Letter from Berringford 10

Skye Cottage

Berringford

11 October, 1978

The linesman

Harry was often, no, ‘often’ is not the right word, he was always to be seen running up and down the touch line in the rugby match on Saturdays, his eyes following the high punts earnestly.  He was linesman for the club on rainy Saturday after rainy Saturday, year after year.  Later he was demoted to sponge carrier when he puffed too much to keep up with one and a half hours’ play.  Whenever a player was injured, Harry would run across the field, a bucket of water in one hand, a sponge in the other, his red cheeks blowing.  He was an unlikely angel ministering to the fallen, and yet oddly enough the treatment always worked.  A quick dab of the sponge of cold water over the face and down the back of the neck and the player was up once more. Then Harry would run back to his station on the touch line and wait for the next emergency.  Some of the lads in the junior team used to play a sort of game on him, and they would drop down with cramp or a knock or a sprain or something else similarly faked, in the corner of the field diametrically opposite to where he was waiting with his bucket.  Off he would set, at a slow trot, to a clap from the crowd, which never seemed to ruffle him.  I can always remember him as part of the scene on Saturdays.  He was always there, just as the goalposts were there.

He had played, of course, in his youth, in the front row of the scrum, even once or twice in the first team, but that was all so long ago that none of us remembered, and no one ever bothered to ask him about it.  Year after year went by with victories and defeats, with good teams and bad teams.  Then, at the start of one season he didn’t appear.  It was when I was away and I came home a few months later. Something was different, and then I realised he was missing and I asked someone what had happened.  Between rugby seasons he had died.  In August it was, just before training started again. Some of the junior team had gone to the funeral, and the first team captain, but few others.  “It was the holiday period, you see.”  Various people took over the jobs that he used to do in the club, and he was missed at first.  A hundred things that used to get done, nobody quite knew how, now needed some other volunteer.  Things were not in the right place at the right time, as they always had been.  But the longest memories are short in a sports club, and soon all the talk was of a new place kicker who was due to arrive in October.

But something is different.  Of course, the goalposts look shorter and the stand looks smaller now, as things always do when you leave and travel and come back home.  But it is not just that.  Harry is no longer around.  Something of our youth has gone.  And as he has gone, one day, I suppose, we will all go.  We all move up the line. 

But I like to imagine, as we walk home after a match we have just watched, that they have the game up there, and if so, they must need a linesman.  I hope they treat him better than we did, because he is sure to be there, puffing as he runs up and down the line eternally, Saturday after Saturday.