Joe Bloggs

It's a black wet night and all around are big black men with glowing red fires in their mouths and smoke coming from their noses which rises up blue and sparkling with rain in the blazing white glare of the floodlights. The massive green sea hangs underneath the black flickering crowd and even bigger men in red and blue are flying over it like huge birds diving for fish.
I'm five years old and sitting on my father's shoulders and going out of my mind with excitement at the colour and the sound and smell of the joy of thousands of men watching rugby at Stradey Park.

Any event packed with as much sheer stimulation as this will tend to have a lasting effect on a young mind. But not every child had the chance of hearing the sentence 'He works with you, doesn't he?' addressed to my father about one of the players I worshipped. And this was a fairly common experience for boys in Stradey Park, and The Gnoll and all the other homes of industrial amateur rugby. So the gods of the pitch had something in common with our fathers. They were the same sort of human being. Which can only have been a good thing.

Sport for us meant rugby.
The heroism of the muddy. As soon as I saw an image of a scrum half in a flying dive pass, I knew I wanted to play rugby, and as soon as I entered primary school at the age of 7 or 8 I wanted boots and a ball for Xmas and my birthday - which were'nt too far apart. And Boxing day saw me flailing to place kick in Felinfoel Park, as I knew the great Terry Davies did, who used to date my sister at one time so there. And as our next door neighbour was a Llanelli scrum half at one time, I felt if not obliged, then genuinely authorised to get very muddy indeed.
The boots were leather-studded, and the Children's Encyclopaedia of Knowledge (another Xmas present) advised the use of dubbin affter every match, rubbed well into the 'welts'. This was a whole new world.

wales rural industrial history childhood social sport

The prickly heat of the husks jabbing all over your body as you turned the hay before baling. Then the mad teenage machismo of feeding the bales on the elevator as fast as possible. All in a golden haze of pollen and flies and butterflies and beetles and diesel fumes.
And the deep Xmas pudding smell of the hay already beginning to ferment on the wagon as you rode on top of the last load under an unfairly wonderful immense universe, with the starcurtain lowering like snowflakes as the horizon went through blue to indigo to purple and black. Then stacking the barn to the rafters, with the hard fungus tang of last year's bales being gradually drowned out by the sweetness of the new summer's wild harvest.
Then later, the barley. With the neighbour's combine lumbering across the slope like a Baleen Whale harvesting cryll - Comanched on all sides by gulls and daws and starlings.
And then hauling the sterile straw bales, which were much more hypodermic than the hay. Then the stubble burning, with the late summer sun blasting its way through the blue smoke. And the mad scattering of the rabbits and the squealing or exploding of the broiled frogs, their legs like teeny barbecued chicken drumsticks - once the dare had been taken. And much more delicious. And grown-up beer to wash them down - and proper cheese sandwiches on Mother's Pride - real farmers being far too busy to bake their own bread, like in the stories.
Then the strawfights with tumbly farmers daughters - and then the buckets of water just to wake up out of the heat trance of dust and sunburn and teenage competitive labour. And home to sweat out the sunburn through the sticky night.