The Book of Fame (2 page)

George Smith mumbled into the mid-distance, ‘…her hips moving under her dresses …’

‘… a face containing a kind of forbidden language. Eyes blue, dark background, crooked teeth.’ We all looked Simon Mynott’s way; the balding sections of his head shone in the ceiling light. We were interested to pursue that theme. But Bob Deans brought us back on track with ‘…picking blackberries, a light mist on her chin and throat. shadows in her white cotton shirt … Her name was Natasha. It was her name I liked best, I think.’

‘… long black dresses, her white shirt sleeves rolled up, a riff of dark hair on the arms.’ Massa Johnston sat upright, his arms crossed in an air of matter-of-factness.

‘… just walking along, saying nothing, our elbows, arms touching …’ (Deans)

‘… chestnut hair … I can tell you it was genuine chestnut. More than that I won’t say.’ (Simon Mynott, again)

‘… ears tipped with cleverness …’ (Jimmy Duncan)

‘… her teeth a gorgeous rabble …’ (O’Sullivan)

‘… you saw her bare shoulder and you thought of a low and narrow doorway. I understand her grandparents are from Dalmatia.’ (Massa)

‘… left foot trailing over stern on the Wanganui River … and all along bellbirds calling to us.’ (Jimmy Hunter)

‘… the way she’d get out of the bath—collecting herself in her arms.’ (George Smith)

‘… and all of a sudden she’d say, “Pull in here, Jimmy.” ’ (Jimmy Hunter)

‘… nibbling of your lips like a sparrow …’ (O’Sullivan)

Then George Smith mentioned ‘her salmon-coloured lips’ and everyone fell quiet.

On the thirteenth day we saw the snow-clad hills of Tierra del Fuego. The snow melt, and the dark solid bits that held it together. Well, it was a thing of beauty. In our football kit we stood up to the ship rail and in a single glimpse we rediscovered our taste for land. Tyler jokingly threatened to swim ashore. Then Cunningham took control. Turning his back on Tierra del Fuego he clapped his hands and called for another scrum to be put down.

In calm seas we rounded the Horn. During the warmest part of the day, we placed our cheeks against the deck where the sun preserved itself in salt and paint.

Two days later, Massa Johnston and Frank Glasgow hauled the piano out on deck and sang ‘Rowsy Dowsy Girls’ to celebrate the re-emergence of the five women from our saloon.

As the weather got warmer, the piano thawed and began to leak. At night a seabird would walk across its keys, and George Nicholson lay in his bunk ticking off the notes—E flat, and that, I believe, is F sharp.

Now we saw flying fish cut across our bow. George Tyler grinned down at the gossipy pattern they left on the water. ‘Hallo you’, he’d say to a fish with butterfly fins.

Two days later, we found ourselves steaming across a fishing ground. We leant over the rail picking out fish and their small darting shadows. From the stern, Dave Gallaher and Jimmy Duncan threw out baited lines and brought in Cape Pigeons and Mollymawks to entertain the ladies.

One morning the land rose out of the sea. It looked startlingly near. We stared back at it trying to make up our minds about South America. The Otago boys were reminded of the coast around Timaru—a rough outline of life, cattle grazing over green slopes, clouds moving off the hilltops.

Montevideo. Our first experience of a foreign city. We went ashore, Carbine with his camera to photograph the monuments.

Cunningham bought an alligator egg, and Smith some primitive carvings.

Jimmy Duncan complained of the locals speaking Spanish and making no bloody attempt at English, and on top of that—which he found the worst aspect—they acted like they’d never heard of it.

Likewise Roberts who asked for a cup of tea.

‘You know—tea?’

But it was pointless.

That night, in the glow of an oil lamp, Stead began a letter home. ‘Imagine everybody in Invercargill using garlic and onions for every meal, and cobblestones sticking up at every kind of angle and hawkers hawking anything from brooms to livers, all exposed to air …’

That was Montevideo. None of us liked its foreignness and open sewer pits. But we were there to take on coal and passengers. We leant over the ship rail feeling possessive of our little ship.

A man ran up the gangway, his paintbrushes tipping out the open end of a canvas bag.

Some Indians wrapped in old blankets and with the faces of ghosts waded up the gangway like it was a mountain path; a Frenchman in a white suit and white boater with a snakeskin hat band oversaw the loading of a number of cages containing native parrots bound for a circus entrepreneur in Europe.

These passengers and cargo were followed by Bob Deans. We cheered him aboard. Bob had been out to buy a dozen hard young pumpkins for the backs to hone their passing skills.

Off the coast of Uruguay, Jimmy Duncan called for a practice. We set up a drive; performed some dribbling and passing skills.

The next morning we lined up to face Brazil and practise our haka. Among the onlookers, a group of Uruguayan women in white pinafores and parasols.

The nights were now warm and clear and we met on the upper deck to debate football matters. The angle of the scrum. The formation of the backs. Billy Stead and Fred Roberts arranged the pumpkins on the deck and we stood over them with our pipes, debating possible lines of attack. Billy convinced us to embrace the idea that everything we did on the field must have as its end design ‘the creation of space’. Time and again we rearranged the pumpkins and determined to find new ways through. The ways were seemingly endless.

Mister Dixon distanced himself from these discussions. He sat in a deck-chair compiling thoughts and observations to write down in his diary.

‘Warmer weather as we go north. Chief Engineer took some snapshots of Heaven. Cunningham’s knowledge of scrumwork proving invaluable.

Aug 23. Most of us are stripped down to our football togs all day.

Aug 29. Hottest day yet. Not a breath of wind and the sea is gluey. Passed a shoal of porpoises …

Crossed the Equator this morning and immediately changed course out to the Atlantic …’

That evening we gathered up the pumpkins to make space to dance. Mister Dixon handed out dance cards. In addition to the piano, we had a violin and piccolo orchestra. There were only six ladies to go round, plus Cunningham in fancy dress; the rest of us danced with dummies. On the stroke of midnight Jimmy Duncan gave each of us a gentle shoulder-tap reminder that we had training in the morning, and one by one we sloped back to our bunks to swap notes.

MONA THOMPSON’S DANCE CARD

‘September 1. In hot humid conditions we held the finals of the sports events—

Harper and Hunter, a dead heat in the potato race

Glasgow, the pillow fight

Booth, the sack race

Thompson, the obstacle course

Mynott, quoits

Hunter, arm wrestling

Gallaher, “chalking the deck” ’

Tenerife. Blessed land. In Santa Cruz we took a ball ashore. Freddy Roberts persuaded a number of Arab fig vendors to form a line and
oppose us in lineout drill. Cunningham jumped well, secured good ball.

Jimmy Duncan got everyone to pull on a face plate and swim out to the reef to watch the shoal behaviour of fish.

We filled ourselves with fruit, then it was back out to the Atlantic.

For a fancy costume ball hosted by the passengers of the First Saloon, Nicholson dressed as a tramp, Newton as a ‘disreputable working woman’, Tyler as a ‘nigger minstrel’, Cunningham as Chief Steward, Harper a gaucho, Thompson as the strongman, Eugene Sandow; Glasgow showed up as a tattooed warrior, Mackrell and Roberts as clowns. Nicholson’s costume won him first prize.

‘September 4. Weather cooler. Everyone training vigorously except

O’Sullivan, down with sunstroke.

Counting the days now.

September 5. Passed Cape Finisterre.’

Close to forty days we’d been at sea. We developed a morbid shipboard stare, hanging off the rails, gazing down as though into our very graves.

We had forgotten the point of newspapers. We stopped talking as if none of that mattered either. Players withdrew, the big men to a ledge deep inside themselves. Nicholson, ‘the song bird’, fell quiet.

At our lowest ebb England answered. She sent out signals that she was
near. The seas thickened with fishing boats and marker buoys. Late in the day, a large cruiser steamed by in the opposite direction to ourselves. We ran to that side of the ship and waved but no one waved back. Casey said he saw a woman with a cocktail drink in a gloved hand.

That last night at sea we sat up late writing postcards of Arabs and pyramids we’d bought in Tenerife ready to send home the moment we stepped ashore.

Before dawn the boys were up on deck, leaning against the rails, smoking their pipes. In the darkness we bumped into one another—

‘Gidday farmer’

‘That you, Bunny?’

‘No, it’s your mother …’

‘Jimmy, what are you doing up?’

We were embarrassed to be found so wanting.

Crouched by an oil lamp Eric Harper concluded his letter: ‘The English shores are in sight and the excitement is too great to continue …’

In the dark, England came to us in a series of noises—

Foghorns. Ships’ whistles. Hissing.

We strained to make her out. None of us spoke. Each of us entertained a private notion of what England should be like.

‘There she is …’ Mister Dixon it was.

Anyway we all looked. And there she was!

England. A crane poking through the fog. Now the rest of England passed through the hole in the fog—rooftops, beyond them the dark shadows of hills. Within those shadows, outlines of cottages, roofs. The view began to jam and our eyes raced from one piece of the jigsaw to the next.

We tried to locate something of what our parents had said, or a vista passed down by our grandparents.

One or two of the players argued with the view. ‘No, that’s not right.’ The woman from the cake shop in Cuba Street had told Billy Wallace to expect English roses. For forty days at sea he had been preparing himself for a botanic experience.

England was a muddled picture to start with. We found ourselves trying to disassemble what we saw from what we knew or had heard or read of a storybook past—the sound of horses, their shocking emergence out of the mist, famous wars, heaths and witches’ brew.

A coal hulk came into view and immediately a homely knowledge descended over Corbett.

Jimmy Duncan needlessly reminded Tyler, ‘That’s England, son.’ and Tyler looked for the tower he had only seen illustrated in
Dick Whittington and his Cat
.

A seagull’s cry reminded Cunningham of all the lonely coasts he’s known, the place of dreams.

In the emerging light Dave Gallaher looked back for the Plymouth headland, that shaven bit that meets the sea that we passed in the dark. It could be North Head at the entrance to the Manukau.

Johnston’s expression is one of disapproval. He’s just seen three men struggling with a box and calculates that it should only take two men to carry it. The third one, he figures, is bluffing.

Smith, the former jockey, glances up. The sky comes and goes. He looks down at the grey sea and feels a shooting sensation in his heart.

Mister Dixon is all smiles as he mentally composes a letter to his ‘Dear Emma …’

Alec McDonald, at someone’s insistence, scrutinises a brick building and winces as someone else insists: ‘No, but really, it’s different from ours …’

There is a sound of wood on wood as the tender brushes alongside the SS
Rimutaka
. At that moment Bunny Abbott hears doors creaking in the bush—he blinks—and seeing it’s England, colour enters his cheeks. A hunter’s excitement catches in his throat. He swears quietly to himself.

‘Aha! There!’ Deans points to the first spire.

Glasgow is first to smell England’s old, official air—something like leakage from a five-pound note.

Freddy Roberts juggles the ball in his hands. He can’t wait to get on land.

Mackrell holds back a hacking cough behind a closed hand in case the English might hear and get the wrong impression.

The artist from Uruguay points out to Mona Thompson a different palette. He can identify some of the colours, but not all. ‘That, for example,’ he says of the grey light.

The O in O’Sullivan’s mouth is pronounced—he has the muddled idea that he’s been here before.

Jimmy Hunter stares into the fog, thinking how mid-morning around Wanganui on an autumn’s day, the hills are suddenly dreamt into existence.

Seeling switches his weight from foot to foot, nodding blindly whenever something of interest is pointed out.

The slightly wounded look developed at sea shows no sign of leaving Steve Casey. A whole itinerary of places are lodged in his face—beginning with lonely icebergs, the unknown wilds of Patagonia, festering Montevideo and palmy Tenerife.

Elsewhere on deck, as more passengers emerge, there is the silent mutter of folk arriving inside a library or museum. You hear each one say, ‘Oh look, England.’

The smiles shift from Mister Dixon’s face. A sudden surge of managerial responsibility sees him button his collar. Who knows what is awaiting them down on the wharf? He wonders whether he should blow his nose now or save it for later. He sniffs.