‘Rugby League and poetry live in the bones of this city’
THE POETRY OF RUGBY LEAGUE: The poem by Vicky Foster, Shane Rhodes, and Robert Montgomery on display in Queen Victoria Square
This Place, a column by Vicky Foster
Rugby League World Cup: ‘Touching the world and setting it on fire’
When I was a young girl, I spent a lot of time at rugby matches. It might seem more normal to say ‘watching rugby matches,’ but the truth is that I wasn’t always watching. Sometimes I was too busy running up and down the concrete steps at The Boulevard or picking my way between the legs of spectators to make my way into the ex-players’ bar, where I could cadge Coke and crisps from one of my Dad’s friends. Sometimes I was sitting on the lid of a battered cool box, on a touchline on a damp field somewhere, watching my little sisters get muddier and muddier and occasionally being told to shift so my Dad could grab an ice pack for an injured player. Sometimes I was just off in a world of my own, daydreaming about something completely different while the bodies on the pitch played on, in front of my eyes, with me barely noticing.
But always, wherever I was, whoever was playing, in every match there would come moments when my attention was snapped back, sharply focused on the movement of that white elliptical ball, the way the line of men was shifting and moving, the pace on the pitch, the electricity in the arms of those who were reaching for a try-line, or someone else’s legs. And we’d move too, pacing the white-chalked grass, keeping up with the play, words pouring out of us in encouragement, or raising our arms in the crowd, becoming part of the roar, part of the song.
When I was older I worked at Craven Park, waitressing. Serving chips and sausage to fans at half-time or posh meals pre-match to the people in the restaurant. Then it was coffee and biscuits in the exec lounge or hot food for the players who queued up after they’d played, hair still damp, hungry. There wasn’t much time for watching the actual game in those days – pots to wash, stuff to prep, tables to clear – but I was still there. Still part of the community that spirals out around rugby teams. I knew the chants, I knew the names, I knew the scores and the upcoming fixtures. These things bound us together.
Rugby has always been a part of my family life too. We have both Rovers fans and Hull fans sitting around the Sunday dinner table or at summer barbecues. Both scarves hanging over the sofa on derby days. People on both sides hoping they’ll win the bragging rights each Good Friday. I dragged myself out of bed on freezing Sunday mornings to drive my boys to matches when they were small, and I’ve seen them rolling home after day-long drinking sessions on match days now they’re bigger. Hull is a rugby city, plain and simple. There aren’t many people who, at the very least, won’t have been caught up in a crowd of red-and-white or black-and-white-shirted fans, or heard the haunting hum of rugby songs as they drift out across the city sky. So it’s absolutely fitting that this year, with the Rugby League World Cup back in England, we’re hosting some of the matches.
Tonight I’ll be at the MKM Stadium, with thousands of others, watching New Zealand play Fiji in the Men’s Quarter-Finals, and on the way into the stadium, as I join the crowd making its way through the Walton Street entrance, I know I’m going to see something else special too.
Robert Montgomery is a British contemporary artist well-known for his work in public space and billboard poems, and as part of the Power of Poetry project for the Rugby League World Cup Cultural Festival, he has joined forces with Emergency Exit Arts and eight other poets to create four huge, double-sided light poems, which have been travelling around the North, on trailers, visiting the World Cup host cities. They’ve all been inspired by the World Cup strapline, “The Power of Together” and today, thousands of rugby fans will stream past the poem Robert wrote with two Hull poets – Shane Rhodes and me!
Hull has already been visited by the beautiful poems that Louise Wallwein, Jacob Polley, Jackie Kay and Zaffar Kunial wrote with Robert (still to come are poems by Malika Booker and Sinéad Morrissey), and I’ve been watching ours on the screen of my phone for weeks now; in Newcastle, where all four poems started their journey together – our poem was parked at St James’ Park for the opening match and Cultural Festival performance ‘This is Us’; as poet friends spotted it at Light Night Leeds; when Gabby Logan and Jamie Jones-Buchanan posed with it at Brewery Wharf in Leeds; and then, finally, when it landed in East Yorkshire this week, and was pictured at the edge of the Humber. It will move on after today, visiting a civic square in Leigh, a library in St Helens, and St Peter’s Square in Manchester, before all four poems come together again in Manchester, and at Old Trafford, for the Final on November 19.
They’re not the only thing that will be coming together in that place, on that day. The men’s and women’s finals will both be played at Old Trafford, and the day before, the wheelchair final will have taken place in Manchester Central in the city centre.
Last night I couldn’t resist going to have a look at our poem as it stood in Queen Victoria Square. It looked gorgeous, lit up in the November cold, with a flat white moon in the sharp black sky above it. We took some pictures with me and my son posing in front of it, the City Hall and the Ferens flanking it, kids jumping up and down the stone steps of the raised platform where Queen Victoria stands.
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I sat for a while afterwards, just watching, on benches where teenagers in tracksuits gathered, and couples wandered by, coats zipped up tight, or small groups of adults tottered past in heels or tight shirts and trousers, mid-way through a pub crawl. Every time I saw someone step back to look up and read our words, I smiled to myself. One lad read it out loud to his friends as he passed. A young woman sang it to her own impromptu tune, pink foil balloon clutched in her hands.
It might seem to some people that poetry and rugby league are not easy bedfellows, but to me they seem an obvious pairing. The rhythms, the movement, the connections, the feelings. If I did have any doubts though, last night would have dispelled them. They’re both things that live in the bones of this city, that create movement, that make people speak or sing out loud. They’re so much a part of the fabric of this place, that we don’t always stop to pay close attention to them. But even if we’re not watching carefully, they’re always there.