THE GRUDGE

Published by Yellow Jersey Press 2010
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Tom English, 2010

Tom English has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

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First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Yellow Jersey Press

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CONTENTS

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

CAST OF CHARACTERS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PROLOGUE THE FINAL BEASTING

CHAPTER 1 THERE WAS NONE OF THIS HATE BEFORE

CHAPTER 2 PRIVILEGE. I’VE HATED IT SINCE I WAS A LAD

CHAPTER 3 STEEL IN HIS EYE, I’D PICK IT OUT WITH TWEEZERS

CHAPTER 4 CAN YOU IMAGINE? DYING IN SCOTLAND!

CHAPTER 5 I HAD TO PUT UP THE MASK

CHAPTER 6 IT TAKES A STRONG MAN TO DEFEND THE BORDER

CHAPTER 7 OHHH, YOU MEAN THE TESTING GROUND?

CHAPTER 8 AN ENGLISHMAN IS NOT ALLOWED TO SAY THOSE THINGS

CHAPTER 9 IT’S GOT FOUR HEADS

CHAPTER 10 IT’S THE JOCKS I’M WORRIED ABOUT

CHAPTER 11 JIM TELFER, I COULD HAVE WHACKED HIM

CHAPTER 12 IT’S NOT NASA, IT’S A FOUR-NUMBER CODE

CHAPTER 13 SOMETIMES THINGS GO DIZZY FOR A WHILE

CHAPTER 14 IGNORE HIM. HE IS NOT THERE

CHAPTER 15 IT WAS CRUEL WHAT WE DID TO THEM

CHAPTER 16 IF THEY ASK, ENGLAND ARE AWESOME

CHAPTER 17 SHE’S FROM ANOTHER PLANET

CHAPTER 18 ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE MORE

CHAPTER 19 HATRED IS NOT THE WRONG WORD

CHAPTER 20 SKULDUGGERY AND THE SLAM

CHAPTER 21 ENGLAND’S RETREAT – AND THE AFTERLIFE

CHAPTER 22 THE IMMORTALS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY AND OTHER SOURCES

APPENDIX

PLATES

INDEX

 

 

For Lynn, Eilidh and Tom Jnr

 

CAST OF CHARACTERS

 

 

Featuring . . .

FROM SCOTLAND

Jim Telfer, aka Creamy – forwards coach, all-round ball-breaker

Ian McGeechan, aka Geech – head coach, deep thinker

Gavin Hastings – full-back, class act

Tony Stanger – rookie right wing

Scott Hastings – outside centre, the emotional one of the family

Sean Lineen – inside centre from Auckland, grandfather from Stornoway

Iwan Tukalo – veteran left wing from Italian and Ukrainian stock

Craig Chalmers – fly-half, not lacking in confidence

Gary Armstrong – scrum-half, teak-tough

David Sole – loosehead prop, captain, strong and silent type

Kenny Milne – hooker, powerful and out to prove himself

Paul Burnell – tighthead prop, honest journeyman

Chris Gray – second row, based in Nottingham

Damian Cronin, aka Del Boy – lock forward based in Bath, ducker and diver in the antiques game, character

John Jeffrey, aka JJ – back-row forward, canny operator, wind-up merchant

Finlay Calder – openside flanker, intense, streetwise

Derek White – laid-back No. 8, primary target of Telfer’s thunder

FROM ENGLAND

Simon Hodgkinson – full-back, dead-eye goal-kicker

Simon Halliday – winger, an operator in the City of London

Will Carling – centre, captain, not as cocksure as he lets on

Jerry Guscott – centre, graceful, emerging genius

Rory Underwood – winger, record-breaking try-scorer, flying machine

Rob Andrew – fly-half, statesman

Richard Hill – scrum-half, firebrand

Paul Rendall, aka The Judge – veteran prop

Brian Moore, aka Mooro – hooker, pack leader, as thorny as they come

Jeff Probyn – prop, driven man

Paul Ackford – formidable lock forward, police inspector

Wade Dooley – giant lock forward, the enforcer of the team

Mick Skinner, aka Skins – blindside flanker, most extrovert player in England

Peter Winterbottom – openside flanker, the voice of reason

Mike Teague, aka Iron Mike – No. 8, hard nut

Geoff Cooke – manager, architect of England’s boom-time

Roger Uttley – coach, dog of war from his old playing days

AND . . .

Margaret Thatcher, aka That Bloody Woman – Prime Minister, scourge of the Scots

 

ILLUSTRATIONS

 

 

1 The teams: Scotland and England teams before the match on 17 March 1990 (both courtesy of Colorsport)

2 The characters: Scotland: John Jeffrey in action on 17 March 1990 (courtesy of Colorsport), David Sole in 1987 (courtesy of PA Photos), Jim Telfer in 1994 (courtesy of the Scotsman) and Ian McGeechan in 1990 (courtesy of Getty Images)

3 The characters: England: a publicity shot of Will Carling in January 1990, Brian Moore in the game against Wales, 17 February 1990 (courtesy of Getty Images), Wade Dooley arriving in Edinburgh the day before the match (courtesy of the Scotsman)

4 Margaret Thatcher as depicted by Spitting Image (courtesy of PA Photos); a poll tax demonstration on the streets of Edinburgh in April 1989 (courtesy of the Scotsman)

5 England vs. Wales, 17 February 1990 at Twickenham (courtesy of Getty Images); tickets sold out in Edinburgh, a month before the final (courtesy of the Scotsman); the Scottish team training on 16 March 1990, the day before the big match (courtesy of PA Photos)

6 The match: David Sole leading his team onto the pitch, the infamous ‘slow walk’; England’s Jeremy Guscott in a tussle with Tony Stanger and John Jeffrey of Scotland (both courtesy of Getty Images)

7 The match: referee David Bishop awards Tony Stanger’s try (courtesy of PA Photos); Damian Cronin of Scotland and Wade Dooley of England both jump for the ball (courtesy of Getty Images)

8 The celebration: the jubilant Scottish team in their dressing room (courtesy of PA Photos); Scotland on Sunday headline the following day (courtesy of Scotland on Sunday)

PROLOGUE

THE FINAL BEASTING

They saw his shadow from across the field, this giant figure coming towards them, his booming voice travelling out of the night and into the pits of their stomachs. That voice they’d heard year after year, belittling them and hypnotising them all at once.

The eight men of the Scottish pack against the lone figure of their coach, Jim Telfer. And, somehow, as Telfer approached, the eight felt outnumbered. There was a reason for that, of course. Bitter experience. They all had previous with him. Every last one of them. They’d all known what it was like to be his target, what it was like to be humiliated, what it was like to have him standing an inch from their noses, spraying them with spit as he told them what a bunch of inadequates they really were. Old school, that was Telfer.

They knew it was coming, this beasting session. With three days to go before Scotland played England for the Calcutta Cup, the Triple Crown, the Five Nations championship and the Grand Slam all rolled into one momentous package, Telfer greeted them with five seconds of familiarity followed by the promise of two hours of terrible punishment. Intensity in training, that was his thing. Nobody did it better.

‘We’re doing fifty scrums,’ he stated, ‘and if they’re not right, we’re doing another fifty and then another fifty. We don’t leave until everything is perfect because, boys, this Saturday you have the chance to write your names in history and I won’t let you fuck it up by being soft.’

The silhouettes of ten men appeared in the distance, the ten toughest characters that Telfer could lay his hands on. Battle-hardened props, big old locks and back-row forwards not quite good enough to make his final selection but bitter enough to give the chosen ones a test.

Telfer looked at the eight and pointed to the ten. ‘This is England you’re up against now,’ he said. ‘That’s Brian Moore. That’s Wade Dooley. That’s Mick Skinner out the back. Are they out tonight in this weather? Are they putting themselves through this? Do they want it as much as you? All this work, all this pain, all this abuse. And for what? To lose in front of your own people? To be robbed of the greatest day of your lives by a mob that think fuck-all of you? Is that the way you want this thing to end?’

And so the beasting began.

He demanded many things that night. He demanded concentrated scrummaging, he demanded controlled explosions in the rucks, he demanded precision in the line-outs and, if it wasn’t done to his satisfaction, they’d start all over. Scrums upon scrums, rucks upon rucks, twenty-second breathers and go again. Some nights there was no silencing the boys, no amount of physical exertion that would button John Jeffrey’s lip. But this was different. Tonight, even JJ, the most talkative man in Scotland, was too tired to jabber.

‘Derek White, where are you?’

‘Here, Jim.’

‘Right, boys. Derek is going to take this ball up and when he hits the ground I want you to ruck him out of it. He’s an Englishman, okay?’

More than anything in the world Derek White wanted to point out at this juncture that he wasn’t an Englishman, that he’d been a Scotland international longer than any of them, that nobody could mistake him for Skinner or any of his formidable cronies, no way, no how. But White didn’t say anything. In his dreams, yes, he was a militant, a revolutionary storming the gates of his oppressor. But in reality he kept his trap shut because that was what Telfer’s forwards were programmed to do, because he knew what would happen if he said something, and it really wasn’t worth it.

‘He’s lying over your ball,’ said Telfer. ‘He’s killing it. Are you going to let him at it or are you going to give him a dose of reality?’

The seven Scottish forwards formed an orderly queue and took turns to ruck their teammate off the ball, knowing that if they skimped Telfer would notice and then they’d be next, down there in the dirt with a hundred stones of driven men raking over the top of them. ‘Sorry, Whitey,’ said one as the studs came up. ‘You know how it is,’ said another as his boot came down. ‘I don’t want to do it, Derek,’ said a third, ‘but what Telfer wants, Telfer gets, so you’re getting shoe, my son, and plenty of it.’

On they went, Telfer reminding them all the while what was at stake on Saturday, how good the English pack were, how many Lions they had. Brian Moore. Wade Dooley. Paul Ackford. Peter Winterbottom. Iron Man Mike Teague, the star of the Lions series in Australia the year before. England had buried everybody so far. They’d battered Ireland 23–0. They’d gone to Paris and put up a record score. They’d doled out such a hiding to the Welsh forwards that the coach walked out, mortified at what had become of his team. The newspaper headlines were paeans to Scotland’s opponents. ‘Ruthless England turn on the style’; ‘Wonderful England’s finest hour’; ‘Power and glory for irresistible England’.

Telfer sat his pack in a circle after training and began talking. This was his first big address of the week and he’d prepared the words meticulously. Some thought his speeches were off the cuff but they weren’t. He rehearsed them, as if acting. In many ways, he was an actor. For hours he’d worked on intonation, planning when to raise his voice and when to lower it, planning when to use silence and for how long.

None of his players sat close to him. The spray put them off. The spray and the fear of catching his eye and drawing the heat as a result. They lowered their heads and hoped that for once in his life he’d go easy, for once in his life he’d just throttle back on the invective, but they knew the odds of that. About as likely as a tortoise winning the Derby. Jim Telfer was a creature of habit. He did scrums and line-outs and rucks. He didn’t do soft-soaps. He said he wasn’t doing this job to be popular and, to the players, that was always a bad sign. That sounded like a Gettysburg Address of viciousness was on its way. They knew the triggers off by heart by now.

He wasn’t doing it to be liked or respected, he continued. He didn’t give a fuck either way quite frankly. He had his family at home in the Borders and his coterie of friends and that was good enough for him. Didn’t need any more. He knew he was cruel and he knew he was brutal but he wasn’t asking them to do anything that he hadn’t done before them. He’d played for Scotland and played for the Lions. He’d put his body in the path of some bad men from his first days in the Melrose senior team at the age of seventeen and had had it kicked for twenty years. He knew their pain only too well. He had never been a great player, but he was honest and he worked hard and the one principle he lived by was that, however hard his opponent trained, he would train harder, however much the other guy wanted it, he wanted it more.

He coached out of a fear of failure and that feeling was never stronger than it was right now. All through his time in rugby he thought about the worst thing that could happen and then he worked like a dog to make sure it didn’t. That was his philosophy. He thought about the worst thing that could happen at Murrayfield in three days’ time and this session tonight was the result. His players nodded their understanding.

He liked what he saw: the aggression, the focus, the accuracy. Not that he admitted it, but he couldn’t have asked for more. He’d driven them as hard as could be and yet they soaked it up without complaint.

His team rose to leave. Sore and exhausted, they filed out of the room in silence, save for the odd jaded groan. Telfer watched them go. Concealing his admiration behind a wall of stone, he waited for the last to disappear. ‘Jesus, boys,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t you know I wouldn’t abuse you if I didn’t think you were worth it?’

CHAPTER 1

THERE WAS NONE OF THIS HATE BEFORE

17 MARCH 1990

Will Carling, strong and handsome and just twenty-four years old, looked in his bedroom mirror and wondered where the hell he was going to find the right words. How would he address his team just before they left for Murrayfield? What wisdom could a greenhorn like him impart to a pack of forwards that was so hardbitten and cynical?

What could he say to Paul Rendall and Jeff Probyn, survivors of thousands of scrums in hundreds of grounds across their combined sixty-nine years? How could he look Brian Moore in the eye knowing that his rage for victory was so great? How could he understand Peter Winterbottom’s motivation, a man who, two years earlier at Murrayfield, after just five minutes of play, was stretchered from the field in near unbearable agony with two ribs sticking out of the side of his chest?

What could he tell Wade Dooley that he didn’t already know?

When Carling was fifteen years old and tucked up in private school, Dooley, a policeman, was battling through the night in the front line of the Toxteth riots with a bacon butty stuffed down his pants to keep his gonads warm and a floppy shield in his hand that melted when a rioter’s flame flew too close. When Dooley retold the tale of the petrol bombs, the smoke and the destruction, the cars overturned, the shops looted and the smell of a city on fire, and finished with an observation that, typical Scouse, the only things they didn’t set alight were the pubs, what was Carling to do? Regale the boys with the day he got detention?

Then there was Mike Teague. Christ almighty, Teague alone was a freak of nature. Carling talked to him about his training regime once and almost passed out with fatigue when told of the things he did to stay in the England team. He did bodybuilding in an abandoned church in the Coney Hill district of his native Gloucester. Salubrious it was not. ‘Frankly, it’s a shithole,’ he told Carling, ‘but the company’s good.’

‘Who’d you train with, Teaguey?’ Carling asked and within seconds he wished he hadn’t bothered.

‘Well, there’s a coloured lad called Paddy Robinson. He’s a bouncer, a right gym monkey. Then there’s big Derek Bottomley, a God-fearing type. Legs and backs one day, shoulders and arms the next day and then repeat it over and over. Every morning, ten a.m. Been doing it for seven year now. But that’s just the weights. Then there’s the Mad Dogs?’

‘The what?’

‘Yeah, a group of us go running in the Forest of Dean. Pretty extreme stuff. We cut down trees and put the logs up on our shoulders and yomp up the hills.’

‘Jesus!’ replied Carling.

‘An hour and a half one way, an hour and a half back the same way and then into the club for night-time training, two or three hours of that, couple of hundred sit-ups to finish, a few pints of Severn Cider and home.’

Carling knew that Teague wasn’t bullshitting. He’d seen the evidence of his robustness too many times to doubt him. Teague had been named player of the series on the Lions tour of Australia nine months earlier, despite tearing his shoulder tendon off the bone just two weeks before the first Test. He wasn’t called Iron Mike for nothing.

So what was Carling going to say on this morning of mornings? Don’t give an inch, Teaguey! No backward step, Winters! Take no nonsense, Wade! May as well give the Vatican a ring and remind the Pope to say his prayers at bedtime while he’s at it.

Why had the selectors picked him to lead these men? That’s what Carling was thinking about. Why was he even playing for England? How the hell had he made it this far?

That guy you saw? That Carling swagger? It was a front, much of it. An act. A big deception. For the cameras he could put on a show of superiority that looked natural and believable, only it was paper-thin. He could convince the Scots into thinking he was in control, but he had the devil’s own job convincing himself.

All he wanted to do was go to a clock and wind the hands forward to kick-off time. He’d be okay then. Come the first whistle, he’d be fine. But it was early still, way too early.

‘I had to come across as this mega-confident character, this supremely together person,’ he said. ‘And yet I’d sit in my room and crap myself. I’d get on the bus and crap myself again. I’d sit in the dressing room, changed and ready, and I’d crap myself once more. These doubts would go whirring through my mind. Am I any good? Do I deserve my place? Do the lads believe in me as captain? What are they saying when I’m not there? Honestly, the insecurities!’

There were days when he wanted to go to his heroes for affirmation. Days like this. But he couldn’t. He loved Winterbottom and he loved Teague. Unbreakable, the pair of them. Winters and Teaguey were his heroes. He would have killed to have known what they really thought of him.

‘In our world, it would have been pathetic to ask. Feeble and sad. If I said, “Teaguey, did you think I was any good today?” he’d have looked at me suspiciously and said, “What the fuck is the matter with you?” I once told Winters that I thought he was brilliant and he said, “Pull yourself together, Carling” and walked off. You didn’t bare your soul in that dressing room. You just didn’t do it.’

What he did was pretend. He was captain. He needed to get a grip. He looked in the mirror that Saturday morning and gave himself a slap. ‘Stop fucking about! Stop it! You’re a great player, you’re a great captain, you will dominate. Now get your shit together.’

He had time to kill. A couple of hours before the off, a little window before the England team coach pulled up at the front door of the Peebles Hydro Hotel in the Borders and took them to Murrayfield.

What to do, what to do? Chill with the lads, maybe? Nah, no interest, not after he poked his head around the door of the team room and was hit hard between the eyes by Mick Skinner’s theatrical performance. ‘I’m telling you, girls, this is in the bag,’ Skinner was saying. ‘IN THE BAG! No way the Sweaties live with us today. Am I right, Mooro?’

‘Shut up, Skins,’ said Brian Moore.

‘I’m guessing fifteen points, maybe twenty,’ Skinner continued.

‘Shut up, I’m telling you,’ Moore demanded.

‘Maybe I’ll score a try . . .’

If looks could kill Moore’s glare would have mowed Skinner down on the spot. ‘You know what, Skins? You’ve an incredible ability to walk into a room, take it over completely and bore the shit out of everybody in it.’

‘Too kind, Mr Moore. Too kind,’ said Skinner, with a bow.

No, Carling could do without that kind of aggravation. His second thought was for the newspapers.

He’d been reading them all week. Had ploughed through as much battle imagery as he could handle. The coverage had got so out of kilter with reality that he wondered if he should bother wearing his England strip at Murrayfield at all. Maybe a suit of armour would be more appropriate. And a claymore. All the references to bloodbaths past were tiresome. The bastardisation of the bards, from Robert Burns to William McGonagall, was rampant in the press, as if a day as incendiary as this needed any more dynamite attached.

Then the Scots charged them with sword in hand,
And made them fly from off their land;
And King Will was amazed at the sight,
And he got wounded in the fight;

And he cried, Oh, heaven! England’s lost, and I’m undone,
Alas! Alas! Where shall I run?
Then he turned his horse, and rode on afar,
And never halted till he reached Dunbar.

He had seen tabloid images of his head stuck on the body of King Edward II, the hapless monarch trounced at the Battle of Bannockburn, or Butcher Cumberland, the Duke who led the massacre of the Scots at Culloden, or some other psychotic sword-wielding English aristocrat who laid waste to half of Scotland centuries before.

The Scottish air was thick with this stuff. He’d already had an exchange with a reporter, sitting up front in one of his press conferences during the week. Carling could tell by the look of this guy that he hated the ground the English walked on, particularly the patch of ground that happened to be under the English captain’s feet.

‘You know the whole of Scotland detests you, Will,’ the scribbler said. ‘How do you feel about that?’

‘No problem with it’ was Carling’s terse reply.

‘No problem! Really?’ asked the journalist.

‘Yeah, it’s okay. Honest. I hate the Scots every bit as much as they hate me. It’s mutual loathing.’

‘Woah, woah, woah,’ went the reporter.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Carling.

‘You cannae say that.’

‘Oh, right. Why’s that then? It was okay for us to come here in the past when we were crap, get our arses kicked and go home again. You were lovely to us then. Soon as we’re a threat you’re hitting us with anti-English hate. Tell me why that is? ‘

‘Och, years of oppression.’

‘Well, I haven’t been oppressing you, have I? Yeah, I’m English but, surprisingly, I wasn’t around in 17-fucking-whenever. I wasn’t exactly leading the charge at Culloden, was I? I’m only twenty-four. Are you not educated or what?’

Carling willed the guy to quote him word for word. ‘Put it all in, you prick’ was what he wanted to say at the end. ‘Stick that in your poxy paper and see how people like it.’ But none of it appeared. He checked every line.

He knew what was going on around him. The political backdrop. Margaret Thatcher’s second son, that’s what the Scottish press did to him. That was the image that resonated with readers. Young and flash and full of money, he was Tory Boy. He was public school, he came from army stock, he was a City type, a capitalist, believed in the greed is good mantra, worshipped at the altar of That Bloody Woman! Like peas in a pod they were.

If only they could see inside his head.

‘Bullshit assumptions,’ said Carling but nobody was listening. The Scots had their own version of what he was about and they had no intention of changing their minds.

Thatcher had been up a week before. She’d gone on television to trumpet her pride at being the ‘prime minister of Scotland’. But Scotland hadn’t voted for her. At the general election three years earlier, Thatcher’s Scottish MPs were gunned down at the ballot box. When the smoke cleared there were just ten of them left standing, their lowest number since 1910. Labour had fifty. Five times the seats but zero power.

The prime minister thought the reason the Tories were losing the battle north of the border was because people hadn’t yet grasped Thatcherism as a concept. Didn’t understand it. Weren’t alive to its possibilities. As was written by her critics: ‘The Scots are told that their votes are lying; that they secretly love what they constantly vote against.’ And then she hit them with the poll tax and hit them with it first, on 1 April 1989, a year before it came to England. The Scottish newspapers blasted her for using their country as a testing ground. She tried to explain, tried to claim that this was myth being sold as fact, tried to get her message across that she was pro-Scotland, but nothing she said came out right.

In 1988 there had been none of this hate. Oh sure, there was a nationalistic fervour on the streets and in the stadium at Murrayfield, but it wasn’t nasty, not like this. There was slagging then and plenty of it, but there was fun and there was even a bit of warmth.

Most of all there was drink: drink in the dressing room after the match, drink on the bus back to the hotel, drink in the lobby, drink in the elevator going up to the room and coming back down again, drink at the dinner, drink on the street after the dinner, drink with fans from both nations.

Carling was no Sir Robin Day but he knew politics was involved in the shift in atmosphere. It was an ill wind that was blowing for the Tories. And that’s the chill he felt. It was comical in a way because he had no connection with the Conservatives. He’d never voted for them. He’d never voted for anybody. The idea of him going into a polling station and giving his endorsement to one side or another was anathema to him. But there he was, a convenient target. Very English, very arrogant. Thatcher’s captain.

In his relationships with the Scots, Brian Moore had something in common with Samuel Johnson. ‘The noblest prospect which a Scotchmen ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!’ wrote the doctor, and Mooro was not of a mind to disagree. ‘Knowledge was divided among the Scots, like bread in a besieged town, to every man a mouthful, to no man a bellyful.’ Mooro would have endorsed that one, too.

He had first clashed with the Scots in April 1987. First cap, first scrum, the formidable Colin Deans staring him down, Twickenham the venue. England’s put-in. Mooro hooks the ball perfectly only it bounces off Jon Hall’s knee and shoots back out on the Scotland side. A freak ricochet. Deans, the old dog, flashes Mooro a sardonic smile. ‘You’ve a lot to learn, laddie.’ Mooro’s response was not that of a man in awe of his famous rival: ‘We’ll see, you Scottish twat.’ He was in awe of nobody, that was his great strength. He was smaller than most hookers, that was a plus too. It shouldn’t have been, but he made it work for him. His lack of bulk made him more determined, more obsessed. He looked for slights against his ability and made hay. The faces of the men who suggested he was too small he had in his mind’s eye, the words of opponents who’d dissed him he had on the tip of his tongue.

‘The Scots don’t need much excuse to hate us, do they?’ said Mooro. ‘Despite the fact that we’ve paid them a disproportionate amount of money under the Barnett Formula since 19-fucking-whenever.’

His teammates looked at each other. ‘What’s the Barnett Formula?’

That was another thing about him. He was alive to the world around him. ‘I’m like this, you see,’ he said, talking to nobody and yet everybody. ‘I’ve studied Scottish history. I tell the Scots when I meet them, “You know Robert the Bruce was French, don’t you?”

‘They say, “What do you mean he was French?”

‘He’s French. Your great hero. A Frenchman.’

‘No, he wasnae.’

‘Yes he fucking was. He was as much French as he was Scottish. And here’s another one for you. The famous Act of Union, when Scotland gave up its independence in 17-whenever. Bought and sold for English gold and all that bollocks. I say to them, “Bet you think that the English made you sign that, don’t you?” And they go, “Aye”. And I say, “No, what happened was you were bankrupt because you tried to colonise some place in Central America and you fucked it up. You lost so much money you were broke. And then we gave you a bribe to sign.”

‘Aye, you bribed us!’

‘Yeah, but you bloody well took it!’

‘No we didnae. It was the aristocracy.’

‘Well, somebody signed it, didn’t they?’

Mooro had worked up a head of steam now.

‘I won’t have it. They say they never colonised anybody. Well, how is it that when you go around the world, when you fetch up in Tonga or Samoa or Fiji the first person you meet off the plane is called McGregor. It was the British Empire not the English Empire. Their lot colonised as much as we did. There’s Scots all over the planet and they all wanted to get out because it’s so fucking miserable there.’ Mooro was a walking exclamation mark. He was political in a way that Carling could never be. He understood the psyche of the Scottish people better than any of the English players, and, on the subject of Thatcher, he sympathised with them greatly.

He thought the poll tax was appalling. He thought introducing it into Scotland first was grotesquely unfair. If he had been Scottish, quite honestly, he’d probably be carrying a chip on his shoulder about the English, a chip as large as any of the tartan masses heading for Murrayfield. He wouldn’t have been able to help himself. That’s the way he was. Always railing against something. Always. As targets for Scottish bile, Mooro and Carling were locked together in the bullseye. That’s just the way it was.

A little after midday, Carling put on his captain’s face and spoke to the troops, reminded them of the devastation they’d caused in the championship already, went through the record books they’d shredded, the landmarks they’d set in their three runaway victories. He’d rehearsed every line and he sold it well for a man who wasn’t sure if he belonged there.

Then he picked up his bag and told them that the bus was waiting to take them to Murrayfield. Time to go. And Mooro was first out of the door.

CHAPTER 2

PRIVILEGE. I’VE HATED IT SINCE I WAS A LAD

As fate would have it, Jim Telfer’s birthday fell on Grand Slam Saturday. He was fifty. They gave him a cake – in the shape of a tackle bag. JJ suggested Derek White present it and, game for a laugh, Derek White obliged. They flicked the lights and out he came, his face illuminated by the glow of the candles, his cheery voice leading the celebration of the man who so often tormented him. Ah, the comedic irony. Telfer saw the humour in it right away. He smiled and he laughed and then, when the fuss died down, he went quiet. ‘Fifty years,’ he said, softly. ‘Fifty years.’

On the night he was born, grey and misty, an RAF torpedo bomber with a nickname of ‘The Flying Suitcase’ got into trouble southeast of Yetholm in the Scottish Borders and crashed to earth at Windy Gyle in the Cheviot Hills, killing all four servicemen on board, the youngest a nineteen-year-old pilot, the oldest a twenty-six-year-old air gunner.

The explosion happened in Willie Telfer’s field, or at least in one of the fields he tended for the Duke of Roxburghe. Telfer, a shepherd all his days, was the first on the scene, the first to see sections of fuselage spread wide across the countryside, the first to raise the alarm.

Years later, when his son was old enough to understand, he would tell him about it. ‘You came into the world with a bang, Jim,’ he’d say. Well, that just set young Telfer’s mind racing. Next chance he got, he nipped out of the cottage, hopped on a bus and then walked to the scene of the tragedy to look for fragments of plane to take home as souvenirs. It was the first recorded example of Jim Telfer’s obsession with the breakdown.

He can tell you now that he was in his late teens when he joined the dots of his childhood and became bitter, but even as a boy of eight and ten and twelve years old he knew there was something wrong with the world. He wouldn’t say he became a socialist that early in life, but looking back he can see clearly the seeds being sown.

His father, a quiet and determined man, left school when he was fourteen. Didn’t matter if Willie Telfer was bright or not. His path was clear. He was going into service for the Duke.

Peggy, Jim’s mother, a gentle and bright woman, was a servant in the big house. She, too, had finished school at fourteen, despite showing promise. The pair of them were brought up by parents who were subservient to the landed gentry. ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir’. That was how it was done. It was the way of things.

The way of things grated on Telfer from as early as he can remember. The Duke this and the Duke that, the doffing of the cap and the knowing their place – it wasn’t for him. Whenever the landlord paid a visit they were expected to line up to greet him. Telfer could never understand why. ‘I’d think, “What’s he done that’s so great?” I’d wonder, “Why is he being treated like he was special?” I just didn’t get it.’

As a young man he got confused when a group of other children suddenly appeared in the fields one Christmas, stayed a while and then disappeared again for months on end. It took him time to work out that these were the landlord’s kids, who had parachuted in from boarding school in Edinburgh during the holidays and were then driven back there when the holidays were over. Day trippers to the land, they were. Tourists. These people with their private educations and their big houses and their new cars were living it up off the back of his parents’ hard work, his parents who rarely had a day off, who didn’t have fancy things. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

‘I was a farm worker’s son so I was never going to be a farmer. Had I been a farmer’s son it would have been different, but I wasnae. I was a shepherd’s boy, just like my father before me. Och, my dad was never given a chance. In a way I resented it, aye. He walked the hills all day. Never got a break. Never had the chances that others had. Resentment came into my head, that’s true. Privilege. I’ve hated it since I was a lad trying to make sense of why some people had so much and some had so little.’

The Dukes and the Lords and the clan chiefs. Telfer thought the ordinary people of the Borders had been sold down the river by absentee millionaires. ‘They’re crafty, they only look after their own,’ he’d tell his mother. ‘They’re living down in London, living in luxury, living off the sweat and honesty of people like us.’

Telfer remembers Peggy saying: ‘Oh, Jim, don’t be talking that way’, but she knew he was right. She knew lots of things. She knew what she wanted for her son and it didn’t involve lambing or shearing or that lovely job that Willie had to do with the pigs from time to time: hitting them over the head with a hammer to stun them before slashing their throats with a butcher’s knife. Peggy wanted her son to make his money sitting down. She pushed him into education, not that he needed much pushing. He was clever and inquisitive. The land was never going to hold him. A job in a bank was nirvana to his mother. Or something that required a collar and tie and a briefcase, instead of a jumper and trousers and a shepherd’s staff passed down the generations.

In time, Peggy’s dream came true. Jim left the farm and went to college in Edinburgh, took the first steps down the road to a career as a chemistry teacher.

In the capital he stayed with his aunt and uncle. His daily route – or the route he chose – took him by George Heriot’s, one of the city’s more illustrious private schools. The place oozed history and opportunity and wealth. And it preyed on his mind. On the footpath outside the school he made his statement, a little message to the people he’d grown to resent, the significance of which was known only to him. When the uniforms walked towards him each day there was no way on earth he was getting out of their way. He would not alter his course to let them past, not by an inch, not by half an inch. He would not break stride to let a boy in a blazer through. If it meant a collision, so be it. In his mind it was a point of principle about the privileged classes.

‘When I was making my way I developed a huge fear of failure that was always with me. It drove me on as a player and it drove me on as a coach. I had and still have an inferiority complex. Aye, I do. Coming from the background I came from, I suppose it was inevitable. Raised in an environment where the landlord and the Duke were the kingpins made me feel small, despite me railing against it. It made me a bit of a rebel to be honest with you. I saw that you were judged on what you have rather than what you are and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it one little bit.’

The Melrose boys were in the clubhouse at the Greenyards swapping stories, rain hopping off the windows, wind shaking the building. ‘Dirty ol’ night,’ they agreed. Foul as could be. A night for ducks, not for rugby players. Eck Hastie, Wattie Hart, the Chisholms, Derek Brown, Leslie Allan and the rest. They all agreed, agreed unanimously; you’d be pure mad to go out in that.

Leslie Allan, international centre, put his hand to the pane and wiped away a strip of condensation. Through the clearing he could see activity outside. A person running. Togged out and doing laps. Soaked to the skin, for sure, but not stopping. Not this fella.

‘Look at this,’ he suggested.

‘Is it easing off?’

‘No, it’s down for the night,’ said Allan.

‘What is it, then?’

‘I’m not sure, but I think it’s young Jim Telfer.’

The boys went to the window and looked into the bleakness. It was Telfer right enough. They could see him but they couldn’t hear him, couldn’t hear him reminding himself as he ran that nobody else would be out training on a night as wild as this, that nobody would do the things he was prepared to do to make that Melrose first team.

The thought of his rivals sitting at home or yakking in the clubhouse drove him on. He was seventeen years old and already it was clear in his mind that, while he wasn’t and would never be overblessed with talent as a back-row forward, there were two things that he would never, ever lack and that was fitness and desire. He had as much of both as he needed.

The weather gods would test him to the limit. Rain and wind were the least of it. He could train in that all day. But then the snow came. And the sleet. It was like somebody on high was challenging him. ‘You want it, do you? Okay, here’s a blizzard, let’s see what you’re fucking made of.’

He went down to Melrose one evening and, apart from snowmen, there wasn’t another soul about. The place was a thick blanket of white. Bar the tracks made by the wheels of a car it was an uninterrupted covering. So he ran in the tracks. Sprinted in the gaps and revelled again in his solitary life as the only player in Scotland who’d be out in such weather. And when that was done he would break into the clubhouse. Without a key to the door he’d get in the window, shuggling the latch just so, freeing it up just enough to flip the glass up and slide in through the opening. He’d do weights in there, unsophisticated lumps of things raised above his head for hours. Other times, he’d go to the burn near where he lived at Wester Housebyres and stand in gently lapping water hoisting rocks.

‘This one is a bit different,’ said Ogilvie Scott one day and, because it was Scott, the tough second row, saying it, everybody paid attention. Scott was a veteran in more ways than one. He’d been around. It was said that his time fighting the Germans in World War II was a useful trial for all those Border League matches he put himself through.

‘What you mean, he’s different?’ the boys asked.

‘I mean I’ve seen him kicked and raked and spat out of rucks.’

‘Aye. We’ve all been there.’

‘Kicked and raked and spat out and then getting up with his jersey torn and his head cut open and all the while smirking at the fellas who did it.’

‘Smirking?’

‘Smirking.’

‘Oh.’

Word got round the Greenyards and soon all of the Borders would know about this kamikaze pilot at Melrose, this young lad who thought nothing of sacrificing himself at the bottom of rucks. Everyone at the club revelled in their discovery, but back home the audience was far harder to please.

‘My father, he was a man I could never satisfy in rugby. I would never ask him how he thought I played or anything like that. Oh Christ no, never ever. You didn’t have conversations like that. We were a Borders family. There was always that bit of distance between us. I’d want to know, though. It didn’t worry me if he thought I was rubbish, but I wanted to know, so I’d say, “What did you think of the game, Dad?” and I’d wait for his answer. He’d never talk you up. Just wouldn’t do it. He didn’t praise me for passing an exam at school, he didn’t praise me for playing well at rugby. He’d say, “Hmm”. And that was fine. He wasn’t that kind of man and I wasn’t the kind of boy who needed the praise, to be honest with you. I never needed it. Praise never spurred me on.’

Privilege did. Although he loved rugby and he loved Melrose, he wasn’t blind to the self-importance of some people around him. Sure, the Greenyards had no shortage of working-class boys but he saw it as something of a snob’s club that tolerated him and his growing left-wing views just because he was doing a hell of a job for the team.

In 1964, the Scotland selectors decided they needed Telfer’s grit in the national team. It was the first of twenty-five caps for his country. He loved the game itself, but some of the people who ran it just got his back up. The sport, in his opinion, was overloaded with the upper classes. The SRU, RFU, WRU and the IRFU all got by with the old school tie. Throughout his playing years he’d be at banquets after internationals and losing the will to live while listening to the blazerati drone on in their pompous and patronising ways.

In 1965 Mike Campbell-Lamerton was his captain with Scotland. As far as Telfer was concerned there was a lot of good in him, a lot of the right stuff. Campbell-Lamerton had come close to death more than once in his early life and that kind of thing earned him respect. He survived getting speared by a javelin at school, escaped without a scratch after he trod on a landmine in Korea during national service and lived to tell the tale after he fell out of a helicopter sixty feet above ground while pursuing Cypriot terrorists.

He was a good bloke and they got on, but Campbell-Lamerton was one of them, he was the son of a lieutenant-commander, later he’d become a colonel, later still a bursar at Balliol College, Oxford. ‘These people have never been in an ordinary house in their lives,’ Telfer would tell himself.

‘These men had balls in their mouth when they spoke. Some of the most embarrassing team talks I’ve ever heard were from people from public schools who tried to bring the language down to the ordinary man. The swear words just don’t come out right. Mike was a great fella but he didn’t live on the same planet as me. He was “army this” and “army that”, using the f-word and the c-word, but he couldn’t pull it off.’

Telfer could. And the summer of 1966 helped him. It was a period that shaped not just the way he played the game but also had a profound impact on the way he would coach it years later. That driven man on the training ground in March 1990 was influenced by many things: his parents, the landlords, the Duke, the injustice of society. That’s where his determination came from. But his rugby beliefs? They came from another place, far, far away.

FRASER PARK, TIMARU, WEDNESDAY 15 JUNE 1966

‘Look at them,’ said Brian Price of Newport.

‘They don’t look much,’ said Ronnie Lamont of Instonians.

‘Wiry little devils,’ said Jim Telfer of Melrose.