What Rugby Means To England

That half hour of explanation and the watching of that "upper" was all the preliminary instruction I received. The next day I was posted to a house game. I cannot say that I enjoyed it. I was playing with boys bigger than myself. I felt very lost. I was terrified of making myself conspicuous by doing the wrong thing. I was equally terrified of doing nothing. The game was watched by a prefect who urged us to keener efforts. Abuse was mingled with his exhortations. "Go low. Drop on the ball, run straight, don't funk," he shouted. I was afraid that my ignorance would be mistaken for cowardice, and at half time I surreptitiously rubbed mud into my knees to give the impression that I had plunged adventurously under the feet of the attacking forwards. I was infinitely relieved when the final whistle went. But within a week I had found my feet.

The simplicity of Rugby is one of its great merits. It is easy for a novice to pick it up, and it is possible for the ex-public school boy to continue playing it after he has come down when he is working in an office, with no time available for midweek practice, which is impossible, I fancy, in American football, with its profusion of "plays," its elaborate deception schemes, its mathematical positionings.

The proof of Rugby's excellence lies in the fact that so many men play it after they leave college. Games are compulsory at English schools, and it is natural for a schoolboy to be anxious to succeed at them. Prestige and popularity depend upon his prowess on the field. The reputation and standing of a school is in large part determined by the skill of its footballers and cricketers, and it stands a man in good stead in later life to be able to say he was in his school XV. "A ribboned coat" is the opening to many appointments. But it is quite another matter to go on playing Rugby after you have left school, when you are under no compunction, with no rewards attached, obscurely before an uncrowded touch line, simply out of a love of the game. And that is what thousands of men do.

My own case is typical. When I was posted to the army reserve after World War I at the age of 21, I joined Rosslyn Park, a London club. For seven years I turned out every Saturday between mid-September and mid-April. I had been in the first XV at Sherborne, but as a forward weighing 150 pounds. I was too small to earn a regular place in the first Rosslyn Park side. For the most part I played for the second or "A" XV against public schools, second-class clubs and the "A" XVs of other first-class clubs. That Saturday match determined the pattern of my week.

Each Monday evening the selection committee met, and on the Tuesday morning I would receive a card. "You are selected to play vs. Bishop's Stortford. Train 1:15 Liverpool Street. Meet at barrier. Tickets taken." I observed no training rules, but I kept fit. I confined wild parties to the first half of the week. On Friday I dined at my parents' house and was in bed by 10.

Sometimes when I woke on the Saturday, I would wonder why I still went on playing football. It was cold and wet. Liverpool Street station at 12:30 on a Saturday is a shambles. I should lunch in a crowded buffet off a soggy sandwich. The train would be packed and I should have to stand. The ground would be a quarter of an hour's walk from the station. The pavilion would be a drafty converted army hut. There would be small wash tubs, tepid water and no electric light. Why on earth was I still playing Rugby?

Now and again I felt like that on a wet Saturday morning, but the moment I reached the barrier and saw the familiar faces that mood left me. From week to week the side changed little, and the nucleus was carried on from one year to the next. We had a fund of jokes to share. Though I had to stand in the train, the journey passed so quickly that I was surprised to find we had arrived. It was still spattering with rain, but that made it, I reminded myself, perfect football weather for a forward. The pavilion was indeed drafty, but I did not notice it. I was impatient, like a horse at the starting point. I was young, fit, tingling with a sense of battle. It would be a game in which nothing was at stake, no caps or cups were to be won: afterwards there would be no elation in victory, no deep despondency in defeat. I can remember in detail every house and school match in which I played at Sherborne, but of my seven years with Rosslyn Park I can only recall occasional incidents and the look of certain grounds. Yet, though there was no drama in that later football, I enjoyed the actual playing of it more than I had at school.

And after the game, despite the tepid water in the shallow tub, I was suffused with the agreeable languor that follows violent exercise. Next day I should be stiff and slow in movement, but at the moment my bruises were still soft. I felt pleasantly exhausted, no more than that. After the game there would be a heavy tea with fruit cake and thick fish-paste sandwiches. We would be too tired for much talking, that could wait till afterwards. For always after the game seven or eight of us, on our return to London , would raid Dehem's oyster bar off Shaftesbury Avenue and drink many pints of lukewarm beer, eat a steak and kidney pudding and argue about this and that till closing time. So it went on every Saturday from mid-September to mid-April for seven years.

Rugby football made the pattern of winter life for me, as it does in Britain year after year for many thousands of ex-public school boys. I was lucky to have that pattern. The seven years between 21 and 28 are crucial in a young man's life. He is establishing himself in his career, he is falling in and out of love, he is discovering himself. Myself, I had at that time a half-time job as an editor in a publishing house. On the other days I was writing articles, short stories, novels. I had many problems, emotional and professional. It was an immense relief to me to be taken every week out of the circle of those problems into the wholesome atmosphere of football. It was a relief to all of us.

It is a curious two-dimensional friendship that links the members of a Rugby side. In one sense we all knew each other very well. We knew who was reckless and who was cautious, who was a fair-weather player and who was at his best in an uphill fight. We all liked each other, for that is the great merit of team games, that you only play with congenial people; however brilliant as an individualist a player may be, if he is boastful and a bully, he soon ceases to receive that Tuesday morning postcard. In one sense I knew inside out the men with whom I played regularly with Rosslyn Park. In another sense I scarcely knew them. I knew little of their backgrounds. I knew to which school each had been, and the kind of job he worked at. But I had no idea who his parents were or from what kind of home he came. For the most part we were bachelors, but more than once I was surprised to find that someone I had known for three seasons was married and a father. When we parted outside Dehem's at closing time we passed out of each other's lives until we met at the station barrier on the following Saturday.