by Richie McCaw
Jim McCaw, DFC.
On one evening alone in July 1944, Grandad destroyed four V1s heading towards London, and scraped into Biggin Hill well past midnight with his fuel tanks showing empty. A couple of days after that he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
The really scary stories he made light of or probably just didn’t mention at all. You had to talk to his mates in the bar to find out the truth about those. There’s a famous piece of footage shot from the gun turret of a Tempest. The pilot has possibly misjudged his approach to a V1. He’s very close when he finally manages to fire his cannon and blow it up. The pilot has to fly through the explosion and all the shrapnel and debris. It’s pretty terrifying. Carnage. That pilot is the old fella. He came out the other side.
A lot didn’t. Ten of his immediate colleagues and friends in 486 were killed that summer by V1 explosions as they attacked the bombs.
He was proud of his Scottish roots—his grandfather was born in the Borders—and safely sitting out hostilities from 10,000 miles’ distance wasn’t an option for him.
I’d love to tog up and fly for real in a Tempest. Just to get a feel of what it was like and experience in a very small way what he went through. I’m told they were incredible, very fast and untouchable in a dive but I’m not even sure there is one left in the air, although there are a couple in museums.
At Christmas, the whole tribe would grab the gliders and gear and decamp from my grandparents’ farm and head across the river, up the Waitaki Valley and over the hill to Omarama, where we’d set up camp at Wardells, just round the corner from the town and airfield. The South Canterbury and Canterbury clubs would come down as well, and the gliders would stay there until the winter. That’s the way it was for a decade or more, until we shifted the club permanently to Omarama, when numbers to keep the club operating weren’t sufficient.
We sold our own farm in 2002, so Omarama has become more important as a continuing tie to the area, particularly since I went halves with my parents in a holiday home there last year.
On oxygen at 20,000 feet.
These days, I get to see the Haka Valley from the air mainly. We tend to go west in the gliders, but I often hire a plane from Christchurch and fly down to Omarama, and go over the Haka to check it out.
When I get down to Omarama with the Discus in tow, the gliding community is great. ‘Sorry about the rugby,’ they say, then we get on to flying. Omarama is a long way from most places, and the airfield environment is a separate, almost self-contained world within that, with hangars and accommodation units and its own laid-back little café. I love it, and Gavin reckons he can predict my arrival there to within about 48 hours of the finish of a tour or series.
Gavin helps me rig the Discus. That’s all I want to talk about—I’m the newbie down here, all ears, trying to learn as much as I can. I’m a bit embarrassed about being such a novice and having a state-of-the-art machine like this, but Gavin is encouraging, tells me it’ll be great to have a glider I can grow into.
When I finally get the Discus assembled and rigged, I lower myself into that snug cockpit and think, Shit, it’s too small—in my excitement up north I didn’t check that I’d actually fit the bloody thing. But once I’m in, it seems to mould itself around me, the perfect fit. I follow Gavin around to familiarise myself. The Discus is a gorgeous machine, and it’s amazing to be up there at last in my own glider, and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world . . . If it wasn’t for the Cardiff calamity playing out in my head, despite my best intentions to leave it behind.
We circle close to home, and at one stage we catch a thermal on the western ridge of the Kirklistons, and I can see directly down into the Haka Valley, our old farm, and the little school just down the road from the farm.
The Hakataramea Primary School closed in 2003, but it had two teachers and about 25 kids when I became a pupil at the age of five. The two little schoolrooms are still there, with a field out front, surrounded by a shelter belt of macrocarpas to keep out the raw southerlies and sou’westers. There was one set of farm-made goalposts hewn from hardwood and braced with iron footings. It was there that I started playing rugby, in pick-up games at intervals and lunchtimes, mixing it with kids of eight and nine. The bumps and bruises didn’t put me off. Mum says that’s all I wanted to do. Get to school so I could play rugby.
When I was seven, Dad took me across the river to Kurow on Saturday mornings, where I began playing in age-group teams for the Kurow Rugby Club, full of good North Otago names, like McCone, Stringer, Gard, McIlraith, Perriam and McGill. That first year, Barney McCone was our coach, because he had a son, Ross, in the team.
Barney farmed Domett Downs on the foothills of Mount Domett on the southern side of the Waitaki Valley, and was an ex-halfback and a great mate of Phil Gard, Kurow’s All Black, who played outside Barney at first-five. Barney was also assistant coach of the Kurow seniors, so rugby was part of every day of his week and he was a real thinker about the game. We were very lucky to come under his tutelage so early in our playing careers.
He wouldn’t let us play in competition that first year, for instance. We had to spend the first season learning skills. So every Saturday morning, Barney would teach us all how to catch and pass and tackle, and at the end we’d play a game among ourselves. We didn’t know it at the time, but that was a huge advantage Barney gave us. He quickly picked up that I liked contact and was pretty fearless, and he knew that it was really important to teach me to tackle properly, so that I didn’t damage myself. As a result he spent a lot of time with us on correct body position, straight back, eyes open, all that basic but essential stuff.
When we entered the North Otago Under 9s competition the following year, straight into full tackle, playing against the Oamaru teams, Athies, Old Boys, Excelsior, and the surrounding hamlets, Maheno from down near Kakanui, and Valley from the Wairareka, we won it. Every week we used to get on the bus and go down and play rugby in Oamaru. That was a big day out. For half the kids the highlight was the pie and the Coke afterwards at the dairy on the way back. A few other parents would help Barney, and I think pretty much every week, bar one or two, in the five years I played for Kurow, Dad would’ve been on the bus to come down with me.
The best thing about Barney’s coaching was that he made us all part of the team. His mantra was that everyone loves playing good footie, and good teams produce good players. He rotated the captaincy every week, rotated the kicking duties, both for touch and for goal, and kept meticulous records of who did what in his exercise books. He wanted everyone to share in the team responsibilities. He had a cup that he used to award to the player of the day, which never went to the kid who scored the most tries, it always went to the kid who had lifted his game the most from the week before.
Carrying the ball for Kurow Under 9s against Union.
The one thing he did stick to was the positions he chose to play us in. He’d had a year to look at us by then, assess our skills, size, speed and agility, and he must have had a pretty good eye, because most of us played out our careers in the position that Barney chose for us. That said, I mostly played No. 8, and occasionally lock, because of my size.
Barney remembers me as being ‘ball hungry’, but there was no individual starring stuff. You couldn’t be selfish with the ball—you got a metaphorical boot up the arse if you didn’t pass the ball—and it was all about using the backs. That taught me a hell of a lot. I watch kids play sometimes, and quite often some guy will get the ball and that’s it, particularly if he’s one of the bigger kids.
I was one of those bigger kids. I was born on 31 December, so I could have almost played in the year below, I was right on the edge, but I still used to get questioned about my age every week. Mums would come up and ask, ‘How old are you?’ Thankfully, it was only age that counted in North Otago. I was a bit chubby—‘solid, very solid,’ according to Barney—until Dad got me running when I was 12, and weight-wise, I certainly had a bit of an advantage. In the cities
there used to be Under 45 kg then Under 58 kg for the bigger kids in Form Two, but I would have been struggling to even make that.
Barney McCone’s exercise book, full of good North Otago names.
I finished at Haka School in Standard Four at age 10, and travelled to Kurow Area School each day for Forms One and Two, an hour each way in the bus because I was first on, and we had to go right round the loop road. I think that was when Dad and I made the goalposts on the farm, so that I could have a kick around after I got off the bus. Between that and my running, I’d be totally busy until Mum called me for tea.
That Kurow team stayed together for five years, through Under 9s, Under 10s, Under 11s, Under 12s and Under 13s, until I went away to boarding school, and I think we lost only three or four games in that time. We quite often used to win by 70 or 80 points, even though we seldom had 15 players. I was selected for North Otago rep teams from Under 9s through to Under 13s, and twice for the Hanan Shield Under 11s and 12s, encompassing the North Otago, South Canterbury and Mid Canterbury rugby unions but, ironically, I didn’t get selected for the Under 13s the year I did all that running. I did get second in the school cross-country that year, though, an event I’d never featured in before. That was a wow moment.
Barney remembers one recurring problem with me. He was strict about having our jerseys tucked in and our socks pulled up, but I’d forget to bring the tape and within 10 minutes my socks would be around my ankles and my jersey around my knees.
When we’d played our last game together at 12, and we were about to scatter to the four winds, Barney made a speech and told us ‘a couple of you have got the ability to go all the way’. He never singled out who. He wanted us all to harbour our dreams; that was Barney’s way. And we knew it was possible, because we had our own heroes from the Waitaki Valley.
First day at Kurow Area School, with sister Jo.
With Mum and Dad, about to head off to Otago Boys’.
Barney’s best friend, Phil Gard, who also farmed just south of Kurow, made it all the way to the All Blacks from one of the tiniest clubs in one of the tiniest unions. Phil once played for two years, club footy for Kurow and rep for North Otago, without winning a game, until he was selected for the South Island in 1969 and they beat the North Island. In Barney’s estimation, Phil was one of the most complete footballers he ever saw and played mightily for the Hanan Shield Combined side against the 1971 Lions. He was selected for the All Blacks for the fourth test that year at second-five. That was his only cap, but he played on until 1977 for North Otago, was on the committee at Kurow, then President, and I remember him being around at practice. Phil died far too young, of cancer, at the age of 42 in 1990.
Shortly after Phil, Ian ‘Archie’ Hurst also made the All Blacks, for the 1972–73 tour of the UK, also as a second-five/centre. Ian had played for North Otago when he was still at Waitaki Boys’ High School, but made the All Blacks from the fierce Canterbury team of the early seventies, when he became a student at Lincoln University. We’d pass Ian and Gloria’s farm at Papakaio on the way down to Oamaru every weekend on the bus. That’s about as close as I got to him then, but more recently I’ve had a lot more to do with him, through playing with his son Ben at the Crusaders and flatting with his daughter Sarah in Christchurch.
The important thing was that all us kids knew we had All Blacks from our neck of the woods, who were farmers and locals just like us, and who we saw in the flesh from time to time, so we had it in the backs of our minds that to rise so high wasn’t completely impossible.
And, at school, we found out that Kurow had played its part in New Zealand’s political and economic history too, by providing two of the biggest building blocks for the development of the modern nation.
We learnt that Kurow’s Presbyterian manse had been the birthplace of New Zealand’s modern welfare state back in the early 1930s, when the local Presbyterian minister, Arnold Nordmeyer, Kurow school’s headmaster, Andrew Davidson, and the local doctor, Gervan McMillan, prepared the blueprint for the Social Security Act introduced by the first Labour Government.
It should have been no surprise that such a compassionate approach emanated from our area: for all the spectral beauty of the place, it was harsh terrain to wrest a living from in those days, with snow most winters, very hot in summer, little water and a lot of drought. Before irrigation, the crops that grew most naturally were stones and rabbits. The road up the Waitaki was white shingle, and some of the tributaries had to be forded when the little wooden one-way bridges were taken out by floods.
There’d been a hydro dam built just north of the town in 1928, but the real changes came in 1956, when Kurow became the staging post for the Benmore dam, further up the river. At the time, Benmore was the biggest earth dam in the southern hemisphere. The third big dam on the Waitaki, Aviemore, completed in 1968, came with a painful family history. It resulted in my grandmother Cathie’s family losing their land. The Trotters’ station, Garguston, was compulsorily acquired by the government, and the drowning of their beautiful farm remained a sore point with their family for many years, and probably still is today. A lake-edge residential development ensures that the name Garguston lives on, above where the road used to run down to the homestead.
Driving the old Model M crawler tractor, aged 13.
When I look down at the Haka Valley on that first flight in the Discus, it’s with mixed feelings. I know I couldn’t have accomplished what I’ve done and have the life I have if I’d stayed there, but what a start in life it gave me.
I was seldom inside. I’d just take off. If I wasn’t kicking the ball or running, I’d go and play in the creek, go rabbit shooting, or I’d be out helping the old man on the farm. We did a lot of cropping, so I’d get out there and row paddocks with grubbers and stuff, driving the tractor. Shift an irrigator. At 10 years old, I’d be flying round the paddocks on a motorbike. I got to do all that outside stuff. Occasionally, I’d hear a yell ‘Where are ya?’, but they weren’t really worried. It was nothing out of the ordinary. You made your own fun. It wasn’t until I got out of the Haka that I thought, ‘What an upbringing! How lucky was that?’
As I swoop off the Kirklistons in the Discus, I remember something else.
When we sold the farm in 2002 and I went back to clear out my room, I found pinned up behind the wardrobe the table napkin that Uncle Bigsy had helped me put together while we were waiting for our burgers in Timaru. When I looked at the target dates for all the teams, I realised that I’d beaten them all, making the All Blacks in 2001, three years before the 2004 team I’d targeted.
The only goal I hadn’t fulfilled was the last one, the G.A.B.
And I realise, five years later, as I start the glide back to Omarama, that I’m not much closer to achieving that particular goal than I was back in 2002.
Superficially, there aren’t a lot of similarities between gliding and rugby. Gliding teaches you that you’ve got to be as prepared as you possibly can be for whatever contingencies of terrain and weather might eventuate once you’re up there. At the same time, you have to acknowledge that no matter how much you prepare, no matter how thorough you are, you can’t anticipate everything that Nature or Fate might throw at you. Sometimes Fate throws you a curve ball. You have to deal with it the best way you can, survive it, then learn what you can from it.
As I set myself for landing at the airfield in Omarama, I think G.A.B. might be a handy frame of reference when it comes to consider what I do next, how I respond to the Cardiff calamity. What would a G.A.B. do?
The first thing would be to admit that I didn’t play to my best in that game. One bad game doesn’t suddenly make you a bad player. I remember a quote I’ve heard: ‘Every great All Black has been dropped at some point.’ I’ve got to face the possibility that I might be dropped after Cardiff. But even if I’m not, what happened there, getting beaten when we shouldn’t have, is almost like being dropped.
But there’s no real question in my mind about walking aw
ay. I don’t want to play overseas, and I signed a contract with the NZRU just days before that quarter-final. It might have been silly to be doing it in the middle of the RWC, but it had to be signed then, otherwise I wouldn’t have been eligible for Super Rugby in 2008. It wasn’t really that much of a distraction because I was always going to stay. There was never any doubt about that. Now I’m thinking I might have been lucky—they might not have offered me a contract on those terms after the game!
There’s another issue. My captaincy is being called into question, constantly I’m told, in the sports pages I’m not reading and on the talk-back radio I’m not listening to. It’s a legitimate question: Am I the right man for the job?
There’s an option in front of me which would make everyone feel good: take a neutral position, say that if I’m not the right man for the job, I’m happy to step aside. Give everyone, myself included, an out.
But at bedrock, I think: no, bugger it. I still believe I can do it. It’s scary, but if I’m going to become the captain I want to be, I’ve got to put myself up for it, I’ve got to survive Cardiff and come out the other side stronger for the experience.
