Calon by Owen Sheers

Author:Owen Sheers [Owen Sheers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571297313
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

11.50 a.m.

As Roger emerges back onto Westgate Street, the Millennium Stadium rears into view. The first fans are beginning to enter the building, flowing up to the gates in steady streams. Others are already taking up their positions on the corner of the street outside the Angel Hotel or along the castle walls, ready to welcome the arrival of the Wales team bus into the city. All of Cardiff is engaged in a single conversation, the crowds bonded by a shared anticipation. A group of French supporters pose for photographs with a mounted policeman. A young woman in high heels and a mini-dress pauses beside them to stroke the horse’s neck, her gold sequinned handbag swinging from her shoulder. From further down the street a hooter sounds. Another replies. Outside Gate 3 an S4C TV crew are interviewing the welsh boxer, Joe Calzaghe, asking him for his prediction on the match. ‘Wales will win,’ Joe says, ‘but it’ll be close.’

Looking over Joe’s interview is a statue of the late Sir Tasker Watkins, once deputy Lord Chief Justice and ex-president of the Welsh Rugby Union. In a couple of hours’ time the tide of spectators will have risen even further, with thousands flowing up the incline of Gate 3 to maroon the bespectacled Sir Tasker, his hands behind his back, in a sea of red and blue.

As an officer serving with the Welsh Regiment in the Second World War, Sir Tasker was awarded a VC for leading his men in a bayonet charge in Normandy. When Graham Henry was Wales coach, he sometimes pinned Sir Tasker’s citation in the team’s changing room before a Six Nations match:

On 16 August 1944 at Barfour, Normandy, France, Lieutenant Watkins’ company came under murderous machine-gun fire while advancing through corn fields set with booby traps. The only officer left, Lieutenant Watkins led a bayonet charge with his 30 remaining men against 50 enemy infantry, practically wiping them out. Finally, at dusk, separated from the rest of the battalion, he ordered his men to scatter and after he had personally charged and silenced an enemy machine-gun post, he brought them back to safety. His superb leadership not only saved his men, but decisively influenced the course of the battle.

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