to me a jaunt, was to him a need. He was going to be away for a year at least and wanted company.
Always a convivial presence, he is somehow permanently implanted in the memory, a glass in hand, wreathed in cigarette smoke, his figure well-rounded, suit a little crumpled, sometimes lacking a belt, perhaps a remote Queensland rugby club tie and shirt unbuttoned. It was as if he felt it was somehow very English to be absolutely impeccable. Not that appearances ever worried him, or those who most cared for him. It was his smile which was the most important thing. When he smiled, it was with his whole face, often nodding intently as if the smile was not enough, and he had the most infectious chuckle.
'If I send you a wire, will you come?'
'I'll think about it,' I said. He was what is known as a confirmed bachelor and I'd already had first-hand experience of the domestic duties imposed on his guests, for he was a man who regarded a tin opener as a complicated and highly technical instrument, the use of which required at least a degree in mechanical engineering. Once, at one of his many lodgings, he had been charged with the care of a cat bearing the unlikely name of Angharad Trenchard-Jones and, failing to open a tin of cat food, had substituted the Sunday joint. I hesitated also because I had a wife, children, and a novel to write.
But he rubbed his hands gleefully.
'Right! That's settled,' he said, as if a decision had been made. The same invitation had been extended to a number of people for he selected friends in much the same way a bibliophile might choose books for his library – in all, a great variety of people. He needed them all. But only a few came. When I got to know him well, one of the first things to surprise me was his vulnerability. In so many ways, he was a man who could not say no to people, and there were days when everybody seemed to impose upon him and his time.
At that time nobody could understand why he wanted to coach in Italy in the first place. As BBC Wales's rugby correspondent, his weekly match analyses on television were avidly awaited. He wrote occasional elegant essays for the Guardian on rugby football and had a summer brief to cover cricket. As a journalist and broadcaster he was constantly in demand, contributing to programmes of all kinds, and the summer before, he had covered the Commonwealth Games in Canada for BBC Wales. He was also constantly being asked to speak at functions and wherever he stayed, the telephone never seemed to stop ringing. And yet he was bored.
Wherever he went, especially in rugby clubs and particularly in Llanelli, he was the subject of adulation. He could not walk down the street without being stopped by a host of people anxious to hear his views, often forcibly expressing their own on this rugby topic or that. At parties, he was the centrepiece, his ear the most easily purloined, for he was the most remarkable and patient listener ever. In short, he was the man everybody wanted to speak to and, although he was several times accused of arrogance in his dealings with the Welsh Rugby Union, he was really a lifelong victim of his own nature. For there was in him a sensitivity that made him the prey of other people, a gentleness of nature that did not want to offend, the capacity for which he secretly admired in other people.
A month later, contrary to expectation, both the letter and the telegram arrived. I soon found myself stepping off the plane in Venice to see his enigmatic figure smiling broadly down from the privileged visitors' gallery where he stood in the same suit and yet another rugby club tie, this time in the presence of two huge South African forwards, Dirk Naude and Dries Cotzer, guest players for his new club, Sanson Rovigo.
The customs formalities were soon over. 'You didn't expect the telegram, did you?'
'No,' I said.
'That's East Wales, you see? Suspicious, always.'
'Not without justification.'
'Never mind, now we can leave all that behind us.' But we never did.
I often reminded him of Joyce's phrase which I transposed – Wales is an old sow that eats her own farrow – but he always laughed. Of all the people he knew, he said, we were both the most easily available for the dish. Neither of us had ever stayed away for long. Neither of us could ever pass as coming from anywhere else, like some of our more famous compatriots whom we jocularly regarded as light-skinned negroes passing as white. In private such inflammatory phrases delighted him and we had a mutual habit of collecting sentences most likely to give offence. His favourite was spoken to me, a rebellious figure glaring over the wardroom silver in Portsmouth years before.
'There's something in what you say, Richards, and no doubt you have your contribution to make, however small!'
Such sentences delighted him, largely, I suspect, because they were the antithesis of himself.
In Venice, we took a launch to see the sights, but sitting in a café opposite the Basilica of San Marco he soon asked if I had brought the Western Mail as ordered and immediately turned to the Welsh rugby club results. He took his own square mile of Wales with him wherever he went and remained intensely rooted, Wales-centred and Wales-dominated. Yet, as I came to think, that inevitable preoccupation wore him out, whereas every contact outside of Wales stimulated in him the energy to return to the major obsession of his life, rugby football. Thus it was no surprise to learn that the one time he stood for election as a Nationalist Candidate, on the eve of the ballot he sat at the house of a friend, discussing his recent appointment as British Lions coach while the loudspeakers blared his name and party outside, his own presence denied his supporters for the evening.
Carwyn brought a Welsh eye to rugby football, he was the most unbiased of men and moved so freely amongst rugby men everywhere because he so seldom put a Welsh point of view. When Dai Francis, the General Secretary of the Welsh Miners, presented miners' lamps to the Welsh members of his Lions team and over-enthusiastically stated that the Lions would have been nothing without the Welsh contingent, he got himself roundly ticked off by their coach who insisted the victory had been won by a British team from all four countries.
In the game, Carwyn's intelligence transcended nationality, as did many of his views, but at the same time he was inescapably Welsh and you could not know him for long without hearing him quote his favourite poet, Gwenallt, bidding you remember that you cannot care for the nations of the world unless first you learn to care for your own.
All of which did not matter much to the Italians, nor indeed, I suspect, to most of the teams he coached, but wherever he went he was in some senses a permanent extension of a National Cultural Museum. The moment I entered his flat in Rovigo, it was to be greeted by sizeable portraits of the Welsh language writers who mattered most to him – Gwenallt, Kate Roberts, Saunders Lewis. On one occasion, hotly engaged in an argument in which I was expressing the anti-nationalist view, he promptly stood up and obscured one of my own books with a volume of Gwynfor Evans, the Nationalist MP, adding impishly, 'You were saying?'
Yet, as I was to discover, in personal terms Carwyn's nationality was the least important fact about him. The man who so confidently asserted himself on public platforms, on the television screen and in the rugby dressing-rooms of the world, was a man who came crisply alive on specific occasions and then afterwards relapsed into a wayward self when he seemed at times incapable of looking after himself and was, moreover, not much interested in whatever consequences befell him. There were thus two Carwyn James personas – the public man and the private man. They were markedly different. Neither was false, but it was sometimes impossible to believe that the one belonged to the other.
I was soon shocked to see how badly affected he was by the virulent form of eczema which haunted him all the time I knew him. He had a habit of rubbing his hands together, a brisk and vigorous movement as if to convey immense enthusiasm at the slightest provocation.
'Another g and t, Richards?' he might say in his naval voice. We had both served in the Royal Navy.
'Plenty of tonic.'
One of my favourites amongst his many stories concerned the taciturn English rugby captain in the dressing-room at Twickenham who had heard that the Welsh were giving lengthy team talks and, when it was suggested that he might do the same, reluctantly agreed. But he was a man short on words and, having called for silence, cleared his throat uneasily.
'Right, gentlemen! Today we are playing the Welsh, ahem.' There was an awkward pause while he struggled for the next sentence.
'All I can say is, we've got to beat the bastards!' A further pause.
'Er ... has anybody here got a fag?'
End of team talk.
Carwyn told this many times always grinding his palms together as he did so, and it wasn't long before I realised that the skin on his palms was unnaturally hardened by this constant rubbing. In fact, there was not a part of his body that was unaffected by the eczema apart from his face. In the privacy of his flat, he couldn't wait to remove his shoes and socks. As the night wore on, that first night and every night after that, you could often hear him scratching in his sleep through the bedroom wall. He was to have various treatments, in hospital and out of it, including acupuncture, but nothing worked for long, although he never complained and ignored his condition so successfully that it embarrassed his friends more than it did him. This stoicism was an unexpected trait and his indifference to himself was matched only by his indifference to all possessions, from overcoats to suitcases to cars, all of which he abandoned when it suited him. To this day, I'm sure there are suitcases belonging to him dotted all over the world. He was a man who walked away from things and set no value upon them at all. 'Possessions' was an ugly word in his vocabulary.
Although no medical expert, I began by attempting to bully him into taking more care of himself. Creams, lotions, powders littered the bathroom. More often than not, he forgot to apply them as if he had long since decided that he was the victim of an incurable condition. I urged cotton underclothes, air, light, vitamin C, the simple sensible things, but my concern bored him. There were things to do, people to visit, visitors to receive.
He had announced my arrival, making me a celebrity, and, as I soon found, a friend of Carwyn's was welcome anywhere. He had been installed in Rovigo for just under a month. His top-floor flat in the Via I Monti was just around the corner from the flat where the two South African forwards lived, the stranieri or foreign 'guest' players allowed by the Italian rugby authorities to each major club in order to further playing skills. They were his neighbours and friends, constant companions, and then there were the Rovigo team. The chairman, Franco Olivieri, had read of Carwyn and approached him through a previous straniero, Bernard Thomas, who had returned to play for Llanelli. The famous coach was already a minor deity and I was immediately accepted as part of his entourage. Carwyn was taking Italian lessons from Angelo Morello, a schoolmaster who lived around the corner, the most gentle of men who soon began to translate Carwyn's rugby articles for the local newspaper. I became il companiato di rugby.
It was like joining a potentate. Newly installed, I was assured by Franco Olivieri that my lack of Italian could be redressed by repeating molto stupida! whenever spoken to, a practice he himself found came naturally, as an ex-hooker like myself, and we shook hands on it in friendship. Indeed, friendship became the key note as we went from restaurant to restaurant and bar to bar, and once to a village nearby where a small rugby club had laid on a function to commemorate the death of their one international, a prop forward who had learned the game in Italy and then played at top level in France, returning home to have the local stadium named after him. In the little whitewashed tavern the local wine was produced in quantity. Carwyn and I sat bemused at the tributes and it suddenly dawned on me that I was in a rugby world as intense as any at home. Listening to the speeches of praise in memory of the fallen hero, I learned three more words of Italian – aggressivo, generoso and combativo – which gave me enough to be going on with. When Carwyn and I rose to sing the Welsh hymn, Calon Lân, there was tumultuous applause, before and after and the flashlights of cameras seemed only natural. Later that night we were in the cellar of a local property owner, inspecting his wine vats, and sat up so late talking rugby in broken English that his wife began to hurl abuse down the stairs. From that night on, transport, invitations, discount in leather goods stores, at the tailor's, and prize dishes in restaurants came our way like autumn leaves blowing down the Via I Monti itself. I had worked for Hollywood moguls and film stars and spied on showbiz extravagance, but these were the gifts of ordinary people, the whole town and, somehow, always more personal.
'It was,' I said, 'the Rugby High Life.'
'Why not?' Carwyn said.
The flat was headquarters – callers every day. They seldom came empty-handed. Players brought gifts of their family wine and some nights the whole team arrived, spreading themselves around the floor, often showing video films of previous matches until the cigarette smoke hung in the still air and the aggrieved faces of Saunders, Lewis and Gwenallt on the sideboard seemed to grow more and more grim and disapproving. The debris remained the following morning and Carwyn stepped through it without noticing. Twice a week a tiny woman came to clean, creeping in apprehensively, lowering her eyes as she entered, as if grateful not to find a hand or an arm, perhaps the odd finger, amongst the overflowing ash trays. Carwyn greeted her imperturbably with a warm smile and once, when she brought half a dozen crumpled shirts which he had forgotten to remove from the clothesline on the balcony – they had blown down and would have to be washed again, he grinned benignly. 'She is getting to know me!'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Carwyn by Alun Richards. Copyright © 2015 The Estate of Alun Richards. Excerpted by permission of Parthian.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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