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A Grand Time
One of my most enduring memories of early childhood was my friendship with Joss Spivvis.
It all started in the early nineteen-twenties, not long after my father and my eldest sister had both died within a few weeks of one another. The remainder of our large family, consisting of my mother and six children, had moved to a house in Llandaff, near Cardiff, which was called Cumberland Lodge.
The gardener that my mother engaged to look after everything outdoors was a short, broad-shouldered, middle-aged Welshman with a pale brown moustache whose name was Jones. But to us children he very soon became known as Joss Spivvis, or more often simply Joss. And very rapidly Joss became a friend to us all, to my brother and me and my four sisters. Everyone loved him, but I loved him most of all. I adored him. I worshipped him, and whenever I was not at school, I used to follow him around and watch him at his work and listen to him talk.
Endless stories about his young days Joss would tell me as I followed him round the garden. In the summer holidays my mother always took us to Norway, but during the Christmas and Easter hols I was with Joss all the time. I never ate lunch in the house with the family. I ate it with Joss in the harness-room. I would perch on a sack of maize or a bale of straw while Joss sat rather grandly in an old kitchen chair that had arms on it.
And there we sat in the quiet of the harness-room while Joss talked and I listened. One of his favourite subjects was the Cardiff City Football Team, and I was very quickly swept along by his enthusiasm for those heroes of the turf. Cardiff City was a fine club in those days, and if I remember rightly, it was high up in the First Division. Throughout the week, as Saturday came closer and closer, so our excitement grew. The reason was simple. Both of us knew that we were actually going to go to the game together. We always did. Every Saturday afternoon, rain or hail or snow or sleet, Joss and I would go to Ninian Park to see the City play.
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Cardiff City.
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Oh, it was a great day, Saturday. Joss would work in the garden until noon, then I would emerge from the house neatly dressed in my scarlet school-cap, my blazer, my flannel shorts and possibly a navy-blue overcoat, and I would hand over to him a half-crown and a shilling that my mother had given me to pay for us both.
‘Don’t forget to thank your mother,’ he would say to me every time as he slipped the two coins into his pocket.
As we rode the twenty-minute journey from Llandaff to Cardiff in the big red bus, our excitement began to mount, and Joss would tell me about the opposing team for that day and the star players in it who were going to threaten our heroes in Cardiff City. It might be Sheffield Wednesday or West Bromwich Albion or Manchester United or any of the fifteen others, and I would listen and remember every detail of what Joss was saying. The bus took us to within five minutes walk of Ninian Park Football Ground, where the great matches were always played, and outside the Ground we would stop at a whelk-stall that stood near the turnstiles. Joss would have a dish of jellied eels (sixpence) and I would have baked beans and two sausages on a cardboard plate (also sixpence).
Then, with an almost unbearable sense of thrill and rapture, and holding Joss tightly by the hand, I would enter the hallowed portals and we would make our way through the crowd to the highest point of the terraces, behind one of the goal-posts. We had to be high up otherwise I wouldn’t have seen anything.
But oh, it was thrilling to stand there among those thousands of other men cheering our heroes when they did well and groaning when they lost the ball. We knew all the players by name and to this very day, I can still remember the names of three of them. The centre-half for Cardiff was a small bald-headed man whom Joss referred to as Little ’Ardy. His name was Hardy. One of the full-backs was Nelson. The goalkeeper was a giant called Farquarson, which my mother told me was pronounced Farkerson, but which Joss pronounced Far-q-arson. Hardy, Nelson and Farquarson. Look up the records and you’ll find they were there. And when Cardiff scored a goal, I would jump up and down and Joss would wave his cap in the air, shouting, ‘Well played, sir! Well played!’
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Bill Hardy in flight.
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Cardiff City played Sheffield United in the FA Cup Final in 1925. Here, Tom Farquarson hurtles across the goal mouth at Wembley.
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And after it was all over we would take the bus home again, discussing without pause the great spectacle and the famous men we had just been privileged to see.
It was always dark by the time we reached my house, and Joss, standing in the porch with his cap in his hand, would say to my mother, ‘We’re back safe, ma’am. We had a grand time.’