Bred of Heaven (24 page)

We jog out onto the pitch. A wooden H towers overhead as we gather, perhaps forty of us, in a circle and listen to a head coach address us in Welsh then English. I don't know the average age of the veterans, but no one else here seems to be in their forties. It emerges that Clwb Rygbi Cymry Caerdydd is under a cloud after the first team the previous Saturday snatched feckless defeat from the jaws of victory. We are to be punished with a gruelling workout, even innocent parties such as myself. We fan along the try line and start jogging up towards the twenty-two. Then back. Then up again. Then back faster. Then to the halfway. And so on. Jogging, sprinting, walking, breathing, stretching – this could go on all night and I'd pass with flying colours.

Our next drill involves finding a partner and scrumming down opposite him. I select Rhys the Voice. We lock shoulders and in turn try to use our upper-body strength to twist the other out of the horizontal. Upper-body strength and me are not often found in the same sentence, but Rhys the Voice is half a head shorter than me, and besides, I'm determined not to look like some floppy-sleeved
nancy from over the Severn. So I put a lot into it and come up unbelittled if ever so slightly twingey in the neck area. A side effect, I tell myself. Ignore. Go with this feeling of macho empowerment.

We gather in the middle. Two blokes in their twenties are pulled out of the group and one is asked to tackle the other, who is stationary. He piles in, grabs his quarry round the thighs, lifts him off his feet and dumps him upside down. Traditionally known as the spear tackle. The perpetrator is roundly chastised for dangerous play. If someone does that to me I'll be more than twingey in the neck area, I think, as a co-coach demonstrates how to tackle safely: shoulder to the thigh, head on the hip.

We are instructed to form groups of six and mark out a square of five metres by five. On the whistle, one player in the square has to put in as many tackles as possible in thirty seconds while the rest provide a moving target. I start jogging about while a rhinoceros in shorts charges around, crashing into moving objects. Thump. Down goes one of the five. Up. Sprint. Thump. Another one. I try to veer out of his eyeline. Thump. Another one down. But sooner or later he's going to catch my eye. Up. And I am conspicuously wearing red. Sprint. So far he's got three of the others. It's my turn any min– THUMP.

My instinct is to stay on the deck and gently recover. However, it wouldn't do to lie about looking wounded so I roll onto my front, push myself very slowly onto all fours, gingerly stand and re-enter the square. The others are still being biffed by the rhino. When the whistle blows it's now the turn of a compact, bow-legged unit who gets me twice; after him a tearaway whippet whose tackles make up for in snap what they lack in heft.

On the grounds that I'd look like a wimp to put off my turn till last, I volunteer to go next. I've not tackled anyone for the best part of three decades. Even Elgan Rees avoided tackling where possible.
The whistle goes. I look around the square and size up the options. Five young Welshmen are circling. A cheetah must feel something like this upon sighting a pack of wildebeest. A cheetah approaching retirement, with arthritic knees. The whippet is closest, so I have at him with maximum force, shoulder on the thigh, head on hip, and wait for him to crash to the floor. He is conveniently light, so only a bit of extra shove finds him toppling, and me with him. THONK. Hitting the hard earth is slightly less painful when someone under you is cushioning the blow. I lever myself up and look for more prey. Another player is passing so I thwack into him. Down he goes. Up I get. This is actually quite bracing. I can feel my testosterone levels surging. I don't know why I didn't do more of this at school. The rhino is in the corner of the square. Time to take him down. A three-yard sprint and BIFF! My arms barely reach around his tree-trunk legs. He barely budges. Tumble, dammit, you lump. He's immovable. I dig my studs in, drive with all my middle-aged might and begrudgingly he sinks like a slow-mo sack of spuds. I get up and keep going. Hit. Down. Up. Sprint. I've already done more tackles than in my first term at prep school. Hit. Down. Up. Sprint. Surely Mr Youle, now deceased, would look upon me more favourably. The tackle board would record five, six, seven new
t
s, some of them
T
s. Hit. Down. When the whistle blows I'm on the floor, panting heavily.

‘Faint?' calls out the co-coach. How many tackles? ‘Rhywun yn well na deg?' Anyone better than ten?
Wyth
for me. Eight.

When the rota begins again we are tasked with improving on our previous score. I ratchet up the intensity and hurl myself at a queue of bodies. Hit. The lungs are starting to feel it. Down. And the right shoulder. Up. But I keep going. Sprint. The rhino consents to keel over first time. Hit. Just as I'm wondering if the whistle will ever go, it does and I've scored ten. I am starting to feel like quite the meathead. If it moves I'll fly at it so I will. Bring it on!
Testosterone now at danger levels. Bring it all on!

We jog up towards the tryline and form into more queues of six. This time, taking it in turns, we have to run from the touchline to the five-metre line, crouch, then sprint and crunch hard into a tall yellow rectangular crash pad held up by a volunteer. After the first crash you retreat three metres and, at the call, crash into the pad again. I await my turn. It seems perfectly doable. After all, a crash pad can't hurt you, can it? I reach the front. And sprint to the line. Crouch. Sprint. SMASH! The crash pad, and the volunteer, take the impact of a monstrous hit. Or as monstrous as I can manage. I shuffle back and await the call. Go! SMASH!

‘Da iawn,' says the crash-pad holder. This goes on for ten minutes. In all I manage a dozen or so crashes. If only I'd been this aggressive at rugby as a schoolboy, I think, as the head coach asks for two teams of six to line up against each other. One has the ball and, passing it up and down the line, has to try and break through the other team's defences. Suddenly the pretence is over. A dozen young Welsh men are clattering into one another for real.
Llawer o
contact. One of them is the giant Hywel. Physical
iawn
. I suddenly decide that my body might object if after twenty-eight years of no impact it is suddenly asked to take on this extra burden. I've done enough for now. I can congratulate myself. Project Wales has taken a vast step forward. I shower, wash, dry, dress and get into the car feeling thoroughly pleased. This is it, I think. I am one of the boys. Finally.

The next morning there is not a single muscle about my person that hasn't succumbed to paralysis. It is virtually impossible to get out of bed. Or sit. Or stand. Or walk. I move like a lobotomised Frankenstein's monster. My joints have locked. It's as if I've been caught in rockfall. The worst of it is not the arms and shoulders, back, coccyx, rump (which
really
aches), thighs, knees or ankles.
The real problem is in a more vital part of the body. My neck. Something feels badly wrenched in there. I suddenly realise why rugby players have necks the width of barrels, to go with all their other pumped-up musculature. It's chainmail.

My phone beeps. A text from Rhys the Voice.

He names a date for the codgers' match two days before my forty-sixth birthday. Only a couple of weekends hence. The vets play very infrequently. All things being equal, this is likely to be my main chance.

The next morning I can't move either. I wonder whether my body, which is after all my temple, is trying to tell me something. And even if it isn't, I know someone who is: an email arrives from my parents.

‘We think your intention to play rugger is not only foolhardy but downright stupid. Please reconsider.' Without waiting to be asked, Dr Rees has ventured an opinion. Trust him to say ‘rugger'. I can't move on the third day either. By the fifth I am in negotiation with myself. If I play only half the match, I halve the risk. If I trot on with twenty minutes to go, so much the better. Even with ten minutes I can at least say I've played rugby in Wales. But in the small dark hours fears start to assail me of getting ransacked in a seething maul and having my unarmoured leg snapped like a dead twig or being spear-tackled by a psychopathic wing who doesn't like the sound of my English accent. My visualisations are all about survival, not glory. But I must do it. Against medical advice. And against that of Elgan Rees. Who played for Wales. ‘Don't take the risk,' he said.

With five days to go, snowstorms are massing on the east coast of England and Scotland. The unseasonal weather races west and smothers all Wales. I text Rhys the Voice, ostensibly to ask for directions to tomorrow's game, in reality to seek confirmation that, while I was always willing, I won't actually have to put my body on
the line after all. A reply comes back by return.

‘Dim gem! Eira!' (
Eira
= snow.) Another cancellation. Is it just my body which doesn't think it's a good idea to play? Is a guardian angel trying to prevent my participation? If I really pushed it, if I really hustled, I could presumably get myself onto another team sheet. But I feel as if I've dodged a bullet with my name on it. There is no point in pretending. I cannot duck the unWelsh truth about myself: Dr Rees, I got a terrible problem with my backbone.

WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER
could eventually no longer drive, she gave me her car. It was beige. And somewhat of the old school, being a Simca saloon with plush red upholstery, a handbrake in the dash and a petrol cap behind the rear number plate. It felt like an Eastern European taxi.

No car in the history of motoring can have had two more contrasting owners. She was a slightly flappy driver, if memory serves, but ever so careful. I remember racing away from Carmarthen on a golden Sunday evening behind the wheel of my new motor at the age of twenty, feeling enriched by new possibilities.

While staying with friends in the Black Mountains, I had to collect a latecomer from Newport station. Two of us set out on an icy night. My passenger and I decided to kill time in conventional OCD style by compiling sports lists. We fixed on first-class Welsh rugby clubs. A mile into our journey we had already listed Llanelli, Cardiff, Swansea, Neath, Bridgend, Aberavon, Pontypool,
Pontypridd, Maesteg and South Wales Police when one of us – I forget which – proudly introduced the untoppable, championship-clinching decider.

‘Ebbw Vale.'

At which point, because I had not really been concentrating on the road, I veered round a left bend a little too vigorously, skidded on sheet ice, slammed through a thickish hedge and came to rest,
Italian Job
style, in precarious mid-air. I was forced to ring up my grandmother and explain what I had done to her car. She was all too forgiving.

So I associate Ebbw Vale with my inner halfwit. It's not a good association to take into Welsh Learner of the Year, being held this year in Ebbw Vale. Or Glyn Ebwy, as we say in Welsh. This is my moment. I'm competing as a Welshman against other Welshmen and Welshwomen.

It's not quite pissing down. Rain dribbles dismissively onto the windscreen, as if holding back the monsoon for later. I've come down from the northern end of the valley, along the ridge fringing the top of the old coalfield. I drive past formerly prosperous towns which once powered the British Empire, each at the head of its own valley: Aberdare, Merthyr Tydfil, Tredegar – they turn a hardened face to spitting skies. Coniferous forestation smothers the slopes hereabouts. Where it doesn't, the hills are scorched bald, purple heather scattered like alopecia.

I hear about Learner of the Year when nosing about the BBC Cymru website. Four people had got through to the previous final. There were pictures of them, all wearing smiles. You could click and find a paragraph in quotation marks, with a helpful translation underneath. They were all resident in Wales, I noted. And had learned Welsh for the usual reasons: needed it for work, or lived with a Welsh speaker. Somewhere inside me, envy fluttered its
mean little wings. I bet they didn't write those blurbs themselves. A fiver says they had help, that the syntax police swooped and sprayed it with Cymrifying anti-toxins. I wish one of those pictures were of me, grinning false-modestly in contemporary casuals, semaphoring to the world how marvellous I am at Welsh. Well, it could be, couldn't it? I could enter, couldn't I? I could do that. It's just a question of application.

The application form can be found on the National Eisteddfod website. Needless to say, this corner of cyberspace is in Welsh. Rather official Welsh, cluttered with pedantic grammatical formalities and long abstract nouns ending in -
aeth
.
Cystadleuaeth
= competition.
Gwybodaeth
= information. To be honest it's all kind of a bit Gree … Ooh look, you can click on that tab there and get the whole site in English. The devil on my shoulder urges me to click. No, says my Project Wales voice, that would be
very wrong
. Cliiiiick, whispers the first voice sulphurously. Reader, I click. Instantly, the entire site of the National Eisteddfod, the site which celebrates Wales and Welshness and the Welsh language, transmogrifies into the language of world domination. It's a jolly easy read. There's bags of digestible info about categories of competition, rules and regs of entry, deadlines, addresses. I am hoovering it up, like moreish polyunsaturates that corrode your stomach wall. After three web pages I start to feel uneasy, then queasy, then actually soiled. This is the language which once set out to smother Welsh into actual extinction. I must return to Welsh at once. If I don't, how can I claim to be learning? Click. We are back among pedantries and abstractions.