Some twenty years ago, I wrote a letter of condolence. It went to a friend of my parents who had just lost her husband and my reason for writing was because he had been one of those who helped me towards a lifelong enjoyment of, and enthusiasm for, the game of rugby union football. He was not necessarily aware of his influence. I was pally with his son, his house was not far from my home, so I was in and out plenty of times, getting under the feet of his long-suffering wife who already had four children of her own.
He was an extrovert, had served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, always full of boisterous good humour, and he and my father and a bunch of their friends would stand on the touchline watching Salisbury play in the 1950s and 1960s. Dad would take me along on Saturday afternoons and I learned to make myself useful – I was the nipper who would shin over the fence to retrieve the ball when it had been kicked out of play into the council-house gardens. I would go round with the collection box during the second half and, when I was a bit older, I was entrusted with the flag to run the touchline.
David Hands aged 15, with his father, Tim
It was a doorway to the world of adults. Better still, Dad was able to take me to the occasional international match at Twickenham when he got lucky with a couple of match tickets. I would squeeze into the car along with four hefty chaps and off we would go up the old A31 towards London – no M3 in those days – and the nearer we came, the slower we got as we filtered through suburbia to our regular parking place, the grounds of a church only a few hundred yards away from Twickenham Stadium.
I never enjoyed car travel much as a youngster nor, to be honest, was I that worried about the rugby (the second game I was taken to was a dramatic 0-0 draw between England and Wales). What I looked forward to more than anything was the journey home when we would always stop at the Grosvenor Hotel in Stockbridge for a slap-up meal. The table had been booked earlier, there was always a roaring open fire and it was just the greatest fun to sit down with the men and listen to their stories, laugh at their jokes, absorb the camaraderie of everyone's shared love of the game.
I don't know if they were conscious of attracting another rugby devotee. My father was pleased there was something he and I could share on a weekly basis and, even before I was a teenager, I was a regular at Salisbury city library, looking through the sports shelves to see what rugby books they had. Precious few, was the answer, but they were enough. They included the books written by Vivian Jenkins and J B G Thomas, journalists both, on the 1955 and 1959 British and Irish Lions tours, the first to South Africa, the second to New Zealand and Australia, and those tours seemed so full of characters and and joy.
I didn't know then that, in due course, I would get to know both those authors and, indeed, a few of the players who had toured. I didn't know that I would be lucky enough to visit those same countries, as a journalist myself. When you're a child, you have no conception of what the future may hold, you live only from day to day and week to week. But that was how it all started, on the side of a muddy pitch, cheering on the local team, sharing good times with Dad and his friends. I did play for Salisbury's lower teams. I was a poor rugby player but it really didn't matter that much, I was doing something I enjoyed, occasionally I managed a decent tackle or pushed over a useful conversion and when I started writing, I stopped playing because weekends were no longer my own. But by then I had got the bug and it has never left me. I hope it never will.
David Hands, Rugby correspondent, The Times 1982–2010
Memory added on February 28, 2021
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