In between the two All Blacks-Springboks tests, we reproduce a classic rugby story by Warwick Roger
I’d written to Noel Holmes months earlier to ask if I could see him, and in reply I’d had a phone call. His voice was faint and scratchy as he told me that although he’d be happy to talk, it couldn’t be for some time as it had just been discovered that he had throat cancer and he had to have immediate surgery. I mumbled something sympathetic, wished him all the best and said I’d get back to him. And now I’m knocking on the door and my hero opens it, extending his hand, which I shake, noticing how light it is and how one finger is clawed back with arthritis. Into his other hand I thrust the bottle of claret I have promised to bring.
He lives in a back unit with his wife of 48 years, in a brick-and-tile cul-de-sac above Mellons Bay; Motuihe and Waiheke on his blue horizon. Holmes is 71 now and very thin. He can barely speak above a whisper and has to clear his throat frequently, but about him still is a touch of pride and the vanity of someone who has been great. He tells me he can’t think why I want to talk to him, so I try to explain, although possibly I’m not sure myself. It flicks through my mind that perhaps I’m wasting the old man’s time, seeking legitimacy for the book I have just written.
The previous day I’d completed Old Heroes, my book about the 1956 Springbok tour, which Holmes had covered as the Auckland Star’s ‘colour’ writer. And I’d just read again Trek Out of Trouble, the book Holmes had written in 1960 while touring South Africa with Wilson Whineray’s All Blacks. It’s the best sports book by a New Zealander. I wanted to know the how and the why of that book, and, if the truth be known, to find out if I’d done the right thing with my own book.
Reading Trek Out of Trouble again, I’d been surprised by the extent to which I’d obviously been influenced by it when writing Old Heroes. The pattern is the same – rugby, observations of South Africa, political comment, travel writing, rugby…
Holmes was engaged by everything and he could write intelligently and well about anything. He tells me: "You should be able to write about any subject under the sun and make it interesting. Although God alone would know why you’d want to, you should be able to write about underwater hockey – all you need is someone to explain the rules."
The best writing is simple writing, and Holmes was the master of it, with his short sentences and one-sentence-to-a-par style. Consider the start to Trek Out of Trouble: "There is no need to warm up the engines of a jet-prop aircraft. And on the morning of 10 May 1960 our Electra simply taxied, turned and took off from Whenuapai airport in one smooth operation. Maybe lives were saved that way, for before the plane was airborne figures were racing across the field to intercept it. They failed – but only by feet. What would have happened if the demonstrators had been given warning of the take-off is more than anyone could say, but halfway across the Tasman the skipper confirmed what we had all been thinking. 'We could have chopped them down,' he said."
Holmes has both his book and the tour underway, and has introduced the concerns that many "No Maoris, no tour" New Zealanders felt about it – and all in just over a hundred words.
I travelled alone to South Africa in 1991 to search out the surviving 1956 Springboks. I felt dislocated, afraid, acutely depressed and many times on the verge of abandoning the whole mad project that had consumed three years of my life and had brought me halfway around the world to a country where nothing seemed to make sense
The loneliness of the long-distance sportswriter quickly begins to descend on him. "I write now in the Coogee Bay Hotel. It is one of those faintly depressing hotel bedrooms with a sad, well-worn air to it. Through the window, through the old-fashioned lace curtain held top and bottom by wooden dowelling, I can see the moon rising at sea. A Boeing jet hurtles out along the moon track. Trams whine by. TV sets are being switched on to Popeye and washing-machine commercials. In a tree below the balcony a native pigeon says 'morepaw', 'morepaw' in tones of dreary resignation. It is one of those moments when you feel confused, lonely, uncertain."
The loneliness. I travelled alone to South Africa in the April and May of 1991 to search out and interview the surviving 1956 Springboks. I felt dislocated, afraid, acutely depressed and many times on the verge of abandoning the whole mad project that had consumed three years of my life and had brought me halfway around the world to a country where nothing seemed to make sense. My mood deepened night after night locked in my room in another Southern Sun hotel or Holiday Inn watching the news in Afrikaans. I made elaborate plans to cover long distances more quickly so that I could do my interviews and move on to another town. I checked airline schedules out of South Africa, and several times altered my bookings. By driving myself to the verge of collapse, I covered the ground I needed to so I could leave South Africa earlier than I’d intended. I’d start work in the mornings around eight and then realise that it was three in the afternoon and I hadn’t eaten lunch. I’d fall into bed exhausted and lie awake all night.
Rosenberg after his stroke in his new townhouse in the Jewish suburbs of northern Johannesburg. Across the brown highveld under the wide, eggshell-blue sky to see huge Jaap Bekker in Pretoria where the streets are lined with jacaranda trees. Van Vollenhoven, fat and gouty now in drab Springs, keeping him from a morning’s golf. And later the wealthy Pickard, Butch Lochner and Craven – ‘the old man’ – at Cape Town and beautiful Stellenbosch.
For Holmes, the last of the long rugby tours. Three months on the road, from Ndola in Northern Rhodesia to Cape Town in the south, Windhoek in the west and Durban in the east. And in between: Salisbury, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Springs, Potchefstroom, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Aliwal North, Wellington, Oudtshoorn, East London, Port Elizabeth. Twenty-six matches.
He wrote mostly in hotel bedrooms, the dressing tables invariably too high and the beds too low for comfortable typing. Some sections of Trek Out of Trouble were written on the few aircraft the team travelled in, and a good deal more on the tedious train journeys. He wrote: "The history of the 1960 All Blacks has been written as it occurred. I am uncomfortably aware that this is not the way to write deathless prose. The book is jerky. Maybe it would be improved if I were to sit down now and rasp off the high spots. But let it stand. It happened this way."
The All Blacks discussed space travel, relativity, basic religions, poetry and the migratory habits of crayfish
He told me: "You had a target to write so many words each night in the room, but in practice you didn’t do it every night. You did it when you had a chance and when you felt strongly about something. You’d do the matches as soon as you could while they were still in your mind. That’s the trouble with the book, it’s half matches and half comment. You’ve no idea how dispiriting it was to get up to my room at night, dead tired and had it, and through the wall comes 'tap, tap, tap' from [rugby wirter TP] McLean and you think to yourself, 'Oh shit.'"
On one long journey, Holmes recalled, the All Blacks discussed space travel, relativity, basic religions, poetry and the migratory habits of crayfish.
One night before one of the tests, Peter Jones, the great North Auckland forward, came to Holmes’ room. He was morose and homesick and began to talk about his daughter. He said, "I love her but I’d die right now if we could win that test."
*
Holmes wrote a political book. After standing and watching what was going on at a trading post in the Transkei, he summed up the economics of apartheid: "Again and again the ear caught the sound of mealies being poured on to the scales – a cascade of mealies grown on the farms of white men in the Transvaal. Coins were being pushed across the counter – coins from the mines in the Transvaal. And outside the close-cropped land, the land set aside for Bantus, lay idle."
One day he went boating from Cape Town. Even at sea he couldn’t rest: "We had rounded the Cape, a dour craggy point with a white light house at the tip. The short seas of the Indian Ocean smacked against one side and the Atlantic rollers hurled themselves high on the other. I wondered briefly whether the last white South African would be forced down to this tip of the continent by the dark hordes to the north. Then I decided the bleakness of the Cape was making me morbid. We finished off the beer and headed for home."
The evidence of apartheid I saw: razor wire on high suburban walls; triple locks on doors, car alarms; the police headquarters on John Vorster Square in Johannesburg, scene of beatings, torture and defenestrations; helicopters beating overhead on their way to another township flare-up; Alexandra and Soweto and Tembisa, the names on the network news; the vast Crossroads squatter camp unsuccessfully screened from the freeway that slashes across the Cape Flats by scraggly willows; the bare area in lovely Cape Town’s heart where District Six used to be; the Voortrekker Monument on the highest of the sere hills surrounding Pretoria.
Holmes wrote, "I liked the Afrikaners to the extent that they were dour, uncompromising and, I suppose, honest by their lights"
There our books converge. Holmes wrote: "I was unexpectedly moved by the atmosphere of the place. The history of the Boers’ early privations is graphically illustrated in the sculpture extending around the four walls … nobody could study the story without understanding the Afrikaner’s fierce pride in his people and his iron determination to hold what was so hardly gained … I liked the Afrikaners to the extent that they were dour, uncompromising and, I suppose, honest by their lights."
I went to the Voortrekker Monument with Jaap Bekker, the 1956 Springbok prop. The old man had not long before had a hip replacement but had no trouble climbing the 169 steps to the roof, where we gazed out over the veld. We didn’t speak. I was at the dark heart of Afrikanerdom, but I felt the same way Holmes had felt at the same place.
I wrote in Old Heroes: "It is an eerie and silent place, one to which, the old man tells me, Blacks and Coloureds were not admitted until fifteen years ago, and then only on Tuesdays, the day the cafeteria wasn’t open. I feel uneasy being at what is the spiritual dark heart of Afrikaner dom. I wonder what will become of the monument when South Africa passes into black rule. Will the sun still be allowed to strike the stone at noon next year on the 155th anniversary of the day Andries Pretorius’s band of trekkers slaughtered Dingane’s Zulu impi at Blood River?"
Cape Town is the most pleasant of South Africa’s cities. My hotel was in Newlands, under Table Mountain, near the famous rugby ground, near the university in a district where there are bookshops and restaurants and some street life and less race fear. I began, for the first time, to feel more secure. And then one night it was time to go home in the morning. This had been what I’d wanted.
I drove out to DF Malan Airport, parked the rented Toyota and handed over the keys to a coloured man who gave me the warmest smile I’ve ever seen, caught the plane for Johannesburg and flew for 39 hours, making connections in Taipei and Hong Kong, until I got back to New Zealand.
I had a bag full of tape recordings, notebooks of impressions that made little sense to me, a mind that wouldn’t rest. I didn’t go back to work but stayed at home, sleeping like a boxer recovering from concussion, Robyn bringing me strong coffee to wake me, running long distances in the mornings to clear my head, and writing all day before falling into bed exhausted again until it was all out of me. It was one of the happiest times of my life.
*
He wrote a novel. A chapter was published as a short story in Eve magazine and a lot of people said it was brilliant, but strangely the novel was never published. Holmes left the Star to run a string of trade magazines. That didn’t work out and for a time he went into public relations. Eventually he came back to the paper, where he stayed until the late ’70s.
Holmes stood for parliament for the National Party. His posters read: "Holmes – a National figure, never a party hack." Rob Muldoon, who was on the rise in those days, spoke at one of his meetings and was very good, but Holmes was awful. His words read well in the paper, but he was one of those people who couldn’t speak well in public. A lot of print journalists are like that.
His candidacy was unsuccessful. For a long time his confidence was battered.
A few years later, he retired to the clifftop house he’d lived in at Bucklands Beach for 30 years. He read a lot and fished out in the channel by Motuihe or wherever the fish were biting. His seafood cookbooks were reprinted, but Trek Out of Trouble was forgotten. He thinks it sold about 5000 copies. He says he made bugger all money from it. It’s out of print now and so he gets no royalties, although each year there is a small cheque from the Authors’ Fund, which indicates that people still borrow it from libraries.
He hasn’t looked at the book for years. It was, he says, "a quick oncer that sank without trace". He prefers the cookbooks.
Trek Out of Trouble is still the best New Zealand sports book ever written.
In 1978, I came back to work at the Star for the second time. I was given Holmes’ old desk and his clunking Imperial 66 typewriter. Wedged between the desk and a wall I found a black briefcase. Three months later Holmes came into the office, displeased, and reclaimed his briefcase.
I could see the glow in the sky over the city and hear the sirens of the fire engines floating across the harbour in the still night...I was seeing a metaphor for what had happened to the Auckland Star
After they closed the short-lived Sun in July 1988, they moved the Star operation to the Sun premises in New North Road. Street kids and derelicts took over 20 Shortland Street, and then one night in the winter of 1989 the old Star building burned down. I heard the news of the big blaze on the radio and went outside into my backyard. From Devonport I could see the glow in the sky over the city and hear the sirens of the fire engines floating across the harbour in the still night. Next morning I drove down Shortland Street. The road was still cordoned off and firemen were hosing the smoking structural remains of the building where newspapers had been produced in my town for over a century, and I thought I was seeing a metaphor for what had happened to the paper.
The Auckland Star, the fine liberal working man’s paper of my youth – the paper of Noel Holmes – struggled along for a year or so and eventually became a tabloid. Some days it was down to 36 pages. Its editorials were rabidly right-wing. It was full of stories about savage dogs and Princess Diana. It didn’t have anything to do with my life any more, and I doubt if anyone in Auckland took it seriously. In the end, the directors of Independent Newspapers didn’t either, and in late August 1991 they closed it.
Two months later I’m again driving out to Howick. It’s a busy Friday. All Saints Church at the end of the village is packed. The New Zealand flag is draped over the casket. Men wear RSA badges and bowling-club blazers. We intone the Lord’s Prayer and sing the grand old hymn "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise". John Holmes, who looks like his father must have looked in his heyday, gives the address: the biographical details, the sailing and the family holidays, the shy man who seemed aloof, the man with the burning sense of justice who in his writing captured the flavour of his city and his times.
We file out into the gleaming morning loud with the sounds of birds and children and I stand blinking in the sun, looking around to see if any of the 1960 All Blacks have come. None have.
"The sportswriter" by Warwick Roger is an abridged version taken from The Awa Book of New Zealand Sports Writing edited by Harry Ricketts (Awa Press, 2010), published with courtesy of Awa Press. Awa has three copies to give away. To enter the draw, simply email ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias to stephen11@xtra.co.nz with the subject line GOOD OLD WARWICK, and name your favourite New Zealand sportswriter, living or dead, male or female, journalist or otherwise.
