by Dai Smith
What naturally decided it for him was the unwillingness of the national selectors to make him first choice, even when illness or injury or retirement had removed those deigned to be above him in their pecking order. He was named in squad after squad. He trained and he trained. He could accept that in an era so star-strewn, even amongst the back row contingent, as the 1970s were, he might graciously have to concede to Dai and Tommy and John and Terry, but to be put on the bench behind others he knew he could eat for dinner, breakfast and tea was a hurt he nurtured. He sat on the bench, Home and Away, and he never played until it was made worse when he finally came on in the second half to shore up a well-beaten Welsh XV against an All Blacks side made maraudingly vengeful by their own uncharacteristic blips of a few years previously. Inevitably, perhaps, he had a stinker of a game: missed tackles and dropped passes accumulating like the lies of a schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. But he had, and that was the problem. He had served his time, learned his trade and was ready to serve his country, and here it was, at last in forty minutes of spotlight, and all to no avail. For the next home International he was dropped. Not even in the squad. Or on the bench. Dropped after one game. The hurt, he felt, was too severe to bear. His decision was instantaneous and, he told the press, savouring the word he’d looked up, irrevocable. He had retired from international rugby. Myra was delighted and hastened to book a wedding date. Her father gifted them a newly built four-bedroom detached in an estate of similar “executive dwellings” on disused colliery land, promoted Digger to the Board (of three, joining Bobby and Myra) and added his/their name to the company’s signage: Braithwaite and Davies. Bobby gave him all the time off he needed to play for the club and, under his ferocious leadership, they won the unofficial championship for the first time and then three years running and took the Challenge Cup at the fourth attempt. Then Digger, honour satisfied and the town sated, hung up his boots. He was, his old man told him shortly before his pneumoconiotic lungs packed in after the second successful national strike that decade, “made”. A made man.
So why, it would be Digger’s fate to wonder on into the next century, did he feel the opposite of that? Somehow not made at all, but un-made. Like the whole bloody world, was his increasingly assertive conclusion with advancing age. He found it difficult to explain precisely what he meant. It was as if the rhythm of lives once held in common had become a jangle where every part could still be heard and recognised but not now in concert the one with the other. The way he figured it was that his parents’ lives dovetailed into, echoed you might say, their own parents’ and back beyond that, yet it no longer held true in any identical way. He became crotchety when all that he had himself lived through, intimately felt even, was reduced by the turn of the new century to documentary films which, neat and tidy and removed, could have been referring to the Romans or South Sea Islanders as much as the native inhabitants of the Valleys. Always there was some perfunctory journalistic nod to the upheavals of the mid-1980s, making central the Miners’ Strike – rebellion more like, he’d insist – when, he’d tell them, it was all over by then, the last kick of a dying horse. The sentimental and the defeated easily took offence.
He worked more out of the office, on site, than at a desk, all of which suited Bobby Braithwaite and didn’t seem to bother Myra, who taught effectively but dispassionately in a primary school until an early retirement taken to coincide with her father’s last illness. Their marriage had been another of those passages through the limbo of a comfort to which Digger had settled. There were no children. They didn’t worry about why not, and neither was inclined to adopt. Present time, their time, just passed. Then it was Digger who ran the business. He moved into the office, and off site. The business expanded in the housing boom after 2000. Myra cared for her father. She took yoga lessons, went to language classes, Welsh as well as French, and visited Geoffrey. The more time passed the more she talked of the time to come. Digger, puzzled, would just shrug.
His own projected delight after her father died was first to sell the business at a solid profit and then to take their ease. By which he meant punctuating the routine of the season, and the seasons, with well-timed – outside the International fixtures – trips abroad. Really abroad, he’d stress, not bloody France. Thailand. New Zealand. Singapore. America, of course. Plans for Japan. India maybe. China for sure. Digger liked all that. Business class flights. Taxis. Four and five star Hotels. Pools. Room service. Bars to discover and sit in whilst she shopped. Restaurants out of the guidebooks. Sightseeing without any hassle. Perfect. And then, only a few years into this, bloody Geoffrey died. Trust him, and trust him to spell his name like that, too, thought Digger, for whom it all stopped again or, rather, with the house inherited by Myra, it all began again.
Now, although they could afford better, it was all cheap flights with bare-boned carriers, and all rolled in with everyone else, because they were the airlines that flew to the local airport, itself a Toytown strip carved between sea and plain with, worryingly enough, two tiny red fire engines forever sat on display on the apron outside the cafeteria-sized Arrivals Hall. They had tried driving all the way down but the time it took to get back made it seem uphill all the way, so flying and renting had become the pattern. A lifetime of sweating and fetching and carrying was about to be reprised. A lifetime in which the things to which he had related early, to which he belonged because they expressed who and why he was, had been taken away too early, leaving only where he was physically rooted and where the only stuff that now moved them all along was the impetus of Who Whom. That was the phrase he’d picked up from his rugby coach, who’d heard it more than once when the Valley was still littered with the useless dicta of its political past, and re-applied it to the mechanics of back row play. All, considered Digger without being in any manner forensic about the sentiment yet from experience certain of its damnable accuracy, all just frittered away.
* * * * *
The location de voitures was without shade. A frying pan of numbered sections. Theirs was Number 88 and in it was a “clair gris” Audi, an upgrade from the Compact he’d booked. Digger walked around it three times with the contract in his large and callused hand, checking, as instructed, that there were indeed no bumps, dents or scratches. The sun turned his sparsely covered scalp a blushing pink as he completed his tour of duty. He nodded as much to his wife who had already opened the car and had sat in the driving seat to give the air conditioning a chance to kick in. Digger put the bags in the boot and walked to the driver’s door. He motioned for her to come out and move over. To his surprise Myra made a pretty mouth and mimed through the closed window a clear “Non”. Digger asked again, and again was denied. She even buckled up and began adjusting the mirrors. It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to her mouthing negatives. It was the positive reason for the negative which puzzled him.
She never drove from the airport, and if she did at all after that it was only to HyperU or a garden nursery and back to the house waiting at the end of its stony single track road into the cul-de-sac where the hillside garrigue began to rise above them. The back of the house was not a problem for Digger, garrigue or no bloody garrigue, because it could and must grow as it pleased. It was the other wildness that concerned him. Geoffrey’s cultivated and tended wildness, the famous Wild Garden. That, or the English Garden, was what the locals called it. That, and pittoresque. They said so every time Myra invited them to leave their new build villas, their manicured lawns and easily maintained swimming pools, to have an aperitif – usually more than the one – amidst the scramble of box hedge and umbrella pine and black bamboo and cypress and juniper and oleander bushes and pomegranate trees and mimosa and roses and herbs and, he thought, God knows what else bloody Geoffrey had planted, in bloody “rooms” for God’s sake, to create in Languedoc his idea of a Gertrude Jekyll paradise. More like the hell of bloody Mister Hyde, was Digger’s silent rejoinder. The resident English assured the resident locals that it was all truly English, and used
a lexicon of French words to prove it. Myra who, Digger would point out after several aperitifs of Gin Tonique, was bloody Welsh, smiled and glowed.
Digger thought it was all bonkers. He preferred the silvery-grey and gnarled olive trees which dotted the stepped and abandoned vine terraces above the garden. He thought them forlorn because they had never fruited. Something to do, he was told, with not having male and female trees in the correct proximity. All down to Geoffrey, was Digger’s view. He never fruited either. But then neither had Myra and he, so he let the analogy, too accurate all round by half he could see, wither along with the olive trees. Still, that meant they didn’t have to be tended, pruned and watered, and as such they stayed in Digger’s good books, for that was decidedly not the case for the rest of the place, whose lavender and sage and wall-climbing plumbago and hibiscus in pots and hollyhocks and geraniums, and on and on, ever needed watering by hose and can. And the pool, an odd aubergine shape – Geoffrey again – had its own blue glint and sun sparkle garlanded around the cream-stoned irregular patio by a Mediterranean mélange of flowers and foliage which only needed daily sweating and fetching and carrying to keep up their appearance, as Myra had once observed, and now required.
And now, apparently, she required to drive. When, sat belted beside her, he asked why, it was to be mysteriously told that the car had just felt right to her. It was asking to be driven. It was an Audi, for a change, not one of those squat Opels or grotesque Méganes which, appropriately enough in her view, advertised themselves in animated TV adverts by sashaying their rear ends in imitation of the bottom wiggling tarts they so resembled. Digger held his breath. So she wanted to sit behind its well proportioned leather clad wheel for the forty minute drive to Chez Elle. He decided to make no further objection. That, he guessed as they pulled smoothly out of the parking lot, would have been as pointless as the old Pontypool three-quarter line’s total for the entire season. He liked this grin-making conclusion so much he almost shared it with her: no tries, see? A back line who couldn’t score tries, see? All the points, from tries anyway see, from the Pack, see? He thought better of it, and stopped smiling.
He did not, unlike most men he knew, actually mind her driving at all. Myra was a capable, unhurried driver, not as fast as he was maybe, but not as impatient or reckless either. He could relax. No need to be a human satnav. She knew the way, and once they’d negotiated their passage across the middle intersection of a treacherous dual carriageway and turned into the far, slow right-hand lane – why oh why, she’d say automatically, couldn’t they put up two sets of traffic lights, and he’d agree, though normally he was doing the stop-start-accelerate negotiation – and then straight on for eight kilometres to the Péage and the Autoroute. He fumbled in his pocket in readiness for the five euros he knew would be needed and placed it in the side pocket. They crossed over the dual carriageway with an ease that caused Myra to smirk with satisfaction. He closed his eyes, supernumerary to her effortless superiority, and settled back for the ride.
Digger’s mind always drifted when it was not directly engaged with the task he’d been set. Time to take stock was how he put it, a kind of where-was-I pick-up, a personalised inventory. Nowadays, where he was most of the time was in the past. Lights came on and off like in the old fashioned pinball machines with the bottom-push flippers to make the balls collide with the nubby targets. Digger was content to let whichever random hit was ready to light up. It depended where he placed himself. In a seldom-used and chilly front room it was the respectability of the smell and feel of polish on the furniture and Brasso rubbed bright onto the candlesticks, or in a back kitchen the sulphurous splutter of a banked coal fire and the sweet vaporous fumes from a cawl of glutinous shin beef and root vegetables. Outside, wherever, on the street or at the pictures and certainly in pubs, the tobacco of dozens of brands of cigarettes swirled into curlicues of blue smoke that stung the eye, caught the throat and filled nostrils with the power of a shared addiction. Digger had given up smoking a few years into his marriage except for the rare cigar he accepted at Christmastime, and sucked rather than smoked in the club. Men, he remembered, would bring their single Christmas cigars in their silver aluminium tubes, and a mutual sharing and appreciation would occur. A round of drinks, too, was a ritual when money was not so fluid a commodity. You neither refused nor baulked nor missed your turn to pay, unless you wanted to be known and labelled for as long as others would remember, and they all had long memories in a world where you were known, street by street and generation by generation, by whose boy or girl you were, what you did now as much as where you came from, and even, though mysteriously, how you lived your life. Digger wondered how that could be known. But it was. How reputations could be handed out like good or bad conduct medals. How could they be? But they were.
Digger brought to mind faces. They all came with tags. Unwritten and unspoken but tags all the same. A gallery of mug shots. Most of them, Digger ruefully noted, in the ranks of the departed. And not all, by any means, regretted. Not by him at least. Not, for instance, her late father, Bobby Braithwaite. Digger could never quite work out why the old bastard, as he not so fondly referred to him, ever considered himself a cut above those all around him because, as he had stressed, he was not really from “around here” originally, but from Oxford. Which, Digger would stress for the benefit of everyone around him, and who were indeed from “around here”, he bloody was not. Or, at least, being born there wasn’t the same as coming from there, was it? It was Bobby’s father, who’d met Bobby’s mother when she was “in service” in a “Big House” at Witney outside the city of spires, who came from Oxford and who was a scout in one of the colleges, the university connection at which Bobby airily waved. The prat, said Digger. They’d met on her day off and, with the maid quite rapidly no maiden anymore but pregnant with Bobby, went back together to marry in chapel and see what work an Oxford man might find in the Valleys. The rest of that indigent and indigenous population were moving in the opposite direction. Bobby’s father got the message and joined the exodus. Alone.
“Mind you,” the opening gambit of numerous conversations in saloon bars and workingmens’ clubs, and, “Say what you like,” the consensus invariably advanced was that Bobby Braithwaite was an “’ard man”, “a tough old bugger”, “a right bastard” and “you wouldn’t want to cross ’im”. Tales would be told and heads would nod at the saga of bare-knuckle fights and one-punch knock-down and kickings and head-butting at which Bobby had specialised before graduating to sealed envelopes, veiled threats and generous hospitality. The path by which the local boy, the Oxford man, had risen to rooted fame and reasonable fortune.
He felt Myra slow down as the first warning sign for the Péage instructed her to do so. He blinked into the sun, and reached into his pocket for his Ray-Bans. Very Big O, he thought. Digger looked out of the darkened car window at the regimented and scrupulously tended vines in the passing fields of the lowland plain and up to the meticulously maintained dry-stone walls of the near-distant terraced hillsides and sighed at how soon he would himself be accumulating, stacking and sorting the ancient fallen stones of their own extensive, and higher, terraces.
He closed his eyes again. But he was firmly back in the present now. Or the future that was set in stone. Bloody great honey-coloured slabs of limestone which had weathered and slipped from their artful setting or been knocked away by scrambling goats to lie in heaps on the orange-crumble earth. It would be for Digger to rescue them and re-build the ingenious ramparts which generations of toiling peasants had erected to shore up their wedge cuts into the otherwise unyielding slopes. That was what he was, then, was it? In her eyes as in her father’s before. A toiling peasant.
Of course he did have the building skills for the job. Hard learned and well taught. And, with a hint of pride, the strength yet to do the back-breaking job. There was, too, the praise to be lapped up: her guests gazing up at the fruit of all his early morning work done before the sun could rise and sear hi
s bare back and sizzle his hatless head. Then, it was, from locals and incomers alike, and all not within a personal generation of the construction of a dry-stone wall, “Superbe” and “Magnifique” and “Extra … Extra!”
Bloody extra it was all right in Digger’s roving thoughts. The only thing he didn’t have to do to keep bloody Geoffrey’s bloody albatross ready for its destined entry in the bloody Maisons et Décors spread which Myra had in mind, was to prepare, clean and maintain the bloody Aubergine. He couldn’t, thank God, be trusted with that. Not with the delicately correct amounts of chlorination, the Ph. factor or some such calculation in pink in a test tube, and the timing of the filtration system and the exact pulse to the skimmers and the suction and the lights for midnight swims – as if, he thought – and the throbbing pump itself. Thank God, he intoned, that for all that she had employed a “pool man”. Digger had privately, and childishly she said, christened him Pedro. His real name was Philippe, a hulking, taciturn, pig-tailed misery guts – Digger’s alternative appellation – who turned up in cut-off jeans, a torn T-shirt and ripped trainers and never accepted Digger’s weekly offer of a cold beer. Digger never stopped offering, though his look now was cloak to the “Suit yourself, Froggie, you twat” variety which he reserved for cover-all usage when annoyed. Nonetheless, he took care to veil his dislike, just in case he found himself made available from the bench as first substitute. Sod that, he figured, as the Audi glided expertly into the middle lane towards the tollbooths of the Péage, when he had more than enough to do as it was.
