Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  Almost a century after the incident, it is impossible to know whether Doc and Percy’s superiors at their Broadmeadows camp were in fact Carlton supporters or, indeed, if Collingwood would have beaten the Blues in that grand final had the pair of Magpies not been marched 10 miles on the morning of the big match. But there is evidence that Collingwood flagged after the third quarter and that it was Carlton’s final-quarter stamina that ultimately won it the 1915 Premiership.

  What also seems to be beyond dispute is that Doc and Percy did actually go on a route march on the morning of the Grand Final. While the press reports of the day make no mention of it, it is referred to reliably—and in less partisan terms—in other places.

  In The Courage Book of VFL Finals, 1897–1973, a compendium that records in a concise and matter-of-fact manner the circumstances and scores of seventy-five years of football finals, Graeme Atkinson writes: ‘Collingwood lined up with two players (Rowan and Seddon) who had just finished a ten mile route march with the AIF at Broadmeadows and only arrived at the ground in the nick of time.’

  Ronald Austin’s history of the 29th Battalion, Black and Gold, also confirms that

  on the morning of 18th September, the 8th Brigade went on a ten mile route march. It was an extremely unfortunate pre-match preparation for the two soldiers who had to then go into Melbourne to play in the football grand final between Collingwood and Carlton … Percy Rowe (alias Paddy Rowan) of the 29th Battalion and another soldier, Malcolm Seddon.

  But these sources make no mention of a conspiracy involving a Carlton-supporting superior.

  Allan and David, however, are adamant that that is what happened. Doc, a quiet and reflective man who was not prone to hyperbole, apparently told the story to their parents, Malcolm Junior and Shirley, many times.

  ‘The day of that grand final they were at Broadmeadows, Perc and Doc, and you know, they were fit young blokes and they were pretty crucial to the team actually getting up and winning the game,’ Allan begins. ‘And the drill sergeant took them on a route march—I dunno, 10 or 15 miles—on the morning of the grand final. So that’s Saturday morning. And they come back to Broady and they’re fairly rooted, as you would be I suppose. And then they’ve got to find their way from the camp to the MCG. So, they race onto the tram down Mount Alexander Road with their footy boots over … [their shoulders] and end up in a taxi part of the way just to make the bloody game. So anyway, they got there and they played, but they wilted towards the end. Because they were bloody buggered, of course.’

  ‘Is that the way Doc told the story?’ I ask.

  ‘Yep,’ says David. ‘That was exactly the story as it was told to our parents—you know, those bloody Carlton mongrels sending us on a march before the grand final so that we would lose.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Allan agrees. ‘Doc told that to my father. He said that that is exactly what happened. He told my mum, too. He said, “Yeah, that Carlton bloke made us march.”’

  On the eve of the 1938 VFL Grand Final, in which Carlton beat Collingwood by 15 points and by which time Doc Seddon had served as Collingwood’s chairman of selectors for as many years, he publicly recounted his version of the morning of the 1915 Premiership contest, which was subsequently reported by the Argus:

  Although a ten-mile route march on the morning of a grand final is not regarded as the ideal form of training for footballers, it is the treatment meted out to two Collingwood players in the last Grand Final between Carlton and Collingwood in 1915. At Victoria Park last night the chairman of the selection committee (Councillor M Seddon) recalled how he and Paddy Rowan, who were selected to play, were in camp. On the morning of the big match they were ordered out on a route march by an adjutant who, they thought, must have been a Carlton supporter.

  Clearly, the incident left a lasting impression on Doc, and it is a significant anecdote in the greater story of the remarkable—and, below the surface, very complex—friendship between him and Percy Rowe. But both Doc and Percy would probably have moved on pretty quickly from that disappointing grand final loss and the injustice of the route march. They had more important things to think about—like the war.

  For a while at least, football would, for them, come a distant second to the First Australian Imperial Force. Both men were still relatively young and probably hoped that there would be time for plenty more football—including, with any luck, inclusion in a Collingwood premiership team—when they returned.

  But war has a way of interfering with a man’s best-laid plans. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  Just before they enlisted in July 1915, Doc and Percy went to a photographic studio to pose together for a formal portrait. It seems likely that the photograph was taken during a Collingwood Football Club vacation in Brisbane. In it, both men are wearing their finest three-piece suits. Percy sits while Doc stands to his right, as if reprising his on-field role as Percy’s protector. They both look at the camera assuredly, confidently—almost arrogantly. Their hands are so close they appear to almost touch. In another photograph, a picture of the Collingwood team that was probably taken in the same studio at the same time, Doc and Percy stand, characteristically, next to each other.

  Doc, standing, and Percy, just before going off to war, 1915. Seddon family collection

  Just after Percy and Louie married, they, too, were photographed together. The fact that it is the only picture of them together indicates that they had not been a couple for very long. The pregnant Louie, fresh-faced and radiantly beautiful, leans in towards Percy’s chest. With his fine features, wavy black hair and intense eyes, he appears startlingly handsome in his soldier’s uniform, with the rising-sun badge on his collar.

  There is no prescience about these photographs; they speak only of frozen moments in time.

  While Percy and Louie, in their photo, certainly seem happy in each other’s company, the truth is that they were probably overwhelmed by the novelty and enormity of their passionate relationship, and were grappling with the many uncertainties that had already beset it.

  Doc and Percy, meanwhile, appear to be utterly inseparable in their photographs together. It is easy to believe that these are images of best mates who are about to ship out so that they can fight, and if necessary die, side by side, just as together they had worked and played—and loved.

  But something was about to change.

  12

  St Arnaud

  Setting out on the long journey from Flinders Street to Bendigo, Percy’s mind skipped back and forth, like an unwound fob watch, between all that was happening in his life now and what he might find when the train returned him to the world that he had hoped he’d left forever, years before.

  Even in uniform he was recognised these days. Men he’d never met before would stop him, wanting to talk about Dicky Lee’s knee, about that bloody Carlton grand final, about how he and Doc were the toughest pair they’d ever seen. It was Paddy this and Paddy that. What do you reckon, eh, Paddy? Paddy, Paddy, Paddy.

  Women pondered him even more now. It was the uniform. Occasionally when he passed a window he’d steal a look and, content with what he saw, carry on with an added spring in his step. He wore it well, did Percy, and he knew it.

  Inside the carriage, at the end of the opposite bench, sat a young mother—very pretty, mid-twenties, perhaps, wearing a long blue overcoat over a white dress with a floral flock print, her hair pulled back the way Louie did it. Her little boy had a leonine mop of blond, curly hair and wore a dark woollen suit over a white, stiff-collared shirt. Long white socks led from shiny new brown shoes up to his knees. He leaned into the sanctuary of his mother’s shoulder and stared at Percy, who smiled. The mother blinked, held Percy’s eyes, and smiled back. The boy coyly averted his gaze.

  Percy jiggled about the cracked, brown-leather seat and slipped into a shallow sleep. The lullaby of the wheels on the track, sudden darkness and then light as the train pas
sed through a tunnel, and the rhythmic vibration that came up through the seat, all became the wallpaper of a dream.

  He was at the head of a column of troops on a gravel road, marching in time—crunch, crunch-crunch, crunch, crunch-crunch—through blinding rain in the middle of a black, black night. Flares popped overhead, enveloping everything in garish phosphorescent light, highlighting a nightmare panorama of smashed-up earth and vehicles, and dead horses and men, slick with blood and viscera, piled one on top of the other where they’d fallen. The column slowed, formed a single file and walked carefully over a slippery duckboard. A pair of boots—Australian boots, probably made in Collingwood—stood up out of the water as if the man wearing them had swan-dived from the duckboard. But it would’ve been nothing so graceful. He’d drowned, like dozens of other poor bastards, after slipping into the mud and slush.

  All was suddenly darkness again, with the only noise his breathing, the staccato rattle of machine-gun fire and the moans and cries of the dying. He knew that there would be more light soon. The horizon and little pockets of the night sky always glowed a split second after the boom of enemy artillery, fired from the front line 3 or 4 miles away, had reached your ears. Then came a nauseating whistle as a shell fell to earth, then a thud and an explosion, and hot, razor-sharp metal filled the air.

  The train’s whistle jolted Percy out of these subconscious imaginings—a dream that had been sown at Broadmeadows during weeks of drills, training and marches, and repeated warnings from his commanders, Boer War veterans, about what the battlefield was really like, and incubated by press reports that he’d read about British attacks on the German lines in French Flanders.

  His mouth was dry, his forehead clammy. His heart raced and skipped as he wondered if that was how it would end. Was death just a moment when the body, ruined by a jagged piece of metal, stopped functioning? Or was it a new way of being that held its own dimensions, its own bearings and sensations? He couldn’t imagine just stopping, no longer being.

  He realised that the woman and the boy were staring at him once again. He and the woman exchanged another smile and this time he winked at the boy with the beautiful hair, who again turned away.

  Percy sat upright and loosened his collar. Soon he would be back in his old home. It had been a few years. A lot had happened to his mother. And to him.

  The only one he’d really seen since leaving was Ethel, the sister closest to him in age, when she’d come down to watch him play at Vic Park that time. It was just after baby Doreen had died and he had felt bad, as guilty as buggery, really, that he hadn’t gone home for her funeral. He hadn’t been able to get time off work, he’d explained to Ethel with excessive defensiveness, even though she hadn’t raised the matter. Then Henry had died a few months later. He hadn’t even heard the poor boy was gone until he’d been buried in St Arnaud’s cemetery.

  It was a few months later that he’d gotten the letter from Ethel, explaining that his mum wasn’t right after losing two more children in such quick succession, and Henry just a few days before she had her fourteenth baby, Gwendoline. She was sick all the time and cried all night, Ethel wrote, and she wouldn’t let little Gwen out of her sight, nor let anyone near her.

  Percy tried to think about the others. He could remember them all as babies, when he was a teenager: Joshua and John, Lilian and Fred, looking up at him from their cots, and sitting at his mum’s feet in the yard while she pegged the washing and he kicked a ball around the yard.

  An image of Lilian, who’d died just before he moved to Melbourne, stuck in his mind. She was there in her white confirmation dress, her pine coffin open on the kitchen table, while the neighbours filed past, saying how beautiful she was and how peaceful she looked and how it was for the best. The priest held his mum’s hand as she sat on a wooden rocking chair and just wept and wept while one of the other little ones lay across her lap, attached to her breast.

  Poor Henry. He was a great kid. A big boy, and a good footy player, too. Percy wished he’d found out sooner that he’d died. But even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have been able to make it back. There was always training, and you wouldn’t make the Saturday list if you missed training. Wal didn’t care why you weren’t there. He’d leave you off the list or bench you for the match.

  Percy had only seen Dor the once, soon after she was born, just before the start of the 1913 footy season. She’d been a big baby, he recalled, rosy-cheeked, milk-fed and strong, while his poor mother Charlotte had looked exhausted, dried out, feeble. He’d have bet a fiver that Dor would survive.

  But it was always the same story: the tiny house was as hot as Hades in summer and freezing in winter; there was never enough food and the old man was in and out of work; the little kids always had coughs; every day was just a struggle for his mum to put something in their stomachs, never mind getting them to school. And there was always another one on the way.

  He prayed to God sometimes, just to say thank you for being allowed to escape it all. He was the eldest of fourteen, and half of them hadn’t made it. So the odds hadn’t been that good. And he’d done what he could to help his mum and the littlies, sent back a few quid now and then, all the while vowing that he’d never slip back into such circumstances. He also swore that when he had kids, which was going to be a lot sooner than he’d planned, really, there’d be enough money to care for them properly.

  There was no-one to greet him on the platform except the station-master, old Bestman, who raced up and shook his hand vigorously.

  ‘Percy Rowe, look at you!’ he said. ‘You done us proud, son, with the football. We read all about you down there. And now you’ve signed up and you’re going off to fight. Your dad and your poor mum must be thrilled with the way you turned out, Percy Rowe. God be with you, Percy. God be with you over there.’

  Even though they called him Paddy Rowan in the newspapers, around these parts they all knew who he really was and where he’d come from. He could be Paddy Rowan in Melbourne. But here he would always be Percy.

  As he walked through one of the station’s great arched doorways and onto the street, the wind began to gust, carrying a steady horizontal shower of icy rain. It was almost sleeting by the time he’d walked to Bendigo’s main street, the ice stinging his face as he stuck his thumb out at the first lorry that came along. He wasn’t surprised when it stopped. Nobody drove past a soldier who was in want of a lift these days. It was bad luck. And everybody needed a bit of luck because just about everybody had a boy or a husband or a brother or a lover over there.

  Percy was travelling light. The only thing he carried was a box, a little bit bigger than one that would hold a new pair of leather boots. It was wrapped in brown paper that was sodden now, mouldering under his grip, and tied tightly with twine.

  Percy didn’t recognise the farmer who stopped for him, although the name of the man’s family, wealthy squatters from the north-east, over towards Benalla, was familiar to him. As the lorry bounced and jolted over a pot-holed track, heading towards the hamlet of St Arnaud, the farmer told him how a letter had just come to say that his nephew, his brother’s eldest and a member of the 8th Light Horse, had disappeared at Gallipoli. Everyone on the property, even the blackfella rouseabouts, was in mourning because they had loved the boy so much. And the boy’s mother had taken a turn and hadn’t left her bed since the letter had come.

  ‘It’s a bloody shame, son,’ the farmer said. ‘And all for what? Charging at a bloody trench full of gyppos on some place we don’t give a stuff about because some Pommy officer who wouldn’t do it himself tells you to.’

  Percy hadn’t thought too much about the blokes who had died, though he’d seen a few with shell shock around Collingwood—men who’d come back without losing arms or legs and looked fine, but who everyone knew weren’t quite right anymore. He just couldn’t see himself as one of the dead, or the maimed. He’d already defied the cards dealt to him at birth. Fort
une, he felt certain, would continue to look fondly upon him.

  The lorry stopped in the main street of St Arnaud just as the rain subsided. Percy and the farmer shook hands. ‘Take care, son. Think before you stick your head up,’ the farmer said.

  The main street was little more than a cattle run, really. Percy’s family home, a three-room weatherboard place with peeling green paint, stood halfway along it in the middle of a small yard where scrappy vegetables grew and a sheep strained at its tether. A boy and a girl, grubby-kneed and snotty, kicked a paper football to one another over the sheep.

  Percy stood at the gate watching his brother, John Junior, and little Evelyn play kick-to-kick. The boy, seeing the soldier, let the ball fall at his feet while he looked at him quizzically.

  Percy had known the kids wouldn’t recognise him. ‘John, hello, it’s me, Percy, your brother,’ he said.

  The boy kept staring but the girl raced over to face him over the gate. She offered her hand for him to shake. ‘I’m Evie,’ she said. ‘I know about you.’

  Percy smiled, then said, ‘I know about you, too.’

  He wished he’d brought something for the kids—sweets or fruit even.

  ‘Are Mum and Dad home?’ he asked.

  ‘Mum’s inside, with the baby, and Ethel,’ said Evelyn, opening the gate and taking his hand to lead him around the side of the house to the back door. Percy realised the girl did not understand him as part of her world; she didn’t know that the craggy path leading over the roots of old melaleucas to the kitchen door was etched into his being as deeply as it was now becoming stitched into hers.

  His mother was precisely as he remembered her from Lilian’s funeral, except even more drawn and with a different child at her breast. Charlotte looked up as he entered the house and her face broke into a rare smile.