Why these ABs are like the ‘71 Lions
During the Lions tour, Mark Reason is writing a blog in search of his father John, for 30 years the rugby correspondent of the Daily and then Sunday Telegraph. John began his tours of New Zealand in the 60s and wrote two books chronicling the tours. Somew
My father was not always on tour. In fact I fancied I saw him the other day at an Auckland theatre. There was the same slight stoop, the browngrey hair still trying to gather the energy to curl up like a breaking wave, and that oh so gentle tread. I caught up with the distant man, but it wasn’t my dad, of course. Facts aren’t always what they seem. The mulberry linen jacket should have given it away, I suppose. My dad wouldn’t have been seen dead in something like that.
But he was always smart on tour. Not at home where he was ironically called Beau, after Beau Brummell, the Regency dandy. At home my father would wander around in broken, light blue sweaters and trousers often suspended by a piece of string.
But on tour he would usually wear a jacket at the very least. Indeed he had two suits made by Tony Sinclair of Savile Row, the man who cut Sean Connery’s suits for the early James Bond films. They still hang in my wardrobe. I wore the jacket last week, although sadly I find myself having to breathe in sharply in order to get into the trousers.
Do we slowly turn into our fathers? One of John Mortimer’s wives asked, ‘‘Do you always copy your father?’’ ‘‘Good God, no,’’ he said. ‘‘Really?’’ she mused. I wonder. The title of ‘The Voice of Reason’ column has been unwittingly inherited. Will I start to repeat the same stories. Maybe I am already doing so. Will I acquire a growing horror of visitors ‘‘turning the house into a London nightclub’’? Will I eventually abandon the largish home in the country, because all I see is work, when all my wife sees is the beauty all around her?
‘‘Nature’s remorseless,’’ as Mortimer’s father observed.
It was certainly remorseless to my father. He had something like motor neurone disease at the end and he knew he would die a slow and horrible death as his mind and body fell apart. He had other ideas. He usually did.
I last saw my father a week before his death. He was sitting quietly in a chair looking out on the back garden in Twickenham. There was snow on the ground. He smiled at me, peaceful and, I now realise, happy to go. He wasn’t going to hang around. My dad’s smile was saying goodbye to me.
He liked sweet things in his final months. He ate parma ham and melon most lunchtimes. My mind went back to our lovely bull terrier, Sidney, who picked up some poison on the street, and died an agonising death. We syringed glucose down his throat in the hope of giving him enough strength to recover.
The local Godman came to our door and saw I was upset. I told him about Sidney’s death. ‘‘Only a dog,’’ he said. Silly, silly man with empty blue eyes. I had tears stinging at the back of my eyes. I am not sure I ever saw my father cry. The other day in the glorious Hamilton second-hand bookshop I saw a copy of John Updike’s My
Father’s Tears. Of course, I bought it, there seem to be a lot of Johns in this story.
Updike’s father was seeing him off at the train station on the way to college. ‘‘It shocked me threw me off track as it were - to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand goodbye, glittered with tears.’’
It was the only time Updike saw his father cry. A few, years later, with Updike trying to fly back from Europe in time to be with his seriously ill father, the news arrived that his dad had died. Updike’s wife put her arms around him and told him to cry.
‘‘I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.’’
I find it the other way around. I can’t ever remember seeing my father cry, not even when my little brother died. I am sure he must have done, but not in front of the children. In some ways Victoria was still my father’s ruling monarch. And so I cry quite a lot. My father left me plenty of his tears.
Mike Gibson told me the other day: ‘‘Your father was looking for the ideal.’’
That was certainly true of rugby. He saw something close to the ideal in the ‘71 Lions and he would have liked the comparison with the modern All Blacks. Kieran Read’s men are able to play the beautiful game, but when they have needed to be pragmatic in this series, then they have played that way. And I fancy they will win 2-1, just like those Lions from long ago.
Mortimer’s father died ‘‘in the summer with the garden at its most turbulent...You step into the sunlight where nobody is taller than you and you’re in no one else’s shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.’’
My father died in the winter when the garden was dead under a white shroud of snow. And my mind goes back to a story he used to tell. There was a teacher at his school who used to like a lunchtime drink. And one afternoon, just before he came into the classroom, the boys got the lamps on their long cords swinging in harmony, and then they picked up the motion, rocking their desks from side to side.
The master came into class, saw the whole room swaying and ran down the corridor clutching his head. I don’t know why i thought of that. But I often smile when I think of my father. I feel he’s still on tour somehow.
I feel he’s here in the Wairarapa, shaking hands with Brian Lochore, whom he greatly admired. I feel he’s looking at Sonny Bill, horrified at the violence but with forgiveness in his heart. And he is talking to everyone behind the scenes, away from the press pack, because as Gibson said: ‘‘Your father was never too proud to think he knew everything in any aspect of life - he sought contact with people who were experts.’’
My father smiles at some secret thought which he is never going to share. And sings quietly, ‘‘Birds singing in the sycamore tree, boodly, boodly, boo.’’
I never did find out what the next line was.