CLIVE GAMMON
I'm awaiting the opening of the international rugby season with pleasure—a pleasure tinged only by the regret that, this year, I don't think I shall be able to make the Paris trip.
In the sad old days in South Wales, one of the few things to look forward to was the ride to London on the excursion train to see Wales play England at Twickenham. Flagons of mild on the way up, the game, a win-or- lose saturnalia afterwards and Paddington Station at 1 a.m. like Culloden Moor after Cumberland got through with the Scots. Every year it happened and was described in a hundred Welsh short stories. How the boys scrimped and saved for the trip, how much it meant to them.
Naturally. there are still excursions to Twickenham on which drink may be taken and various human dramas enacted. But the glamour has passed away. In times which are thankfully more prosperous in the valleys, it is the Colombes, Paris. trip that the lads save their money for and the merry sound of breaking glass echoes, not across bleak sta- tion platforms, but in the departure lounges of Cardiff and Swansea airports where chartered Viscounts stand by to carry 10,000 Welshmen on a three-day junket to the City of Light.
Mind you, a lot will tell you that the game with the Scots at Murrayfield is well worth the journey. It is claimed that the Edinburgh police just withdraw from certain areas and
let the boys get on with it. Certainly they are sometimes better disposed than the English (and especially the French) police. A friend of mine claimed to be one of a cellful after a Murrayfield game when a ser- geant came down to them and said, look boys, it not just drunk and disorderly, there's been a bit of damage done, I think you'd better get hold of a lawyer. My friend pointed to a dazed, whey-faced figure in the corner holding his head in his hands.
`We brought our own lawyer,' he said.
Dublin can be good, too, unless there's a bit of needle in it as there was last year because the year before that was when Brian Price uppercutted the Irish skipper in front of the grandstand at Cardiff Arms Park and, so it's said, wasn't sent oft because the Prince of Wales was there.
But Paris. ah, Paris. Paris in the spring of 1969, the bar of the Racing Club the night before the match with the waiters retreated the hell out of it and penillion singing in one corner, three separate strip-teases in another and suddenly, surrealistically, a huge kilted Scot swinging into the room playing 'Camp- belltown Loch' on the pipes and disappearing at the far end, not to be seen again.
Early next morning, unable to sleep, I came down for a 7.0 a.m. breakfast and was privileged to see a complete descent from the manic to the depressed state compressed in- to five minutes. A man weaved in who had spent the whole night, God help him, drink. ing beer alone in a Wimpy bar. Euphorically he roared for the waitress, swung her up on the table, kissed her and demanded bacon and eggs. Then, by evil chance, he caught sight of his reflection in a mirror. Instant melancholia supervened. 'You poor bugger,' he said wonderingly. 'You poor old sod.' He broke into deep, searing sobs and fell on the floor. No match for him.
The rest of us saw it, though. and gnashed our teeth when Gareth Edwards gave away a penalty that gave France a draw. The French carolled `Allez la France' in the in- furiating way they have but the real action late that night was a civil war amongst the Welsh that spilled out onto the pavement from that Watney's house on Pigalle, an old East-West feud.
Put like that, it all sounds pretty sordid, I suppose. It isn't really, though. 'Fools to theirselves' my wife heard a granite-faced Welsh matriarch say when she came to meet me at the airport. It looked like that. certain. ly. One man came out of the plane dressed in an ex-us Navy uniform he had fancied in the Flea Market that morning. Somebody sold his real suit while he was trying it on. But at least he was walking. Some could not.
They hadn't done any harm, though. Not like soccer hooligans. I'm just sorry 1 won't be with them this season.
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